376
EV6ENY
ZAMYATIN
only dead things. The live-live people are all mistakes,sea.rc.hingJ,
questions, torments.
So too what we
write
also walks and talks, but it can be live–
dead or live-live. The genuinely live, stopping at nothing, brooking
no obstacle or hindrance, searches for the answers to foolish, "child·
ish" questions. The answers may be wrong, the philosophy erroneous
-but errors are of greater value than truths: truth is machine-like,
error is alive, truth reassures, error unsettles. And even
if
the
answers are quite impossible, so much the better: to ask answered
questions is the privilege of minds constructed on the same principle
as the cow's stomach which is ideally suited, as well we know, to
chewing the cud.
If
there were in nature something fixed, if there were truths,
all this would, of course,
be
wrong. But happily all truths are er–
roneous. This is precisely the significance of the dialectic process:
today's truths become tomorrow's errors; there is no final integer.
This (one and only) truth is only for the strong: weak-nerved
minds unfailingly require a finite universe, a final integer, they re–
quire, as Nietzsche said, "the crutches of assurance." The weak–
nerved do not have the strength to include themselves
in
the dialec–
tic syllogism. True, this is difficult. But it is the very thing that Ein–
stein did succeed in doing: he managed to remember that he, Ein–
stein, with watch in hand observing motion, was also moving ; he
succeeded in looking at the earth's movements
from outside.
That is precisely how great literature-literature that knows no
final integer-looks at the earth's movements.
The formal characteristic of live literature is the same as its
inner characteristic: the negation of truth, that is, the negation of
what everyone knows and what I knew up to this moment. Live
literature leaves the canonical rails, leaves the broad highway.
The broad highway of Russian literature, worn shiny by the
giant wheels of Tolstoy, Gorky, Chekhov, is realism, reallife:- con–
sequently we must turn away from real life. The rails, sanctified
and canonized by Blok, Sologub, Bely, are the rails of symbolism-:–
symbolism which turned away from real life: consequently_we
OlwJ
turn towards real life.
- ..
