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MAX HAYWARD
reasons--and loyally served
it,
once they had convinced them–
selves that
it
was there to stay_ It
is
interesting to note that
it
was
the very few
Marxist
writers, such as Evgeny Zamyatin and
Maxim Gorky, who were at the time the most implacably hostile
to Lenin's coup d'etat. Like Rosa Luxemburg, Gorky prophesied
that the Bolshevik seizure of power would inevitably lead to the
dictatorship of one man, and he violently denounced Lenin for
his arrogance and "seigneurial" contempt for the Russian people.
Zamyatin, as we can see from
his
article on "Literature, Revolu–
tion and Entropy," clearly foresaw all the dangers of the Bol–
shevik monopoly of power for the free development of literature
and the arts. Unlike Gorky, who had a fatal weakness for success–
ful strongmen--one
is
reminded of G. B. Shaw-Zamyatin re–
mained irreconcilably hostile and managed to emigrate from the
Soviet Union in 1931- not long after Gorky finally returned to
Moscow to become Stalin's confidant and advisor
in
literary
matters. In the latter capacity Gorky was responsible for the
formulation of the doctrine of "socialist realism."
There was a third category of writers, notably Alexander
Blok, Andrei Bely and Sergei Esenin, who greeted the Octoliler
Revolution with unbridled enthusiasm as the secular consumma–
tion of a mystic vision. Politically naive, they saw
in
the
grand
chambardement
of October the beginning of a millennial "revo–
lution of the spirit" which would somehow, out of the chaos, the
squalor and the bloodshed, produce a spiritual transfiguration of
mankind ("Transfiguration" is the title of one of Esenin's poems
in 1917) and the realization of ancient dreams. By a strange
irony, therefore, Soviet literature had its beginnings in the reli–
gious ecstasy of a small group of poets who were the very anti- \
thesis of the cold-blooded engineers of October. An even greater
paradox is that Blok, the ethereal, otherworldly symbolist, and
Bely, the even more otherworldly esotericist (he was the leading
Russian disciple of Rudolf Steiner) greeted the Revolution
with
poems steeped in Christian imagery. In Blok's "Twelve,"
Jesus
Christ "in a white crown" leads the triumphal march of the Red
