Scythian Humanist
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
Christmas Books A Scythian Humanist By Stanley Edgar Hyman There appears to be a growing interest in the work of Evgeny Zamyatin. Eight translations of his only novel, We, have appeared over the...
...He is saved by a kind of lobotomy, to become the conspiracy's happy betrayer...
...When he was bitten by a rabid dog as a child, he did nothing but start a diary to record his sensations...
...The style of "X" is effervescent comedy: A deacon repents of religion in order to replace his wife with the round-heeled Martha, revealing that he is a convert not to Marxism but to Marthism (this enables the author to lecture us on Martha's generous bosom as Marxist superstructure...
...Zamyatin's style in the stories is equally varied...
...then sleeps, "breathing evenly, quietly, blissfully, her hps parted wide...
...When the publication of the banned We abroad produced what he called a "manhunt" against him, Zamyatin never made the slightest repudiation of it or confession of error...
...He spent his remaining years in Paris, making a precarious living by writing film scenarios, and he died in 1937 of a heart attack...
...A selection of Zamyatin's stories appeared last year in a translation by Mirra Ginsburg as The Dragon (Random House), and a selection of his essays by the same translator is promised next year from the University of Chicago Press...
...In 1927, he and Boris Pilnyak were the victims of the first Soviet literary frame-up...
...The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin tells all this fully and sympathetically...
...The text consists of a biography followed by a critical study...
...Pilnyak recanted abjectly, but Zamyatin stood firm...
...Other stories are mainly ironic, such as "A Story About the Most Important Thing" ("the most important thing" is progressively understood as "to crush the others," to survive, "to bloom," and, finally, to love sacrificially...
...Shane is primarily a scholar rather than a critic, and he is no master of English prose ("The subordinate plot is allied to the major triangle by a relationship both prognostic and contrastive...
...Its protagonist, Anfim Baryba, rises to the exalted rank of police sergeant by the betrayal of every friend and benefactor, the nasty hero of this nasty sty...
...At times "X" is a marvel of what Kenneth Burke calls "perspective by incongruity": We see militiamen in a ballet class...
...We'% innumerable progeny, prominent among them Huxley's Brave New World (Huxley always denied any indebtedness, but in a series of inconsistent statements that invite disbelief) and Orwell's 1984, have made all this material overfamiliar, and the novel now seems terribly dated...
...Zamyatin believed in his own variety of permanent revolution, an endless cycle of death and rebirth, and his stories are full of such apocalyptic imagery as the destruction of the earth producing renewal, and murder resulting in new birth...
...The current Soviet writer most visibly influenced by Zamyatin is Andrei Sinyavsky, who has published abroad as "Abram Tertz...
...Other stories are tragic, such as "The North," where the idyllic joy, "the intolerable happiness," of the giant Marey with the Lapp girl Pelka is slowly undermined by her death-wish until she leaves them disarmed before an infuriated bear, which kills them both...
...When he was arrested by the trigger-happy Cheka in 1919, he got himself promptly released by lecturing the interrogator on Marxist theory...
...Evgeny Zamyatin, who believed in new life out of death, lives on in the Soviet Union, and his long-quiescent flowers of freedom may yet blossom everywhere...
...The works of "Tertz" are Zamyatin's monument, but far more so was Sinyavsky's fearless eloquence at his trial...
...elsewhere Marx is confused with the planet Mars and the god Mars...
...Zamyatin's craft is best shown in wild, almost surrealist, tropes and in fierce parodies of Soviet rhetoric (a paean to the New Poets, whose "lyre is the morning rubbing-sound of the electric tooth-brushes...
...From first to last, Zamyatin's defenses of his work were not only uncompromising, but were written in what Shane calls a "somewhat haughty and biting tone...
...The 15 stories and tales in The Dragon show a considerable range...
...About the same time he published a fable making fun of Lenin...
...The details of Zamyatin's life make a familiar Russian pattern...
...This growth of interest may be attributed largely to the mushrooming field of Russian studies, but some part of it is the recognition that the Soviet 1920s?with Babel, Olesha, Pilnyak, Mandelstam, and others —were a literary renaissance, and some part of it is due to the peculiar attractiveness of Zamyatin as writer and man...
...The first of them, "A Provincial Tale," written in 1912, is a museum of the horrors of provincial life: ignorance, grossness, boredom, cruelty, superstition, servility, chicanery...
...A monograph on Zamyatin by D. J. Richards was published in England in 1962, and now the first American monograph, The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin, by Alex M. Shane, has appeared (University of California, 293 pp., $7.95...
...Zamyatin had been a Bolshevik in his student days, but he became increasingly critical of the Workers' Paradise, which returned the compliment...
...In his critical analysis of the works, Shane synopsizes, evaluates, identifies sources and parodies, traces imagery and symbolism, and studies diction and syntax, rhythm and musicality, even the use of color as synecdoche and the symbolism of the letter-and-number names in We...
...He got out of the country four years later by writing a bold "Letter to Stalin," in which he proclaimed "I have never concealed my attitude toward literary servility, fawning, and chameleon changes of color," and asked permission to go abroad until it became "possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringiDg before little men...
...Zamyatin's views, as Shane presents them, are quixotic and attractive...
...He was trained as a naval architect and worked at his profession, but as early as 1913 he began publishing fiction, and after the 1917 revolution he settled down in Leningrad as a prolific writer, editor, and teacher of writing...
...The book's protagonist and narrator, D-503, the sober designer of the state's first spaceship, under the influence of such archaic symptoms as love, jealousy, and dreams, cooperates with the underground conspiracy and goes so far as to proclaim "We must become insane as soon as possible...
...confesses her murder, running over with words...
...Zamyatin thought that the attainment of any ideal, including revolution, inevitably philistinizes it, and he wrote in an essay: "The philistine is growing, he is sprouting from all cracks like a weed, smothering man...
...But for all that, Shane has produced an admirable and most useful book...
...We, written in 1920 and never published in the Soviet Union (a recent Russian critic acknowledged it as "a malicious pamphlet on the Soviet government") makes curious reading today...
...His life became increasingly impossible, until in 1931, through the intervention of Gorky, Stalin surprisingly allowed Zamyatin and his wife to go abroad...
...The most amazing thing about Zamyatin was his fearlessness...
...The principal weaknesses of We are that the wonderful heroine, 1-330, has no personality but is simply a mouthpiece for Zamyatin ("There is no last revolution, their number is infinite"), that too little is clearly stated and too much implied in unfinished sentences (always a weakness of the author's), and that the book's contrast to the regimented life in the United States is pure pastoral romance: a naked people, their bodies "silky-golden and diffusing an odor of different herbs," eating ripe fruit and drinking sparkling wine out of wooden cups...
...Some stories neatly blend tragedy and irony, such as "The Flood," where the murderer Sofya gives birth, "running over with juices...
...How the book would have delighted Marx, an earlier Scythian humanist...
...for a time he was chairman of the Leningrad branch of the Union of Soviet Writers...
...In 1920, We was prophetic, visionary...
...the state paper's argument that counting dissenting votes would be like taking coughing in a concert hall to be part of the symphony...
...The strengths of We are its subversive sensuality (all art derives from sex, Zamyatin wrote to a friend) and the author's craft...
...He made common cause with all heretics, believing that "heretics are the sole (bitter) medicine against the entropy of human thought," and that real literature can be created only by "madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics...
...It is a story of the breakdown of the Utopian state after a thousand years, when the flowers of freedom, "that bloom only once a thousand years" (all my quotations are from the Zilboorg translation) burst into blossom...
...a doctor's tombstone lists his visiting hours...
...Shane's book is an adaptation of his PhD dissertation under Gleb Struve at Berkeley, and it is most remarkable for its formidable bibliography, 800 items covering 60 pages...
...Baryba is seen at the end as "an idol from an ancient burial mound...
...D-503, before he falls into sin, represents the New Man (and not only the Soviet New Man) as the death of the imagination: He sees clouds as so much steam, defines inspiration as "an extinct form of epilepsy," is horrified by irrational numbers and blots, finds nothing beautiful in flowers, and enjoys the reassuring feeling of an eye watching over his shoulder...
...In "A Provincial Tale" it is portentous: A lamp dies "in long, slow anguish...
...Other short pieces are grotesques, such as "The Dragon," a portrait of a 1918 Soviet soldier as "a dragon with a gun" (by 1923, in "The Most Important Thing," the same image has become "an ant with a rifle...
...He was born in Lebedyan in 1884, the son of a teacher...
...Eight translations of his only novel, We, have appeared over the past decade, including one in English by Bernard G. Guerney, supplementing the 1924 authorized English translation by Gregory Zilboorg that was the book's first publication...
...While Stalin was still an insignificant figure, Zamyatin saw a future world "like steel—a sun of steel, trees of steel, men of steel...
...He identified himself as a "Scythian" at war with philistinism, and his opposition to Communism was that of a humanist to religion...
...The eroticism of 1-330 undressing, for example, is so charged that it is clearly revolutionary...
Vol. 51 • December 1968 • No. 23
