Evgeny Zamyatin
ON LITERATURE, REVOLUTION
AND ENTROPY
1
Tell me what is the final integer, the one at the very top,
the
biggest of all.
But that's ridiculous! Since the number of integers is infinite,
how can you have a final integer?
Well then how can you have a final revolution? There is no
final revolution. Revolutions are infinite.
(from
We
by Zamyatin)
Ask the question point-blank: what is revolution? You
get a variety of replies. Some people will answer in the style of Louis
XIV:
la revolution, c'est nous.
Others turn to the calendar, giving
1.
Zamyatin was one of those few Soviet writers who refwed to make com·
promises or rationalizations in the face of the inherent moral evil of the
Soviet dictatorship. Had other Soviet intellectuals followed his
(and
Pasternak's) example it is possible that Stalin would not have obtained
his ascendancy over the nation in 1929.
Before the revolution Zamyatin was a member of the Bolshevik
fac–
tion of the Social Democratic Party. In a short autobiographical sketch
published in 1925, he ended with the words, "Then I was a Bolshevik,
now I am not a Bolshevik." Like Gorky he had recoiled from Lenin'.
premature assumption of supreme power; but unlike Gorky, ZamyatiA
did not subsequently come to terms with the
fait accompli.
His novel
W"
published in Prague in 1929, a forerunner of Orwell's 1984, foresaw
the
horrors to come. In "On Literature, Revolution and Entropy," published
in Moscow in 1924 and again in 1926, he defiantly asserted the need
for
heresy in literature as the very condition of its existence. When,
in
1929,
he was framed together with Pilnyak, he refused to submit, and,
appar–
ently with the assistance of Gorky, was able to emigrate
to
Paris
where
he died in 1937.
