Stifled Heresy
The Tragedy of Zamyatin
If you are reading this then you are in a tiny minority of the world’s population, for you have heard of Yevgeny Ivanovitch Zamyatin.1 Zamyatin’s name ought to be as well known as the impacts of his writing, as well known as the names Orwell and Huxley. His stories, plays, novels and essays ought to be available everywhere; they ought to be studied in schools as commonly as Orwell’s and Huxley’s. Zamyatin wrote at the same time, producing equally exceptional work. A single difference between Zamyatin and these celebrated writers made the difference between fame and relative obscurity: Zamyatin was Russian, and while the others blossomed in the freedom of the English press, Zamyatin suffered under the censorship of Stalin.
Zamyatin's young life was precisely that which one would imagine for a great writer, one of solitude and literature. Born in 1884, he was raised in the Russian wilderness of Lebedyan. "My friends were books," he wrote in an autobiography (Zamyatin 1970, 3). He had an instant passion for reading as soon as he was "initiated into this mysterious thing, letters" (Zamyatin 1970, 8) and declared with passionate nostalgia "I still remember the shivers and the flaming cheeks as I read Dostoyevsky's Netochka Nezvanova." (Zamyatin 1970, 9). He did brilliantly in school in everything except math, which led him, due to his stubbornness, to pursue the very mathematical career of engineering (Zamyatin 1970, 3-4). From the very beginning he wrote, and was warned against it by his teachers as being dangerous, since there was censorship under the Tsar.
I remember the last day [of school], the office of the inspector. Spectacles upon his forehead, he... handed me a pamphlet. I read the author's inscription "To my alma mater, about which I can remember nothing good. -P. E. Shchegolev." And the inspector sententiously drawled through his nose: "Fine, isn't it? He also finished with a gold medal,2 and what does he write? Of course, he ended up in prison. My advice to you is: don’t write. Don’t follow this path." (Zamyatin 1970, 9)
Although this was good advice, even in retrospect Zamyatin never would have wished that he had taken it. Zamyatin had to write, for it was central to the brilliant philosophy which he developed. It was based on two key values: the eternal progression of the future, and the value of what he called the "heretic". He believed that the future was an inevitable force which would come and replace the old ideas and objects of the present, and then be replaced by an even further future. This replacement was to be achieved by the heretic, an individual who challenges the present in order to achieve the change. He summarized and synthesized these ideas perfectly in his own poetic style in the essay "Tomorrow," written in 1919:
Every today is at the same time a cradle and a shroud: a shroud for yesterday, a cradle for tomorrow.... Today is doomed to die-- because yesterday died, and because tomorrow will be born. Such is the wise and cruel law. Cruel, because it condemns to eternal dissatisfaction those who already today see the distant peaks of tomorrow; wise, because eternal dissatisfaction is the only pledge of eternal movement forward, eternal creation. He who has found his ideal today is, like Lot's wife, already turned to a pillar of salt, has already sunk into the earth and does not move ahead. The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy3. Our symbol of faith is heresy: tomorrow is an inevitable heresy of today, which has turned into a pillar of salt, and to yesterday, which has scattered to dust. Today denies yesterday, but is a denial of denial tomorrow. This is the constant dialectic path which in a grandiose parabola sweeps the world into infinity.4 (Zamyatin 1970, 51)
This could be called a particularly revolutionary form of romanticism, since it applies the romantic idea of the world as dynamic and changing, but stresses the heretic, or revolutionary, as the catalyst. Zamyatin's doctrine of "If there were no heretics, one would have to invent them" (Holthusen 1972, 97) brought forth in his writing much exploration and originality as he worked towards aiding the natural process of progress. He wrote because he felt that "The only weapon worthy of man- of tomorrow's man- is the word." (Zamyatin 1970, 52). To Zamyatin, heresy was everything, and his writing was his heresy.
This philosophy, of course, led him to be quite a revolutionary, and as a boy under the rule of the Tsar, he was a very active Bolshevik. He recalled his time at engineering college with the words: "All that seems like a whirlwind today: demonstrations on Nevsky Prospekt, Cossacks, student and workers' circles, love, huge mass meetings at the universities and the institutes....- The outcome of all this was, of course, a solitary cell in the prison on Shpalernaya." (Zamyatin 1970, 5). Undaunted by several months of imprisonment and exile from Petersburg, he continued to work, and to write. Again and again his revolutionary philosophy brought him in conflict with the Tsar's government, eventually bringing him to trial in 1913 for the only time in his life as he tried to publish At the World's End, a satire on the life of military officers. He was acquitted, but the printing was confiscated without the law’s justification. (Zamyatin 1970, 13). Due to these perpetual clashes, his revolutionary outlook and his Bolshevism, few could have been happier than Zamyatin when, while building ice-breaking ships in England, he heard the news of the revolution, and rushed to return to his homeland despite the danger of German attacks (Zamyatin 1970, 13). Overwhelmed by the coming of his beloved revolution, his descriptions of that time are full of excitement, fervor and poetry:
The merry, eerie winter of 1917-18, when everything broke from its moorings and floated off somewhere into the unknown. Ship-like houses, gunshots, searches, night watches, tenants' clubs. Later, streets without streetcars, long queues of people with sacks, miles and miles of walking daily, potbellied "bourgeois" stoves, herring, oats ground in the coffee mill. And, along with the oats, all sorts of world-shaking plans: publication of all the classics of all periods and all countries, a united organization of all the artists in every field, the staging of the entire history of the world in a series of plays. (Zamyatin 1970, 13-14)
Shortly, however, he did not look on the revolution with this sort of passionate joy, but with sadness, for the revolution for which he had worked and yearned for so many years, brought not tomorrow's freedom to today, but tomorrow's oppression.
The revolution began the reign of Lenin, which, while it ended Tsarism, did not end the oppression which came with it. The systems of censorship with which Zamyatin had so often clashed remained in place, simply redirected to stifle anti-Lenin writing instead of anti-Tsar. Zamyatin found that his work was still stopped, even by the leaders of the revolution which it supported. This support, however, was for the principles of the revolution, not the policies of the new government. While Lenin’s reign brought no change for the better for Zamyatin, his successor brought change for the worse.
Suffice it to say here that no major nation has ever suffered state terrorism of such ferocity as Russia did then, that those arrested and put to death or consigned to slave-labor camps numbered in the millions, and that the grief and hardship borne by their loved ones defy computation. The moral, spiritual, economic, military and cultural damage to the Soviet state was likewise incalculably great. (Ludwig 1942, 441-2)
So Emil Ludwig summarized Stalin’s rule. The arrests were common and sudden, the sentences harsh and the trials nonexistent. An anonymous report published abroad described the arrests by saying that "People are not arrested, they just disappear…. In the midst of a meeting, a man goes to the bathroom and doesn't come back. That way it's less conspicuous. Where he ended up nobody, of course, asks." (Tucker 1992, 442). Most of the arrests were attributed to a false counterrevolutionary underground invented by Stalin to eliminate his enemies. Most of the victims, however, were guilty of no more than disagreeing with some unimportant new doctrine or failing to adjust their policies as the party adjusted its. Being on record for having endorsed old party members or doctrines now out of favor was fatal (Ludwig 1942, 307-310).5 Having lived during the terror, Ola Freidengurg wrote "No one who has not lived in the Stalin era can appreciate the horror of our uncertain position.... A person's life was poisoned secretly, invisibly, as witches and sorcerers were hounded during the middle ages." (Ludwig 1942, 579). For Zamyatin, however, by far the worst use of the terror was not to control politics or life, but his precious art.
"Not only did [Stalin] take a keen interest in Soviet culture; he radically reshaped it. Literature, the theater, the cinema, music, painting, architecture....he effected a cultural revolution from above" (Ludwig 1942, 551). Stalin approved of optimism, romance, heroism and old Russian culture. Anything else, anything modern, foreign, pessimistic or capable of being interpreted as anti-Russian, was banned, and its creators persecuted (Ludwig 1942, 555-6). Russian culture at the time was dominated by the cultural revolution of 1928-9, led by the leftist Bolsheviks of which Zamyatin was a member. The Leftist Bolsheviks were more liberal, in favor of more freedom and less extreme government control. Although they had aided his revolution, Stalin, a rightist Bolshevik, enforcer of government restrictions on freedom, could not tolerate them, and stifled them through his control of the press and his terror. (Ludwig 1942 551-2).
Creative originality was fettered and a reign of mediocrity prevailed. Whether at public meetings or in books and plays, or even in small gatherings (in which, people knew, an NKVD informant might be present), one spoke as one knew one should. People became what it was dangerous not to become- textualists repeating ideas that they knew were orthodox and safe because they had the seal of Stalinist approval. (Ludwig 1942, 562)
1 Spellings of the name vary. Common spellings include Evgeny, Evgenij, Ivenovitch, Evenovitch, Zamiatin and Zamjatin.
2 Gold medals were awarded at graduation to exceptional students. Zamyatin pawned his a few months after receiving it (Zamyatin 1970, 10).
3 Zamyatin's romanticism is demonstrated by his love for the writings of the great Russian romantic writers such as Dostoyevski, Tolstoy and Pushkin.
4 Here is a prime example of Zamyatin’s frequent use of mathematical language in his prose. This style was taken to its height in his novel We which has a mathematician as the narrator who applies beautiful mathematical descriptions and analyses to the entire text.
5 Note the similarities between this and Orwell’s dystopia 1984, specifically the ideas of "thought crime", the invented underground and the reversal of party doctrines. Orwell’s work was, of course, based on Zamyatin’s own dystopian masterpiece, We.
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