378
EVGENY 2AMYATIN
ism-be it "socialist" or "bourgeois"-is unreal: immeasurably
closer to reality is projection onto fast-moving, curved surfaces-as
in the new mathematics and the new art. Realism which is not
primitive, not
realia
but
realiora,
consists in displacement, distortion,
curvature, non-objectivity. The lens of the camera is objective.
A new fonn is not intelligible to all, for many it is difficult
Maybe. The habitual, the banal is, of course, simpler, pleasanter,
more comfortable. Euclid's world is very simple and Einstein's world
is very difficult; nevertheless it is now impossible to return to
Euclid's. No revolution, no heresy is comfortable and easy. Because
it is a leap, it is a rupture of the smooth evolutionary curve, and a
rupture is a wound, a pain. But it is a necessary wound: most people
suffer from hereditary sleeping sickness, and those who are sick with
this ailment (entropy) must not be allowed to sleep, or they will go
to their last sleep, the sleep of death.
This same sickness is common to artists and writers: they go
contentedly to sleep in their favorite artistic fonn which they have.
devised, then twice revised. They do not have the strength to wound
themselves, to cease to love what has become dear to them. They do
not have the strength to come out from their lived-in, laurel-scented
rooms, to come out into the open air and start anew.
To wound oneself, it is true, is difficult, even dangerous. But
to live today as yesterday and yesterday as today is even more diffi–
cult for the living.
(Translated by Walter N. Vickery)
