Evgenij Zamjatin: an Interpretive Study 9783111396866, 9783111034300

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SLAVISTIC PRINTINGS AND REPRINTINGS edited by

C. H. VAN SCHOONEVELD Indiana University

282

EVGENIJ ZAMJATIN An Interpretive Study

by CHRISTOPHER COLLINS

1973 MOUTON THE HAGUE · PARIS

© Copyright 1973 in The Netherlands Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 73-76230

Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., The Hague

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The encouragement and valuable assistance of many persons made this work possible. I especially wish to thank Professors Edward J. Brown, William B. Edgerton, Maurice Friedberg, and Carl Proffer for their many helpful suggestions, and Elizabeth Collins for her support and advice. I am grateful to the editors of the Slavic and East European Journal and the Slavonic and East European Review for permission to use revised versions of my articles published in those journals. I am obliged to the late Philip E. Mosely and the Archive of Russian and East European History and Culture at Columbia University for permitting the use of the Zamjatin collection there.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

5

Introduction

9

I.

II. III.

IV.

From A Provincial Tale to The Flood: Changing Concepts of the Primitive

15

The Islanders

27

We A. B. C. D.

39 39 43 52 68

The Politico-Cultural Context The Context o f H . G.Wells'Utopian Works The Imagery The Novel as Myth

'The J old and The Flood A. 'The Jola' B. The Flood C. Fire and Water

81 83 91 102

Conclusion

104

Selected Bibliography

106

Index

113

V.

INTRODUCTION

Viktor Sklovskij once criticized Zamjatin's anti-utopian novel We for depicting a state not so much similar to a world of unsuccessful socialism as to a world built on the Zamjatin artistic method. In fact, speaking of his work in general, we are studying not the universe, but only our own instruments.1 Whether indeed it was Zamjatin's instruments or his concept of the universe, Zosöenko, Kaverin, Fedin and other young Russian writers chose to study writing with Zamjatin in the early 1920's. The Soviet regime also found Zamjatin's instruments or concept of the universe to be of greater importance than Sklovskij would seem to suggest: Zamjatin was one of the very first writers to be silenced by Stalin. In the face of repression and threats Zamjatin none the less maintained his dignity and integrity with courage equalled among major writers perhaps only by Pasternak and Solzenicyn. Zamjatin would certainly have been among the first to die in the purges except for Gor'kij's intercession with Stalin. Zamjatin was allowed to leave the country 'temporarily' in 1931. He lived a rather unproductive, lonely life in France until his death there in 1937. In the Soviet Union he swiftly became an 'unperson', his work unpublished and his name unmentioned in literary histories. His name now appears once more in broad Soviet discussions of twentieth century literature, but his works are not published in his native land and no published studies of him have appeared there since the twenties. Although his opposition to the Soviet regime has not endeared him to many Western intellectuals - especially in the 1930's and 1940's - Zamjatin has received considerable attention in the West. His most important novel We is in print in two English translations and in many other languages. His major fiction, criticism, and plays are now available, or soon 1

Sklovskij, Viktor, 'Potolok Evgenija Zamjatina', Pjat' ielovek zmkomyx (Tiflis,

1927), p. 67.

10

INTRODUCTION

will be, in English translation. 2 Many of his works have been published in France, Germany, and Italy, and occasionally even in Eastern Europe. Students of the broad Western movement known as Modernism have taken a special interest in him. Irving Howe, for instance, writes: Disdainful of certainties, disengaged from the eternal or any of its surrogates, fixated upon the minute particulars of subjective experience, the modernist writer regards settled assumptions as a mask of death and literature as an agent of metaphysical revolt. Restlessness becomes the sign of sentience, anxiety the premise of responsibility, peace the flag of surrender - and the typewriter the Promethean rock. Nowhere is this mode of sensibility expressed with greater energy than in an essay by the Russian novelist of the 1920's, Eugene Zamyatin. O n Literature, Revolution and Entropy' is a decisive manifesto of the modernist outlook... 3

For all his acknowledged importance, Zamjatin has yet to be - East or West - the subject of a book-length literary analysis. The two books 4 and numerous articles that have appeared up to now largely confine themselves to discussing other matters: the details of his career, Zamjatin as a heretic, Zamjatin as a satirist, Zamjatin as a martyr for freedom, Zamjatin as a follower of Dostoevskij, Zamjatin as a philosopher of Energy and Entropy· My study will attempt to deal with some of the central literary puzzles in Zamjatin's major works of fiction through application of approaches not used on him before. The major works disccussed here are Uezdnoe [A Provincial Tale] (1913), Ostrovitjane [The Islanders] (1918), My [We] (written 1920-1921), 'Rasskaz ο samom glavnom' [A Story About the Most Important Thing] (1924), 'Ela' [The Jola] (1928), and Navodnenie [The Flood] (1929). Other works will also be mentioned. This selection includes those works considered as Zamjatin's most important in the only two books on him and in other discussions by scholars and critics. A second consideration in the selection is that - with the exception of the unfinished (but posthumously published) Blc Bozij [The Scourge of God] (1939) - the works discussed here include all Zamjatin's longer works of fiction. In total length they amount to about one half of Zamjatin's published fiction. Another factor was my desire to include works representative of different stages in Zamjatin's literary career. But the three works Zamjatin 2

See the Bibliography, Part II. Howe, Irving (ed.), Literary Modernism (Greenwich, Connecticut, 1967). 4 Shane, Alex M., The Life and Works ofEvgenij Zamjatin (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968) and Richards, D. J., Zamyatin: A Soviet Heretic (New York-London, 1962). 3

INTRODUCTION

11

himself seems to have considered his most important receive the most attention in this study. He referred to his longest work, We, as 'the most jocular and serious thing' he had written.5 Nearly at the end of his career he seemed to conclude that 'The Jola' and The Flood were his finest achievements: 'All the complexity through which I passed turned out to be necessary for the ultimate achievement of simplicity (the story "The Jola", the tale "The Flood").' 6 Ultimately, of course, the selection of works - (with the exception of the earlier, but representative works A Provincial Tale and Na Kulickax [In the Sticks]) - stems from my personal judgment as to which of Zamjatin's works are his most important. Like many others, I tend to consider the tragic as the highest form of literature and I have been impressed by Northrop Frye's description of the 'profound masterpiece' as one which 'seems to draw us to a point at which we can see an enormous number of converging patterns of significance'.7 We, 'The JolcC, and The Flood seem to me - as they have to many others - the finest examples of Zamjatin's tragic art. The 'converging patterns of significance' of these three works seem particularly to call for analysis and they hence receive the greatest attention in my study. The present study does not pretend to represent a complete, systematic study of Zamjatin's art. It may be objected, for instance, that certain works the reader may regard as important have been passed over, or that the literary and philosophical influences of such writers and thinkers as Marx, Nietzsche, Dostoevskij, Remizov, Leskov, and Anatole France have not been explored, or that the Jungian theory of archetypes has not been applied to all of Zamjatin's works. I have tried to apply the critical approach or approaches to each work that seemed to promise clues to the unsolved literary problems in that work. Where the early stories, for example, suggest merely a thematic approach, other stories recalled quite specific works by other writers, and We, 'The Jola', and The Flood seemed to promise results when approached from several directions. An attempt to define Zamjatin's central theme and especially its later development fills the first chapter. Most of the remaining chapters attempt to illuminate the many 'converging patterns', the many contexts of Zamjatin's works. First there are literary contexts. Three of Zamjatin's works seem especially to invite a reading from the standpoint of older, wellknown works by H. G. Wells, Gogol', and Dostoevskij. Second, there are 5 6 7

Zamjatin, 'Avtobiografija', Novaja russkaja kniga, 1922, No. 3, p. 43. 'Zakulisy', in Zamjatin's Lica (New York, 1955), p. 273. Frye, Northrop, 'The Archetypes of Literature', Kenyon Review, XIII (1951), p. 101.

12

INTRODUCTION

many symbolic contexts. Certain specific traditions, rituals, and myths are reflected in them. At times the discussion of symbolism will include the use of Jungian terms and concepts. There are other approaches to Zamjatin I have experimented with and found unworkable. The Freudian approach, although yielding interesting results when applied to Gogol', Dostoevskij and a few other Russian writers, is of no help in understanding Zamjatin. My search for Freudian symbols and patterns in Zamjatin resulted only in the sort of forced interpretation that has helped to give Freudian literary criticism a bad name. A purely historical or biographical approach to Zamjatin's fiction will also not work. First, the historian will find surprisingly little Russian history reflected in Zamjatin's major works. Many of Zamjatin's works are set in foreign countries, and his only full-length novel is set in some indefinite city of the future. The Great War and the Russian Civil War pass almost unnoticed in his fiction. (True enough, We may be read with considerable justification as a satire on the sort of world the Bolseviks seemed to be heading for. But this aspect has been explored many times by other writers.) In fact, like Gogol', Zamjatin has been criticized on the very grounds that his descriptions of people and places are not historically accurate or 'realistic'. Indeed the two authors made little effort to be 'realistic.' Their fiction stems more from fantasy and from some understanding of universal human psychology than it does from any precise knowledge or grounding in early nineteenth- or early twentieth-century Russia. This may be why they continue to fascinate readers and critics of other times and places while their 'realist' critics have been long forgotten. As for the biographical approach, the scholar faces an almost complete absence of information on Zamjatin's personal life. The only biography of Zamjatin, Alex M. Shane's8, exploited every possible scrap of evidence and managed to chronicle Zamjatin's professional activities in considerable detail. But Shane was at a loss when it came to Zamjatin's private life. The writer's wife is not even mentioned in the text of Shane's biography. (Zamjatin himself did not mention her in his three brief autobiographies.) Zamjatin kept no diary, wrote few letters, said very little about himself publicly, and his wife and few friends were very careful to observe his passion for privacy. One may venture some informed speculation - as I will do in Chapter Four - on Zamjatin's marriage and love life, but any 8

Shane, op. cit.

INTRODUCTION

13

attempt to relate his works to his life in the way scholars have done with Puskin, Gogol', Dostoevskij or Tolstoj is futile. In my discussion I have largely spared the reader accounts of the application of approaches yielding minimal or unsatisfactory results and limited myself to those I considered most successful. I hope the reader will enjoy the exploration of these new meanings and contexts in this major twentieth-century writer as much as I have. Whitehall, Virginia 22987 November, 1972

I FROM A PROVINCIAL TALE TO THE FLOOD: CONCEPTS OF THE PRIMITIVE

CHANGING

Evgenij Zamjatin is perhaps best known to the general reader in the West as a champion of freedom, if not as a pure heretic. The title of the first book on him, Zamjatin: A Soviet Heretic1, and the title, 'The Biography of a Heretic', of the biographical half of the only other book on Zamjatin 2 are indicative of the emphasis on this approach to the Russian writer. Soviet critics have long attacked Zamjatin as an irresponsible 'heretic in the name of heresy'.3 The concept of Zamjatin as a heretic derives, of course, partly from the courageous positions he took in his society, first in behalf of bolsevism and later against it. He was actively involved in revolutionary activities as a student as early as 1903, and later had an illegal printing-press in his room. He spent several months in solitary confinement in the winter of 1905-1906, and was later exiled from the capital. His pre-revolutionary works (as well as his post-October ones) were often filled with satirical portraits of Establishment figures. He was arrested again in 1914 for one of them. Zamjatin fared no better once the revolutionaries he had supported came to power. Again he was subjected to arrest and eventually to censorship far more effective than the tsar's. The Soviet censor has prohibited the publication or circulation of his largest work, We, down to the present day. With the consolidation of Stalin's power in the late 1920's and the beginning of the era of five-year plans Zamjatin's continuing stubborn adherence to his beliefs resulted in the end of his publishing possibilities in the Soviet Union and in his eventual self-imposed exile in France. Had he chosen to stay in the Soviet Union and had he remained in good health long enough (he died in Paris in 1937), there seems little 1

Richards, D. J., Zamyatin: A Soviet Heretic (New York, London, 1962). Shane, Alex Μ., The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968). 3 Voronskij, Α., '[Ε. Zamjatin]', Na styke: sbornik statej (Moscow-Petrograd, 1923), pp. 47-75. 2

16

CHANGING CONCEPTS OF THE PRIMITIVE

doubt that he would have eventually suffered the same fate that so many of his fellow writers met - death in the purges. His writings also encourage the critic to regard Zamjatin as a pure heretic, particularly the arguments of the female revolutionary 1-330 in the anti-utopian novel We, and the philosophy of eternal revolution expounded in his best known essay Ό literature, revoljucii, entropii i procem' [On Literature, Revolution and Entropy] (1924). But it should be emphasized that 1-330 is not the hero of We, and both works were written in the early 1920's and therefore should not, it will be argued here, be accepted as Zamjatin's most important or final words on life and art. Even Zamjatin's doctrine of eternal revolution for its own sake may - in its turn - be subject to a revolution of its own. This chapter will survey Zamjatin's major works and attempt to show that they go beyond the themes of freedom, heresy, and eternal revolution to deal with a more fundamental question: what does one do with freedom, what is the point of having it, or revolting to win it? The answer involves the primitive: an examination of Zamjatin's works shows that it plays the major role as enslaver or as potential or actual liberator. In Zamjatin's two largest early works, Uezdnoe [A Provincial Tale] (1913) and Na Kulickax [In the Sticks] (1914), the spheres of the natural and the provincial, the primitive, are depicted as the realm of slavery. Cebotarixa in A Provincial Tale and General Azanceev in In the Sticks are the female and male embodiments of pure, unthinking, beastly, sensual greed. Both bloat themselves on food to the point of obesity and nausea, and both have greedy, indiscriminate sexual appetities. They are the living dead, slaves to their bodies, and they are the most extreme examples of this slavery affecting almost all the inhabitants of their respective villages. The protagonist of A Provincial Tale is a slow-witted, brutal villager named Baryba. He appears as 'an idol from an ancient burial mound come to life, a crude, Russian stone idol' (A Provincial Tale, 112).4 Baryba at times is presented with moral alternatives. Most of the time he is being 'drowned in the sweet and hot dough' (A Provincial Tale, 35) of sex, food, and idleness. One alternative would be the hunger, anxiety and freedom of 4

The reference is to the page in the text of Uezdnoe in volume I of Zamjatin's collected works, Sobranie socinenij (Moscow, 1929). The translation of this and all subsequent quotations throughout this book are my own. I have, however, consulted Mirra Ginsburg's translation of Uezdnoe in her Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Dragon: Fifteen Stories (New York, 1967) and Bernard Guerney's translation of My [We] in his An Anthology of Russian Literature in the Soviet Period from Gorki to Pasternak (New York, 1960). Subsequent references to Uezdnoe and to other works will be made in similar fashion.

CHANGING CONCEPTS OF THE PRIMITIVE

17

the Balkarin yard - there he had hidden, starved and lived among dogs. The free but struggling life, so attractively presented in Zamjatin's later works, here attracts neither Baryba nor the reader as a palatable alternative even to the most deadening of well-stuffed lives. He chooses the wellstuffed life. Later Baryba must make a choice between honor and further success in the well-stuffed life: he is offered a bribe and a promotion to give false testimony against a friend accused of armed robbery. The alternative is to be honorable and to refuse to commit perjury, but in so doing, to pass up an opportunity for material advancement. Baryba does hesitate before making a decision but then gives the false testimony that sends his friend to the gallows, and that nets a promotion and a sum of money. He thus rejects the civilized values of honor and selflessness in favor of beastly selfishness. If the existence of a world of freedom and meaningful life anywhere is implied in the story, then it is in the civilized cultured world of honor, law, and decency, and not in the primitive world. Zamjatin's next major work, In the Sticks, was published in the journal Zavety in 1914, but the issue was immediately confiscated and the tale was not available to the general reader until the 1920's. This tale may be regarded as Zamjatin's attempt to exploit further a vein already mined profitably in Aleksandr Kuprin's (1870-1938) popular novel on army life, The Duel (1905). The main characters in In the Sticks are not natives of the provinces, as in A Provincial Tale, but exiles from the civilized world. Far from civilization, this community of officers on the frontier succumbs to gluttony, lechery, alcoholism, apathy, and general depravity. The story chronicles the fall of the protagonist, the idealist and musician Andrej, and of Captain and Mrs. Smit. Andrej begins the story back in the civilized world where he is interested in music and culture in general. He goes to the province in hopes of finding the peace and freedom and natural life he thinks he needs to write. But the provincial, the primitive, is seen to be inherently hostile to such activities, and Andrej is inevitably sucked down into the muck with the rest, not only away from art, but away from decency, life, freedom. Even the fog, such a redeeming feature of nature in Zamjatin's later works, is here a symbol of the slavery to the natural, of sluggishness, as it creeps in the door and wraps him up like a cobweb (In the Sticks, 9-10). 5 The sexual here is never so disgusting as in the case of Cebotarixa, yet still serves as a means and symbol of degradation. Unlike A Provincial Tale, however, the story In the Sticks presents an alternative 5

Refers to the text of

Na kuliikax in volume II of Zamjatin's Sobranie soiinenij.

18

CHANGING CONCEPTS OF THE PRIMITIVE

form of heterosexual love, that of the pure love of Captain and Mrs. Smit. Their love is an alternative to the world of blind, sexual greed. The two seem to have an ideally happy marriage, one in which, however, like the idealized marriages in Gogol's early works or in Tolstoj's novels, the sexual is either absent or simply not deserving of any comment by the narrator. The newcomer bachelor Andrej is also in love with Marusja Smit, but in a platonic way. The whiteness of the snow and the light-blue, tender face of Marusja are emphasized as images of purity. When Captain Smit is provoked into threatening the corrupt General Azanceev, the latter blackmails Mrs. Smit into bed, and the happiness of the pure Smits, envied and hated by the corrupt community ever since the couple arrived, is blasted into bits. Any remaining possibility of freedom at this point lies in killing the general. Andrej contemplates the murder after he learns of the general's blackmail letter and before Marusja submits. But he lacks the strength to make the decision, to act, and so Marusja gives in to the blackmail to spare her husband twelve years in prison for insubordination. Captain Smit eventually learns of his wife's infidelity and contemplates murdering the general in revenge. He also is unable to carry through the murder, however, then tries to kill Andrej but fails, then fails in trying to arrange a duel, and finally commits suicide. As in A Provincial Tale, the protagonists are offered choices, opportunities to reject the slavery of the beastly and the provincial; they ponder the choices, but, like Cexov's unhappy heroes, prove too weak to break out. These two early works display Zamjatin's fondness for downwarddirected metaphors, especially for those reducing people to beasts and inanimate objects. General Azanceev is compared to an all-consuming stove {In the Sticks, 30) and frequently to an ugly frog {In the Sticks, 68 and elsewhere). Cebotarixa wraps herself around Baryba's body 'like a spider' {A Provincial Tale, 55). Andrej's orderly, once a first-rate accordionist, is now degenerate and has 'the eyes of a fish' {In the Sticks, 9). Necesa, an amateur physician, has lost his medical manual and now uses a veterinary text instead: '"And, really now, it didn't turn out any worse: after all, what's the big difference? People are made just like animals" {In the Sticks, 85). In summing up the best that life in the provinces can offer 'And so they live just fine, rotting like manure in the heat' {A Provincial Tale, 90) - Zamjatin's reduction of people to excrement reminds us of Gogol's technique in 'The Overcoat'. The sexual also receives a generous share of downward-directed metaphors. The hot, greedy mouth of the incredibly obese Cebotarixa, the lustful, vulgar Varvara Sobaöeja ('Beastly Dog') of 'Alatyr' (1915),

CHANGING CONCEPTS OF THE PRIMITIVE

19

the promiscuous and stupid Mrs. Necesa of In the Sticks are characteristic in Zamjatin's early works and also recall Gogol's attitude toward sex. (See especially Gogol's 'The Notes of a Madman' for the comparison of the sexual activity of people with that of dogs.) Amid the general gloom and decay of Gogol's world and of the early Zamjatin's world there appear a few dreamers, who are necessarily doomed to frustration. Andrej does not become a great writer, but loses what humanity he had. Tixmen"s dreams of being a knight and rescuing a fair damsel {In the Sticks, 50) are interrupted by a brutal return to reality, where he is no handsome knight and his fair damsel does not even know whether her latest child is his or someone else's. And even the down-toearth Afimja of Crevo [The Womb] (1915) has her long-desired unborn child taken away from her. Small wonder that in this world of the primitive, Baryba becomes a stone idol and Andrej is beastly drunk by the end of their respective stories. Two important differences should be noted in any comparison of Gogol' and the early Zamjatin. The first is in the nature of their satire. Gogol was essentially a conservative who believed in God, tsar, and nation. His satire was directed at the failure of himself and man in general to live up to high ideals. Zamjatin's early works were (correctly) interpreted by the government as attacks on the existing political order.6 The authority figures in Gogol's fiction - despite their many sins - are not hateful scoundrels. Akakij's boss is kinder and more sensitive than many people of Akakij's own class. The audience laughs at the mayor in Revizor and he and the false Inspector are both exposed. But the brutal Baryba reaches a position of authority at the end of A Provincial Tale and those higher up are equally corrupt. General Azanceev is the most corrupt, repulsive one in the entire In the Sticks, and the reader goes away disappointed that neither Andrej nor Captain Smit murdered him. These works, especially the latter, are not to be read as expressions of the author's pessimism, but as calls to arms to overthrow the monsters in authority. The second difference is in the two writers' attitudes toward the physical and the spiritual. When the celibate Gogol' deals with sexual love in his fiction, he generally stresses its dangerous (and occasionally disgusting) β

Zamjatin's precise relation to the Bolleviks has never been clarified. In his brief mention of the 1905 Revolution in his limited autobiography, he says he was a Boläevik 'in those years' ('Avtobiografija', Sobranie socinenij, I, p. 12). Between 1905 and 1914 his radical writings caused him to suffer a variety of repressive measures by the government, from solitary confinement to exile. When precisely he left the party he does not say, nor could his late widow offer the present writer any help on the matter.

20

CHANGING CONCEPTS OF THE PRIMITIVE

aspects. Salvation is to be found in rejecting the material, physical, sexual world and finding an internal anchor of Christian faith. Zamjatin displays Gogol's anti-sexual bias in his early works, but goes on later to find the lyrical and even the redeeming in the sexual. In his fiction (and in his life), Gogol rejects the physical in favor of the spiritual. Zamjatin discovers the spiritual in the physical. Zamjatin's vision of the enslaving and stultifying provincial appeared in A Provincial Tale (written 1911-1912) and In the Sticks (written 19131914). But in 1913 and 1914 Zamjatin also wrote The Womb and 'Alatyr'; in them he begins to see the truly redeeming in life as lying in the sphere of the sexual, the natural, the primitive. To be sure, 'Alatyr' contains not only lyric passages about the young, ripe Glafira and her need for pregnancy and nursing her young like a cat, but also a refugee from the world of A Provincial Tale, the doglike, lustful, repulsive Varvara SobaCeja. The Womb must be regarded as an important milestone in Zamjatin's literary development. In it he drops much of the Gogolian and the redeeming aspects of the primitive are brought to the fore where they will remain to be further developed in his major works for the rest of his life. At least two of his most important works, Rus' [In Old Russia] (1923) and Navodnenie [The Flood] (1929), must be regarded as further elaborations of The Womb. The Womb begins with a lyric passage on the otherwise unappealing Petr going out to mow. The feeling of communion between man and nature in the hayfield recalls a similar well-known scene in Anna Karenina. Like Tolstoj, Zamjatin came to see the great importance of a close relationship between man and nature. (But the mature Zamjatin emphasizes the sexual as an especially important aspect of the man-nature relationship, while the ageing Tolstoj separates the sexual from the natural and associates it with the artificiality of 'civilization'.) Afimja is unable to conceive by her ageing husband Petr, and her condition is compared to that of the fields in a drought: 'Her womb is like the parched earth - waiting for rain in order to give birth. Her breasts, like buds in the springtime, ripe and swollen, await the blossoms, await the flowing of the sweet milk' (The Womb, 175).7 In hopes of conceiving, Afimja rejects the non-free world of social convention and does the natural, the primitive thing - has sexual relations with the young Ivan. The relationship is discovered and one night in a drunken fury Petr beats his unfaithful wife so hard she miscarries. Her hatred for him is intense and Afimja then enters a period of non-freedom, 7

Refers to the text of Crevo in volume II of Zamjatin's Sobranie socinenij.

CHANGING CONCEPTS OF THE PRIMITIVE

21

where she restrains the impulse to murder her husband. Eventually without planning, thinking, or agonizing over courses of action, she does the natural, primitive thing and kills him. She hides the body and suppresses her natural desire to confess. Another period of tension and non-freedom follows, relieved only by her confession. Her career is associated with the earth and with nature by the metaphors of dryness and wetness as relating to the earth, to her emotions, and to her body. A few years later with Ostrovitjane [The Islanders] (1918), Zamjatin, then living temporarily in England, puts the good of the primitive directly in opposition to the evil of modern bourgeois civilization. He begins to elaborate on the problem of freedom; the leading characters themselves begin to discuss the problem of freedom. On the side of non-freedom are a sort of small-time Grand Inquisitor - the Vicar Dewley who wishes to enslave man in the name of efficiency, regularity, and the elimination of any possibility of disharmony or crime, and Lady Campbell, who instills the idea of propriety in her son. On the side of freedom are the flamboyant Irishman, O'Kelly, and the strip-tease dancer, Didi. Young Campbell is caught in the middle, between the deadening influence of his mother and of Vicar Dewley, and the alive, free, exciting world of Didi. She excites him and he has dreams about his real needs and a foreshadowing of his brief bursts from his moral prison: '...I am in a car, and the steering is broken. Through fences, through everything that comes along, and the main thing is to...' (The Islanders, 44).8 Campbell's move toward freedom is a mad, compulsive, and seemingly directionless motion. Several times he is described metaphorically as a wild car, taxi, or truck with broken steering. Freedom has deeper significance in the case of O'Kelly and Didi. For them it is not the act of revolt that is central; they are already free, and there are no images of terrifying, headlong motion in their case. For them it is what they do with the freedom they already possess. For O'Kelly, freedom means primarily doing and saying the spontaneous thing, obeying one's (mainly bodily) impulses rather than social conventions. For Didi, freedom means ignoring (not flouting) social conventions and allowing herself to be caught in the rhythms of sun and moon, seasons, plant and animal life, the sea, and her own body. For her, freedom means (ironically) submission·, the waves of the ocean (and metaphorically of her sexual desire) 'picked her up, spun her around, and it was so good not to struggle, 8

Refers to the text of Ostrovitjane in volume III of Zamjatin's Sobranie soiinenij. Zamjatin's dramatic adaptation, Obscestvopocetnyx zvonarej [The Society of Honorary Bell-Ringers] (written 1924) follows the text of Ostrovitjane very closely.

22

CHANGING CONCEPTS OF THE PRIMITIVE

not to think, to s u b m i t . . ( T h e Islanders, 69). We (1921) continues and expands the discussion begun in The Islanders on freedom and primitivism. This anti-utopian novel consists of a journal maintained by a fictional thirtieth-century space rocket engineer. His journal describes the ultra-rational, Utopian Single State in some detail and also chronicles a developing spiritual crisis in the narrator-protagonist, D-503. To protect its citizens from uncertainty, anxiety, and the possibility of error or frustration, the Single State offers and enforces an all-encompassing sociopolitical structure. Nothing is chaotic, unorganized, unpredictable. The only desires man is permitted to have, those for sex, food, and material comfort, are gratified in a routine, organized manner as a matter of public policy; hence there can be no suffering, no frustration, except on the part of occasional heretics, who are executed. The citizen's happiness derives not only from the absence of physical or emotional pain, but from his feeling of being a small but integral part of one mighty, well-organized whole: '...the natural course from nullity to grandeur: forget you are a gram and feel you are a millionth part of a ton' {We, 100).9 Just as the 'ancients' forgot their individual selves and abandoned themselves to the dance, to a rhythm outside themselves, D-503 tells us, so the citizen of the Single State joyfully submits to the great rhythms of the machines he works with and to the Tables of Hourly Commandments. Into this world steps 1-330, the female leader of a secret revolutionary conspiracy. She has no particular goal for her revolution; she simply prefers an unpredictable future full of pain as well as joy to the monotonous, mathematical happiness of the Single State: 'You ought to be stripped and driven naked into the forests. Learn to tremble from fear, from joy, from frenzied wrath, from the cold...' (We, 141). The description by the Marxist critic and editor Aleksandr Voronskij (1884-1943) of Zamjatin as an advocate of 'heresy for the sake of heresy'10 might well apply to her. Alex Shane's statement about Zamjatin -'... the process [of revolt] was of much greater importance than the final results'11 - certainly applies well to 1-330. Bernard Guerney in an introduction to his translation of the novel presents the usual argument that 'the reader will have little difficulty in perceiving that 1-330, the chief heroine of We, is really the author's mouthpiece, his proponent of revolution-for-revolution's sake';12 9

Refers to the text of We in My (New York, 1952). Voronskij, Α., op. cit. 11 Shane, op. cit., p. 48. 12 Guerney, Bernard, 'Evgenii Ivanovich Zamiatin (1884-1937)', An Anthology of Russian Literature from Gorki to Pasternak (New York, 1960), p. 167.

10

CHANGING CONCEPTS OF THE PRIMITIVE

23

Whether the careers of D-503 and 1-330 and whether the entirety of Zamjatin's works actually support the thesis that the lying, childless 1-330 is the mouthpiece of Zamjatin is debatable. D-503 begins the novel in a state of happy non-freedom, a model citizen of the Single State .His acquaintance with the mysterious 1-330, and especially her concert of piano-music, brings images of the breaking and shattering that must occur in his civilized shell before he can proceed further: '...a wild, careering, scorching, sun - tear everything off yourself, rip everything into the smallest shreds' (We, 19). 1-330 kisses him and pours liqueur into him, and images of motion follow. In We, however, the images of motion involve a certain definite direction, a submission to the laws of motion and gravity, rather than the directionless rushing of Campbell in the earlier The Islanders. D-503 writes of the liqueur and the kisses: Ί came loose from the earth and, like an independent planet, revolving furiously, rushed down, down, along some uncharted orbit' (We, 51). The fact of submission in these motions is emphasized many times: And it was such a joy to submit to this Must. Probably it is just as joyous for a bit of iron to submit to the inevitable, infallible law and to cleave to a magnet. For a stone, tossed upward, to hesitate a second and then plunge headlong to earth. And for a man, after his agony, to breathe his final breath at last and die (We, 64); .. .the ripening was completed. And inevitably, like the iron and the magnet, with sweet submission to the infallible, immutable law, I infused myself in her (We, 66). These ecstatic submissions to sexual desire, to 1-330, and to his officially sanctioned sexual partner, the child-desiring 0-90, are infinitely more satisfying than the previous submission to the Single State. However, the new submission does not guarantee happiness. He who must derive his happiness from the ecstatic submission to the natural, especially through a sexual relationship, must also face the possibility of periodic, or even permanent frustration and loneliness. D-503 confesses at one lonely moment: 'Nevermore would it be mine to blend with the faultless, mechanical rhythm... My lot would be to burn forever, forever to dart about' (We, 74). Submission to the natural and the primitive includes submission to two seemingly opposing phenomena - death and birth. One can even long for death, as D-503 realizes when he stops the Integral's rocket propulsion system and it begins to plummet to earth: 'And it was clear: I was the stone, 1-330 was the earth, and I - the stone thrown by someone - the

24

CHANGING CONCEPTS OF THE PRIMITIVE

stone had an excruciating need to fall, to crash against the earth, so as to shatter' (We, 172). But motion is also associated with creativity and birth; the image of falling occurs when D-503 impregnates 0-90: 'The switching off of the light, the extinguishing of thoughts, darkness, sparks - and I was falling headlong over the parapet...' (We, 98)... The state is correct then that to be happy one must submit .The state's error is that it demands submission to an unnatural, artificial order. D-503's freedom consists of rejecting the submission to the unnatural and, instead, submitting to the natural, especially his own instincts. I-330's concepts of freedom and eternal revolution must be regarded as the necessary means to D-503's new existence and creativity, rather than as goals in themselves. 'Rasskaz ο samom glavnom' [A Story About the Most Important Thing] (1924) elaborates further on the interrelated themes of inevitable, purposeful motion, birth, death, and submission to the natural order. The story represents Zamjatin's most ambitious attempt to relate all the planes of existence, the entire destiny of man and Cosmos, in one unified pattern of crushing, inevitable motion, culminating in a grand, glorious cataclysm, to be followed by new birth: 'And the most important thing is to go faster, to smash the earth, bang, so that all this will burn up to dust, along with me, and burn to dust all the walls and machines on earth, and then in crimson flames - new fiery I's ( Ά Story About the Most Important Thing', 212).13 One new concept of sex in this story, and one not explicitly pursued elsewhere in Zamjatin, is that of sexual relations moving man into a world where there is no time, and hence no death. Two different couples on the distant, dark star, facing death from the gradual disappearance of the atmosphere, rediscover each other sexually and learn 'there is no tomorrow, there is nothing - only now' ( Ά Story About the Most Important Thing', 222). On earth, awaiting execution, Kukoverov is permitted a visit by his beloved. She wishes to make love: '...Kukoverov suddenly understands everything. He understands: yes, this is so, this is necessary; and he understands: there is no death' ( Ά Story About the Most Important Thing', 259). In The Flood (1929), Zamjatin returns to the theme begun earlier in The Womb - the desperate, holy need of a woman to conceive and bear a child. This need is beyond questions of good and evil and the murder involved in each case is simply the natural thing to do. 13 Refers to the text of 'Rasskaz ο samom glavnom' in volume III of Zamjatin's So· branie soiinenij.

CHANGING CONCEPTS OF THE PRIMITIVE

25

In The Womb, the woman has a miscarriage. In 'Alatyr', Glafira never gets pregnant at all. In We, 0-90 is impregnated, but the book ends with D-503's spiritual death before the child can be born. One or more of the lovers in The Islanders, Ά Story About the Most Important Thing', and Sever [The North] (1922) die before any impregnation can occur. The wife in 'The J old (1928) is sterile, and the surrogate mistress, the sailboat, disappears with the protagonist in a storm before anything productive comes of it. The sexual drive has been central in all these and in many others of Zamjatin's works, but its purpose, a new creation, the bearing of a child, was never carried through within the stories proper. In The Flood, which must therefore be seen as the culmination of all these works, the woman actually bears the child. The many lyric passages stress the joys of being one with the natural world. Sofja at times is swept along by the passions of love and hate, but absent are the images of terrifying, inevitable motion and the smashing of worlds, the flowing of lava, so prominent in some early works. If the arguments of 1-330 and the philosophy expressed in O n Literature, Revolution and Entropy' mark Zamjatin's most articulate expression of the doctrine of Energy and Entropy, of eternal revolution, then The Flood is a later and his best statement on the ultimate purpose of revolution and struggle - new creation. Western critics place undue emphasis on the arguments of 1-330 when they view Zamjatin almost exclusively as a heretic, lover of absolute freedom, and advocate of 'a never-ending denial of the present in the name of the future'. 14 To be sure, such a view is not totally without foundation, but it requires some careful qualification. In the first place, although Zamjatin continuously and violently attacks arbitrary, unnatural restraints on man, his heroes find their happiness and salvation (if at all) not in some abstract, perfect freedom, nor in eternal heresy for the sake of heresy, but in the discovery of what really matters, and then in complete submission to it, to natural needs, particularly those of sexual love and child-bearing. The less thinking or mulling over of choices and the problem of freedom, the better. 1-330, Zamjatin's so-called mouthpiece, does serve as the means to an eventually meaningful life and to creativity; it is purely through her influence that D-503 comes to impregnate 0-90, but 1-330 herself is not only a liar who uses D-503 for her own ends, but is childless - that is to say, she and her doctrine of eternal revolution are ultimately limited and incomplete in themselves. In the second place, Zamjatin's love of the future manifests itself in a rather odd way: his 14

Shane, op. cit., p. 49.

26

CHANGING CONCEPTS OF THE PRIMITIVE

works become more and more crowded with the more and more distant past. When not actually set in the past (e.g., the plays Ogni sv. Dominika [The Fires of St. Dominik] (written 1920), Bloxa [The Flea] (written 1924), Attila [Atilla] (written 1925-1927), his works are increasingly placed within the context of past events and literature. The so-called Ancient House (a museum of the life and culture of the long-past twentieth century) plays a major role in D-503's spiritual revolution. Even I-330's conspiracy consists mainly of smashing the world of the future in an attempt to return to the world of the distant past. What really matters to the heroes of Zamjatin's later works is not the future, but getting in tune with their bodies and with the natural world in precisely the same way some men have succeeded in doing for thousands of years. Nowhere in Zamjatin is the future shown with such love and affection as the provincial, the rural, and the primitive seen in The Womb, We, or In Old Russia. Zamjatin's one vision of the future is a terrifying one. True enough, since we live in time, a large part of our effort must necessarily be aimed at what is yet to happen to us, but to guide our own individual lives properly, we must, Zamjatin implies more and more in his later works, seek a relation with the natural world in the way the ancients did. This relation is not made by sitting placidly and contemplating the interrelationship of man and Cosmos, but is made by entering into a very active, physical, continuous relationship through such acts as farming, hunting, fishing, riding, fighting (but not wars), making love, and bearing children. Above all, we must see that the purpose of revolution is not for its own sake, nor for the sake of bringing closer some glorious future dreamed by Cexov's Colonel Versinin or by Marxist-Leninists, but is for the sake of constantly re-establishing and maintaining this relation, and eventually, of new creation, new birth. The movement toward primitivism then is seen to display four main (not entirely distinct or chronologically separable) stages in the representative works mentioned: (1) The primitive is disgusting and enslaving (A Provincial Tale and In the Sticks). (2) The primitive begins to emerge as the beautiful and redeeming (The Womb). (3) Modern civilization wrongly suppresses the primitive and enslaves man. Man should revolt. Revolt is the necessary means to salvation, but salvation is actually found in the submission to the natural, instinctual life {The Islanders and We). (4) But even submission to the natural is in turn a means to still greater ends - new creation, new birth (The Flood).

II THE

ISLANDERS

The war years 1916 and 1917 found Zamjatin making his first extended stay abroad. The tsarist government had decided to utilize his considerable professional talents in naval architecture in a mission to England to supervise the construction of Russian ice-breakers at Newcastle upon Tyne. While building Russia's then mightiest ice-breaker and many others as well, Zamjatin still found time for literature. His stay in England resulted in three works set there: Ostrovitjane [The Islanders] (written 1917), 'Lovec celovekov' [The Fisher of Men] (written 1917-1918), and (a dramatic adaptation of The Islanders), Obscestvo pocetnyx zvonarej [The Society of Honorary Bellringers] (written 1924). The Islanders and the other two works must not be read as attempts at a 'realistic' picture of twentieth-century England, or as anti-British satire. Zamjatin's stay in England was too short to make him an expert on byt, and - more importantly - his own literary inclinations led him away from 'realism'. Even early Soviet critics (hardly prone to protest anti-British satire) argued that Zamjatin's portraits of British society were not true to life. The Islanders is no more to be considered anti-British satire, than The Fires of St. Dominik is to be considered anti-Spanish satire. Nor, for that matter, should the many works set in tsarist or Soviet Russia be considered specifically anti-Russian or anti-Soviet satire. In his satires Zamjatin simply presents a manifestation of what he sees as the universal conflict between the forces of Energy and those of Entropy, the Entropy being social, moral, religious, or political, as the particular case might be. Realistic or not, satirical or not, the play based on The Islanders was popular with theater audiences in Leningrad and Riga in the mid-1920's. No doubt the audience enjoyed the opportunity to laugh at the British 'stiff upper lip' and at an emerging consumer goods oriented society, but the play's ultimate success, like that of Gogol's Revizor or of Moliere's comedies derives mainly from its artistic use of exaggerated comic types understandable by people of many times and places. Like Gogol, Zamja-

28

'THE ISLANDERS'

tin testified he drew the outlines of his characters from within and not from the society around him. 1 If traces of Kuprin's The Duel show up in the tale In the Sticks, traces of Cexov and Dostoevskij appear in Zamjatin's next major work, The Islanders. The dull, materialistic Campbell and his freedom-loving fiancie recall a similar couple in the last story Cexov wrote, 'The Betrothed' (1903). Campbell's and the Vicar Dewley's passion for muffling themselves in clothes, for shutting themselves up indoors, and in general alienating themselves from nature plainly recalls Cexov's 'Man in a Box' (1898). But in neither case is Zamjatin placing his tale within the context of Cexov's story, in the way that Cexov, for instance, places some of his own stories within the context of certain literary classics.2 The Dostoevskij work recalled here does however give us the first example of Zamjatin's use of literary context. The reader who is not familiar with The Brothers Karamazov will miss some of the point of The Islanders. Zamjatin has taken Dostoevski's Grand Inquisitor and his theories and reduced them to the pettiness of the Vicar Dewley and his 'Doctrine of Compulsory Salvation'. Much of the humor in the tale stems from the implied contrast between the dimensions of the Grand Inquisitor and the Vicar Dewley. When, for instance, Johnny the porcelain pug, a symbol of love and understanding, 'kisses' the Vicar Dewley, the reader must recognize that the irreverent Zamjatin is here presenting his version of Christ giving the kiss of forgiveness to the Grand Inquisitor. Despite this use of context, however, Zamjatin has not yet learned to place his work squarely in the context of literary classics in the way he does later in We, 'The Jola\ and The Flood. The characters, images, and symbols of The Islanders seem to make the most sense when examined simply as part of Zamjatin's first major effort at a study of alienation. The term has been used by so many writers, philosophers, and critics in such a variety of contexts, that some working brief definition must be attempted before proceeding. One view often heard in Western letters today is that the modern writer must be alienated if he is to be a good writer.3 Alienation in this context means alienation 1

See the discussion of Zamjatin's creative processes at the end of Chapter III. See, for instance, Thomas Winner, 'Myth as a Device in the Works of Chekhov', B. Slote (ed.), Myth and Symbol (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1963), pp. 71-78. 3 The classic statement on the subject is Edmund Wilson's 'Philoctetes: The Wound and the Bow', The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature (New York, 1947), pp. 272-295. 2

'THE ISLANDERS'

29

from the society surrounding the writer, disagreement with the values and standards accepted by society at large. A writer in complete agreement with his society, with commonly held standards and values would have, obviously, very little to say, and very little impetus to say it. This concept of the writer as a heretic is not new and was heartily affirmed by Zamjatin in his critical essays. It is, of course, psychically unhealthy to be alienated from society at large, and we should partially sympathize with pleas for recognition of the modern writer's martyrdom in the name of art and truth: but there are other, more destructive forms of alienation which only the heretic may escape. If adherence to the values of his society leads to alienation from Self, nature, or God, then the individual, the writer-heretic, or the writer's protagonist-heretic may find a more meaningful, unalienated life in rejecting society. He necessarily suffers some alienation from society as a result, but he avoids alienation in more important respects, and benefits from his healthy relationship and integration with the other elements of his existence. In The Islanders traditional British reserve, conformism, and propriety are seen joined with the modern spirit of industrialism to alienate the protagonist, Campbell, and most of his fellow citizens, from Self and from nature. One might suppose that a work set in twentieth-century urban England and dealing with alienation might include comments (or diatribes) found so frequently in other contemporary literary or philosophical works on the city - the anonymity, the loneliness, the slums, the garish advertising, the atmosphere of the fast buck, the all-pervasive noise and filth, the violence, the absence of wildlife, trees, and grass. Such is not the case here. Zamjatin's fictional English city Jesmond is an exciting place to live in for the likes of the uninhibited Irish lawyer and Don Juan, O'Kelly, and for the strip-tease dancer, Didi. Away from the city they would certainly sink into the provincial muck of Zamjatin's early stories. The city does not alienate them from Self or nature. Far from discouraging their free social and sexual activities, the city, in the anonymity it allows, gives them privacy. Nor, as will be seen below, does the city stop them from responding to nature. The three most important forces in the story - traditional modern industrialism, and integration with Self and nature sented in three central images that appear throughout the These images are, respectively, the portrait of Campbell's late

propriety, are reprenarrative. father, Sir

30

'THE ISLANDERS'

Harold Campbell, the electric iron (which Campbell feels he must purchase before he can consider marriage or sexual relations with Didi), and Didi's porcelain pug, Johnny. Each of these objects occupies an honored position on the mantel above the fireplace in the apartments of their respective owners. (Fire is Zamjatin's usual image for Energy and passion, and as such, is nearly holy. There is always a fire in the fireplace in Didi's apartment, but no fires burn in Campbell's apartment or in his mother's apartment.) In position and importance these objects can be considered holy images, ikons. Lady Campbell, Campbell, and Didi each have their revered ikons. Campbell's rejection of Didi's ikon and the placing of his ikon on the mantel next to it is symbolically an indication of the attempted replacement of one religion by another in Didi's life. When Lady Campbell's apartment is first described, the portrait on the mantel of her late husband, Sir Harold, is one of the few objects mentioned (38).4 Her first words in the story are: '"My late husband, Sir Harold, always used to speak out against...'" (21). Aside from appeals to the authority of her late husband she turns out to have very little else to say. When others discuss her son's 'disgraceful' participation in a boxingmatch and the resulting injuries, her only comment is: "All I can think is: what would my late husband, Sir Harold, say..." (55). When the Vicar Dewley and his flock, the Corporation of Honorary Bellringers, discuss Campbell's announced plans to marry a strip-tease dancer rumored (correctly) to be having an affair with another man, Lady Campbell again can say only: '"My God, what would your deceased father, Sir Harold, say...'" (79-80). The ikon of Sir Harold is the holy image of British propriety. The deadness of the saint involved is emphasized in many ways. The portrait is of a person physically dead, belonging to a dead past. His title and the fact that he is dead are emphasized in each of Lady Campbell's utterances. The absence of the slightest conjugal or filial affection for the departed husband and father is an indication of the deadness of even Sir Harold's actual existence in this world. Although dead he nevertheless exercises great power over Lady Campbell, as indicated by her reverent invocations and by the frequent jerking back of her head - seemingly by some unseen reins (40, 55, and elsewhere). Lady Campbell is a death figure herself, with her 'mummy' shoulders (21, 42, and elsewhere), her gray dress, gray hair, and especially her lips 'wriggling like worms' (21,40, and elsewhere). 4

Refers to the text of Ostrovitjane in volume III of Zamjatin's Sobranie soiinenij.

'THE ISLANDERS'

31

The resemblance between Campbell and his late father is mentioned several times: each has the same square, solid chin. Campbell has a high opinion of his mother and does not wish to offend her. In response to an 'indecent' question by Didi he echoes his mother's allegiance to the dead authority of propriety: '"What if my mother could..."' (31). Sir Harold, the law, and propriety are related to each other and to death. When Campbell is commanded by his mother to sit down and listen to the instructions of the Corporation of Honorary Bellringers - at this point serving as a sort of kangaroo court sitting in moral judgment the portrait of the late Sir Harold is invoked first. Only at this point is it noted that the portrait shows Sir Harold in his wig and robe, the first reference to his profession. He was literally a judge, and he is here metaphorically a judge presiding over the trial of his own son in this moral court, and the judgment leads to the eventual execution of his son as prescribed by an actual court. In The Islanders the law does not exist to protect man from criminals, or even to serve as the arm of the privileged. The law shown here is solely concerned with propriety. The references to points of law in the work are: the insistence that, as a matter of form, Didi's ex-husband ought to pay her alimony, even though she was unfaithful to him; O'Kelly's account of his invention of a portable, inflatable suitcase to circumvent the law requiring a couple registering in a hotel to possess at least one suitcase; and the execution of Campbell for murder, the execution being considered by the 'decent' people more a matter of propriety than one of moral or social justice. The lawyer O'Kelly sums it up: "In the final analysis, the role of the law is nothing more than the role of your dresses, ladies?" (25). That is, the purpose of each is to restrain the natural, cover it up, and impose a mask of propriety on it. That O'Kelly is a lawyer does not indicate any interest on his part in joining the late Sir Harold in the support of the rule of law. O'Kelly uses his knowledge of his profession to circumvent the law in his own interests and in the interests of his clients. The second ikon is the electric iron Campbell purchases as the first important step in setting up a household for himself and his future bride, Didi. There are to be no sexual relations and no wedding until he has enough money to rent a house and furnish it properly. The chapter dealing with the arrival of spring, with trees budding and flowers blooming, is entitled 'The Electric Iron' (59). For Campbell the iron is far more important than the stirring of external nature, or the stirring of Didi's sexual desire. Didi complains of the heat, unbuttons her

32

'THE ISLANDERS'

blouse and puts Campbell's hand on her breast. He is tempted, but 'Campbell, thank God, grips the steering-wheel again and steers steadily toward the little house with the electric iron. Campbell withdrew his hand' (61). Campbell's first sentence to Didi when she visits him after secretly spending the night with O'Kelly is 'Iron' (71). They then go shopping. Campbell has been full of doubts inspired by an anonymous letter he received, but he is completely reassured by the shopping trip; this is what a happy marriage is to be about. The iron is bought first, then other things, including night-clothes for Didi. 'With each purchased thing Didi became more and more his wife' (72). By mocking contrast, Didi had been (sexually) the wife of O'Kelly the night before, without benefit of clothes or electric iron. In fact, the same King Street which provides Campbell the electric iron to grace Didi's room also provides O'Kelly flowers to grace his room, where he makes love to Didi. Campbell and Didi return from shopping to Didi's apartment. When O'Kelly arrives he finds the iron on the mantel next to Didi's ikon, the porcelain pug. '"Next to Johnny?" he looked reproachfully at Didi' (73). Didi is now quite unhappy. The iron has been purchased and placed on a level with her ikon, her beloved porcelain pug. Campbell's open dislike for the pug bodes ill. Whereas the portrait of Sir Harold represents the dead hand of old aristocratic tradition, the iron represents the combined forces of modern - neatly pressed - bourgeois conformity and assembly-line industrialism. Like the ubiquitous, nameless 'Sunday Gentlemen', with their equally nameless and indistinguishable wives, children, and houses, and like 'buttons, Fords, and the Times' (43), the iron is produced by the thousands. Industry depends not only on mathematics and mechanics and on the interchangeable parts of the assembly-line, but on reliability, efficiency, and strict scheduling. Industry depends on and encourages a consumer goods mentality in society. The result, Zamjatin is saying, may be a sound economy but alienated people. The Vicar Dewley is also part of the electric iron's world. It is true that he and his 'Doctrine of Compulsory Salvation' are something of a parody on Dostoevskij's Grand Inquisitor, but he also owes something to the twentieth-century efficiency expert. Didi's ikon is her porcelain pug Johnny. Unlike the other ikons, Johnny makes no demands. He simply smiles incessantly at Didi and her love-life, just as the moon smiles on lovers in the park: 'The bushes were intensively alive all night, they stirred, whispered, and all night the moon walked

'THE ISLANDERS'

33

about over the park with a monocle in his eye and looked down with the beneficent irony of the porcelain pug' (60). The pug is further identified with the moon when 'the moon plunged into the light batiste clouds' (61), while Johnny plunges into the white batiste and rosy waves of Didi's breasts (60 and 62). Johnny is more physically alive than the other ikons. He comes down from the mantel frequently to be caressed and talked to by Didi. He is wet by her tears and kisses and warmed by her touch. In his smile, friendliness and ugliness he is said to bear a remarkable resemblance to the human being O'Kelly - 'two drops of water' (33). Not only more alive than the other ikons, he is more alive than Campbell. After Campbell evades sexual relations with Didi she presses Johnny to her breast and he kisses her (61). Didi speaks in the familiar (na ty) with Johnny, but formally {na vy) with Campbell. As the ikon of wisdom, understanding, and love, Johnny is even able (although reluctantly) to kiss the Vicar Dewley (58). It is Johnny to whom Didi turns shortly after her divorce from her first husband to beg him not to be angry if she gets 'a little bit' married (57). Johnny, never one to make a moral judgment, does not object. The same Johnny also seems to approve when, in the following chapter, Didi asks him if she may go to O'Kelly. Campbell instantly senses Johnny's values and the threat to his world of propriety and electric irons: '...there were immediately established, without any visible reason, poor relations between Campbell and Johnny' (32). As Campbell lies in Didi's bed (alone), recovering from the boxingmatch, 'the whole night the porcelain pug guarded Campbell with a grin and disturbed his thinking' (50). Didi's sexual desire and the identical smiles of Johnny on the mantel and the monocled moon in the window annoy Campbell to the point where he leaps up angrily and turns Johnny's face to the wall (61). Didi will not permit her ikon to be so treated, and puts it to her breast. Campbell then sullenly juts out his square chin at the moon. Thus, the portrait of the deceased Sir Harold is the holy image of dead, traditional propriety, and the equally lifeless electric iron is the holy image of bourgeois propriety and modern industrialism. Both serve for their owners and worshippers as images, models, and moral authorities for alienation from the spontaneous, the natural, the free, especially free sexual expression, and from the Self. But Johnny the porcelain pug comes down from the mantel, and even though an inanimate object, enters into a complex web of relationships and identities with nature, animals and people. For Didi and for O'Kelly the porcelain pug serves as a symbol of,

34

'THE ISLANDERS'

and a moral authority for, their spontaneous, natural life, in which propriety and social or economic status are not dominant, a life in which the Self is neither denied nor crushed. A symbolism of clothes also is used to indicate alienation.· First, clothes cover the natural body. Bourgeois society regards the natural, naked body as indecent. Campbell won't remove his jacket for the doctor in the presence of a lady, even though he is seriously, perhaps mortally, injured as the result of an automobile accident. And he never removes his square shoes, fearing to expose his feet. (The foot is often considered in dream or myth a phallic symbol. For a further discussion of the preference Englishmen in this story have for waterproof shoes, see below.) Didi, the incarnation of the natural life, is appropriately a strip-tease dancer by profession. The bare body, the natural, is capable of exerting a powerful influence on even those as well-clothed and well-indoctrinated as Campbell. It is the sight of her bare body on stage and also possibly the semi-naked bodies of the prize-fighters they see that lead to unthinkable infatuation and eventually to Campbell's volunteering to appear in the boxing ring. The second and last sight he has of her body, in bed with his rival, leads to murder and to Campbell's consequent execution. Related is the obvious symbolism of Mrs. Dewley's pince-nez - with it on she is cool and reserved. When it is off or lost, as it is when Campbell becomes a patient in her home, and when he is executed, Mrs. Dewley becomes human, emotional, loving. Second, the wearing of conservative, neatly ironed clothes, properly selected for the social occasion, displays one's respect for tradition and one's conformity in taste and morals with one's fellow citizens. The Sunday Gentlemen all wear identical suits and top hats. Their wives are all dressed in pink and blue. By contrast O'Kelly's jacket is a mess, and often unbuttoned (24). On the occasion of Lady Campbell's dinner-party, O'Kelly 'spoils' everything by appearing in a morning-coat instead of the proper attire (40). And in his enthusiastic, spontaneous gesturing and talking he grossly spills sauce on his clothes (40). Lastly, one notes the white flannel nightcap of the Vicar and his fellow citizens, an image of comfortable complacency, apathy and isolation. The nightcap certainly discourages marital sexual relations. It is pulled over the ears to keep out the birds' singing. And the night before Campbell's execution, when human beings ought to be taking action, or, at the least, unable to sleep because of human concern, the Vicar, in flannel nightcap, 'with arms folded on his chest, as prescribed in "The Doctrine", snored peacefully... the whole world slept peacefully, snoring, in its flannel nightcap...'(88).

'THE ISLANDERS'

35

As in the case of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons the degree of alienation from Self is partly demonstrated by the quality of the relationship each character has with external nature. 5 Zamjatin's story, unlike most of Turgenev's works, is set in the city, and hence the possibilities for showing any relationship with external nature would appear to be limited. There are no gardens, no fields, no forests, not even grass underfoot. One might expect all the characters, whether alienated from Self or not, to suffer from the artificial environment of the city, and to seek to escape it. But through the extensive use of a symbolism involving sun, weather, and water, Zamjatin is able to indicate the characters' alienation from, or relatedness to, nature, and therefore to imply the degree of alienation from Self. When outdoors, the Vicar Dewley frowns from 'the too bright sun, and the impermissible racket of the sparrows' (8). Indoors, he is much happier with sunlight diffused and softened by window-panes (66). Lady Campbell objects to bright sun and pulls down her blinds so that the sunlight becomes 'more moderate and decent' (38). Her son, reflecting the selfalienation of his mother and of bourgeois society at large, also objects to bright sun. In his apartment he pulls down the blinds to shut out the sun. Up to this point the lustful Didi has managed to remain faithful to her fianc6 Campbell, despite his repeated refusal to have sexual relations with her and despite his steady, boring talk of buying furniture and the iron. But the closing of the blinds to shut out the sun is the crucial action that leads immediately to Didi's resolution to offer herself to O'Kelly: 'But I want sun,' Didi jumped up. 'But dear, you know very well I'm working so that we can begin buying the furniture as soon as possible, and after that...' Didi suddenly broke out laughing, did not hear the rest, and went to her own room. She put the pug on the mantel, looked into his charmingly ugly mug. 'What do you think, Johnny?' Johnny obviously thought the same thing. Didi began to pin on her hat in a hurry... (67). Didi then goes with O'Kelly 5 Uncle Pavel, Bazarov, and Mme Odincova pay little attention to the natural world. When they are on the literary stage, even when they are outdoors, there are no lyric descriptions of nature by the supposedly objective narrator. Such descriptions do occur, however, when Katja and Arkadij are on the literary stage. They love the natural world and respond to it, just as they respond to each other. They have children and will lead happy, productive lives. Pavel, Odincova, and Bazarov - his scientific interests notwithstanding - do not respond to the natural world, are childless, isolated, and sterile. At the novel's end Bazarov dies, and Pavel and Odincova may be considered spiritually dead.

36

'THE ISLANDERS'

to the beach at Swnday-By, where the sun 'made the blood boil' (68). She soon agrees to spend the night with him. References to the weather, the clouds, rain, the seasons of the year occur frequently. The Vicar includes 'the taking of fresh air' in his weekly schedule (7). (We can well suppose he would enthusiastically endorse H. G. Wells' hopes, satirized in We, for weather control.) But for the most part the Vicar and his fellow Jesmondians simply prefer to isolate themselves from the weather and the seasons: 'At night came a flood of bird singing, not taking any account of the fact that at ten o'clock decent people went to bed. Decent people angrily slammed their windows shut and thrust themselves into their white nightcaps' (60). A similar isolation from the rain and from the night air is one of the key-symptoms of the alienation of the protagonist in Ivan Bunin's 'The Gentleman from San Francisco' (1915).6 'Decent' people seem not to be affected by temperature extremes. Campbell often feels uncomfortably hot and must wipe his brow, but the weather is never the cause, rather it is the social situation to which he responds. Mrs. Dewley often shivers - not from catching a cold from the heat as the naive narrator supposes (56) - but from longing or from jealousy. The Sunday Gentlemen's standard greeting to each other is 'Fine weather, isn't it?' They go home and discuss the weather and little else with their families (19). The weather remains only a subject of polite conversation with them; they are never involved with it. They do not sweat or shiver from temperature extremes, and the weather and the seasons do not have the slightest effect on their work, leisure, or emotions. The Vicar Dewley's great social presence of mind is indicated by the remark that even while dozing he is always prepared to open his eyes and say '"Fine weather, isn't it?'" (66). In her longing for Campbell Mrs. Dewley comes to a partial realization of her alienation: 'Mrs. Dewley went somewhere with the pink and blue ladies, spoke of the weather, and meanwhile the clouds kept rushing and swelling' (20). Before Campbell's arrival, she is bored by the Vicar's puerile enthusiasm for efficiency and schedules and sits glumly by the window watching the 'swift, swelling clouds' (8). After Campbell is injured in an accident, brought to her house, and nursed by her back to health, she becomes human and longs for him. Now she sits at the breakfast-table, looks past the Vicar 'perhaps at the clouds' and smiles (18). Campbell is β

See especially Seymour L. Gross, 'Nature, Man, and God in Bunin's "The Gentleman from San Francisco'", Modern Fiction Studies, IV (1960), pp. 153-163.

'THE ISLANDERS'

37

never able or willing to perceive her love and his recovery results in his leaving the house. She feels she should act, but is unable to act: '...she looked out the window, the swift, swelling clouds rushed on, and one ought to run after them, one ought to do just that...' (20). The implications of the cloud images will be discussed at greater length below in the discussion of water symbolism. While the Sunday Gentlemen in top-hats remain unaffected by the heat, and Campbell flushes only from embarrassing social situations, O'Kelly actually pants and sweats freely from the heat. While 'decent' people slam their windows on the spring, others spend the night in the park and keep the bushes alive. Didi committed adultery in her first marriage, she confesses, simply because the weather was nice (34). The June weather is directly related to Didi's increasing lust. She complains of the heat and unbuttons her blouse in Campbell's presence. The heat of the sun mentioned above is involved in her increasing sexual desire for O'Kelly at the beach. The bourgeoisie are very much anti-water. It is noted at almost her every appearance that Lady Campbell's ribs stick out like a broken umbrella (21, 55, and elsewhere). Mr. Macintosh (the secretary of the Corporation of Honorary Bellringers), as his name suggests, is interested in keeping out the water. (In the play adaptation, he is a raincoat dealer.) O'Kelly notes that Englishmen are fond of waterproof shoes (62). A connection between the passion for waterproof shoes, Campbell's refusal to remove his shoes when injured and the ultimate meaning of the passion for isolation from water is suggested in Mr. Macintosh's enthusiastic proposal (approved by the Honorary Bellringers) that the church journal increase its advertising revenue by accepting advertisements for rubber prophylactics. The purpose of the prophylactics, of course, is to isolate and render ineffective the life-giving moisture. Didi and O'Kelly do not isolate themselves from the water. After they have sunned themselves well at the beach they plunge eagerly into the surf. Leaping into the water is the necessary action when overheated by the sun. Buffeted by waves and by her desire, Didi is unable to resist and agrees to sleep with O'Kelly. The association of water and sexual expression is made more explicit in other images. Didi's breasts are termed 'white and pink waves' (62), and, as noted above, there are many breasts-clouds parallels. Didi's short, wet, curly hair is mentioned twice with strong sexual associations (43 and 51). Full of unsated desire, Didi smells sweet and pungent, like a flower 'dry from lack of rain' (62). There is no direct description of Didi and O'Kelly's

38

'THE ISLANDERS'

love-making, but the night they spend together is described metaphorically : 'Heat slept. There stood a milky, wet fog' (70). In conclusion, the unhappy protagonist, Campbell, the Vicar and Mrs. Dewley, Lady Campbell, and the other Honorary Bellringers are thoroughly alienated from the natural world and from Self. Their alienation is seen in their everyday life and is emphasized in their choice of holy images, their clothes, their rejection of nature, and particularly their isolation from water. Like D-503 in the later We, Campbell makes an unsuccessful attempt to break out of his prison. He enters a boxing-match, becomes infatuated with a strip-tease dancer, but is unable to escape the alienation-imposing values of his bourgeois society, loses his fianc£e, murders his rival, and is executed. The other Honorary Bellringers do not even attempt to escape their prison. They avoid the boredom of alienation by becoming spectators. Just as they are spectators of the weather and seasons rather than participating in them, they are spectators of life. The mob of spectators, metaphorically an enormous serpent, appears both at the boxing-match to witness real human conflict and to yell for blood, and at the prison-gate to be present at real death and to yell for an execution. (They are the Honorary Bellringers-the real bellringer tolls the bell as the signal for the hangman to spring the trap door and hang Campbell.) The Honorary Bellringers, and especially Macintosh, the self-appointed specialist in moral problems, are always ready to forego their sterile talk of the weather and to smack their disapproving lips over the scandal of the boxing-match and over Didi's affair with Campbell's rival, and even to intervene enthusiastically in such a way that murder is not an unexpected result. The murder and the execution are further grist for the spectators' mill. Didi and O'Kelly, although they may be somewhat socially alienated in being more or less ostracized by the 'decent' people, do not suffer the slightest loneliness thereby, and, more importantly, are not alienated in the slightest from nature or Self. They never talk about the weather or the private lives of others; they are too busy leading their own spontaneous, free, private lives. But modern bourgeois society, argues Zamjatin here, finds such lack of alienation from nature and Self both an intolerable insult and rich fare for gossip to relieve its boredom. Ostracism and meddling are the natural consequences and, in this case, lead inevitably to the unhappy end of O'Kelly and Campbell.

III WE

Zamjatin's greatest work, We, was written while he was in Petrograd in the Civil War years 1920 and 1921. This novel, to a far greater degree than any of his other major works, must be approached within the general politico-cultural context of the day. That context is the subject of the first subchapter here. In its theme of alienation and conformity in modern society We may be regarded as a sequel to The Islanders, but it differs from The Islanders in that it reveals the great influence of the Utopian works of H. G. Wells. The second subchapter will explore this aspect of the novel. The novel also reflects a further development of The Islanders' imagery toward the more complex and the more abstract. The imagery is the subject of the third subchapter. Helpful as explorations in politico-cultural context, literary context, and imagery may be, they still fail to explain the novel's over-all structure, characters, and many of its details. In an attempt to solve these problems the fourth subchapter will consider the novel not as a fictional representation of real life, but as an internal, psychic drama.

A. THE POLITICO-CULTURAL CONTEXT

Ever since Zamjatin first showed the manuscript to his fellow writers We has been viewed by friends and enemies alike as an anti-Soviet political novel. Western critics have probably spilled more ink on the political aspects of this novel than on all other questions in Zamjatin's works combined. And even Soviet critics, in any discussion of Zamjatin, seldom fail to attack We as a 'malicious slander on socialism', even though the novel has never been published in the Soviet Union. The 'Single State' depicted in We is a highly organized, collectivized, rationalistic, scientific one. It came into being after overthrowing the

40

' W E ' : THE POLITICO-CULTURAL CONTEXT

states of the past and has now organized society for the happiness of everyone. Zamjatin then sets a new revolution against the state in motion within the novel accompanied by arguments for the necessity of eternal revolution everywhere. Zamjatin's novel could only be - and was received as a none too subtle summons to a new revolution against the emerging Soviet regime. But the tyrannical, ultrarational state satirized in the novel actually bore little resemblance to the Soviet Russia of the early 1920's - a fact not often appreciated by the modern reader. The early 1920's, the pre-Stalin period, despite the many hardships, has since come to be regarded by many intellectuals as a sort of golden age of Soviet Russia. After the ravages of the Great War and the Civil War the new government saw its task as the consolidation of its power and the physical rebuilding of the country's trade and industry. A certain measure of free enterprise and even free speech was therefore permitted in the early 1920's. Zamjatin and many other writers of seemingly dubious loyalty to bolsevism remained out of prison and continued to publish many of their works. Any such transparently anti-regime fables as Zamjatin actually published in the Civil War years would be unimaginable from the mid-1920's down to the present day. Even the publication of We abroad in 1924 caused the author little difficulty at the time. In We Zamjatin was writing a novel about the central problem in modern Western civilization, not a novel specifically about the Soviet Union. At almost the same time that Zamjatin wrote We, writers in other European countries - bourgeois countries at that - were independently penning other, strikingly similar anti-utopian works. The threat of industrial totalitarianism was apprehended in both socialist and bourgeois lands. The same year Zamjatin began writing We, Karel Capek (1890— 1938) first staged his classic play R. U. R. in Prague. And two years earlier in Germany the Expressionist Georg Kaiser (1878-1945) had written Gas, a play remarkably similar in its general outlines to Zamjatin's We. The setting of Gas is a rather abstract one in an ultra-industrial future. The economic system seems to be a mixture of socialism and capitalism. Modern 'efficient' production methods in an enormous factory are crippling the workers physically and mentally. Moreover, the factory is subject to periodic, disastrous explosions. The protagonist wishes to stop the production of gas and resettle the workers as farmers. He is opposed and eventually vanquished by a combination of engineers, industrialists, and the workers themselves. Despite his defeat his daughter pledges she will yet give birth to the New Man.

'WE': THE POLITICO-CULTURAL CONTEXT

41

Capek followed his R. U. R. with a still more direct attack on industrialism and emergent totalitarianism with The Insect Play (1923). An important silent motion-picture of the late 1920's, Fritz Lang's Metropolis is quite similar in theme and structure to We. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) (completely uninfluenced by We)1 has been a classic among English readers ever since, rivalled only since 1948 by George Orwell's 1984. Had the NEP-days continued to the present one might not be so disposed now to regard We as a direct attack on Soviet Russia. But Zamjatin had always argued that the writer's particular genius and reponsibility lay in seeing further ahead than others, and by these standards the author of We must unfortunately be regarded as a good one: by the late 1920's the novel was becoming an ever more uncomfortably relevant satire on Stalin's regime. The first violent government campaign against a Soviet writer was launched against Zamjatin in 1928-29. He soon found it impossible to publish even non-controversial works and wrote a courageous letter to Stalin reporting the death he had suffered as a writer and requesting permission to travel abroad. Thanks to Gor'kij's help the request was approved and Zamjatin left his native land never to return. One further sad comment on the accuracy of Zamjatin's prophecy is the career of the prominent Marxist critic and editor Aleksandr Voronskij. Soon after reading the manuscript of We Voronskij took his friend Zamjatin to task for his wrong-headed and pessimistic prophecy on the future: the individual would be important in the future socialist state and there would be none of the repression the novel foresaw. 2 History resolved the dispute ironically: not only was Zamjatin driven into exile, but the defender of the Soviet regime Voronskij was arrested by that regime and disappeared in 1937 in the purges. In the short run then, history proved Zamjatin's novel to be (among other things) a satire on the Soviet regime. Whether history in the long run will also justify Zamjatin's fears for the future of all of modern civilization remains, of course, to be seen. 1 It has been wrongly assumed by critics that Zamjatin's novel We influenced Aldous Huxley's later Brave New World. See, for instance, D. J. Richards' Zamyatin: A Soviet Heretic (New York-London, 1962), p. 54. In his letter of October 25,1962 to the present writer, Huxley himself writes: Oddly enough I never heard of Zamiatin's book until 3 or 4 years ago... Men Like Gods [by H. G. Wells, 1923] annoyed me to the point of planning a parody, but when I started writing I found the idea of a negative Utopia so interesting that I forgot about Wells and launched into B. N. W.' Examination of the works of the three authors seems to support Huxley's statement. 2 Voronskij, Α., '[Ε. Zamjatin]', Na styke: sbornik statej (Moscow-Petrograd, 1923), pp. 47-75.

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' W E ' : THE POLITICO-CULTURAL CONTEXT

One will not find in We any official Soviet vision of Utopia satirized - there was no such official vision. When pressed by Nikolaj Buxarin in 1918 for an outline of the future socialist state Lenin stated that no one knew or could say what it would look like.3 As one reads early Soviet documentary works by pro-Bolsevik writers, one is struck by the absence of any clear ideas on the part of the reds as to the forms or organization of that future for which so many had fought, killed, and died. However, among the literary groups active during the Civil War were the particularly numerous and influential 'Proletarian' writers. Zamjatin must have regarded their vision of the socialist future as the one most to be feared and opposed. The Proletarians were divided into three groups: Proletkult (a large group enjoying government support) and two related, smaller groups, Kuznica [Smithy] and the Cosmists.4 Proletarian writers exalted collective labor and machinery and the future. Kuznicds Nikolaj Ljasko (1884— 1953) and others, in rejoicing that 'We' had driven out T , may have furnished Zamjatin the title for the novel. Zamjatin certainly must have had the Proletarian writers in mind when he launched his novel. Some of D-503's images of the glories of the collective and the machine undoubtedly could be shown to derive directly from Proletarian writing, particularly the poetry of Vladimir Kirillov (1890-1943). Kirillov extolled labor, the machine, and the modern age in such well-known poems as 'My' [We] (1917) and 'Zeleznyj Messija' [The Iron Messiah] (1918).5 The following characteristic (untitled) work of Kirillov's represents an enthusiastic description of precisely the Utopia Zamjatin satirizes: Ά ÖpOUieH 6hJ1 Β BHXpb ΟΓΗβΒΟΓΟ KpyXCeHbH, Β pa3MepeHHbiit 6er HeyeMHbix Μοτοροβ, Η Γροχοτ rpaHHTa η TpyÖHoe neHbe Tep3aJlH ΜβΗΗfleMOHHHeCKHMxopoM. EbiJi HpocTeH ροκοτ 2cejie3Horo rHeea, MyryHHaH flpoHCb HenoMepHtix ycHJiHfl, Β cHfliomeM Bajibce — Hanpaeo, HaneBo B e l a r a TpaMBan, &ΒΤΟΜΟ6ΗΙΙΗ.

3

Lenin, V. I.,'Vystuplenie protif popravki Buxarina k rezoljucii ο programme partii 8 marta (veCerom)', Socinenija, 4th ed. (Moscow, 1941-1957), XXVII, p. 122. 4 For a discussion of the early Proletarian writers, see Edward J. Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature 1928-1932 (New York, 1953). 5 For texts, see Z. S. Paperny (ed.), Proletarskie pohty pervyx let sovetskoj kpoxi (Leningrad, 1959), pp. 228-229 and 233.

'WE' : THE CONTEXT OF H. G. WELLS' UTOPIAN WORKS

43

Η Β xaoce 3ByKOB, ÖJiecice, rpoMe JIlOflH Η BeiUH CK0JIb3HJIH pHTMHHHO, Η τ ο , HTO Ha KaacflOM 6biJi JiHTep η HOMep, Ά 3Han x o p o u i o , a BH/ieji OTJIHHHO. floMa 6BIJIH B3HTbi Β KBaapaTbi KBapTajioe, Η BKpaillieHW JIIOJIH Β KBaflpaTHKH KOMHaT,

Η Kaxwa» Bemb noHHMajia Η 3Hajia Cßoe Ha3HaMeHbe ΒflBHaceHbHorpoMHOM... (I was thrown into a fiery vortex, Into the measured motions of tireless motors, And the rumble of granite and the singing of whistles Tormented me like a demonic choir. The roar of the iron wrath was furious, The cast-iron trembling of excessive efforts, In the shining waltz - to the right, to the left Ran streetcars and automobiles. And in the chaos of sounds, glitter, thunder People and things moved rhythmically, And that each had a letter and a number, I knew very well, I saw perfectly. The houses were put into square blocks, And the people dispersed into the cubes of rooms, And each thing understood and knew Its purpose in the mighty motion.)® The Proletarians did undoubtedly, in works like this one, furnish Zamjatin some imagery and a general concept of Utopia, but they produced no full-blown p o r t r a i t s of U t o p i a f o r Zamjatin to satirize, and we shall therefore have to look elsewhere for one.

B. THE CONTEXT OF H. G. WELLS' UTOPIAN WORKS While writing We in 1920 Zamjatin was also hard at work editing translations of the works of H. G. Wells. The work was part of an enormous translating and publishing project by World Literature - a sort of WPA β

This appears in Kirillov's Veiernye ritmy (Moscow, 1927), p. 56. The literal translation here is my own. In meter (anapestic tetrameter), imagery, and idea, Kirillov's poem seems an attempt to write a proletarianized version of Fedor Tjutöev's well-known 'Son na more' [Dream at Sea'] (1936).

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'WE': THE CONTEXT OF H. G. WELLS' UTOPIAN WORKS

organization headed by Gor'kij and staffed by needy writers, critics, and translators - to publish in Russian translation the works of important foreign writers since the eighteenth century. The extent of Zamjatin's interest in and knowledge of Wells' works is indicated by his editorship of three volumes of Wells in 1919-1920 and of the twelve-volume collected works of Wells (not published until 1924— 1926).7 Zamjatin's work on Wells resulted in two public lectures on Wells delivered in early 1921. The lectures were later published as essays.8 His work with Wells' collected works must have served precisely as the literary immersion Zamjatin testified he needed to enter another age.9 Whereas immersion in works about the past helped Zamjatin in the case of the plays Bloxa [The Flea] (written 1924)10 and Attila (written 1927),11 works about the future and Utopia were necessary in the case of We. The Proletarian writers, as noted above, had written some enthusiastic (if not good) poetry but no extensive fiction on Utopian themes.12 Their enthusiasm and that of the party leaders for some sort of an industrial, collectivist Utopia was, of course, of prime interest to Zamjatin. But only in Wells does he find the mass of well thought out material he needs for effective immersion. In his essays on Wells Zamjatin regards the British writer as superior to the dozens of other writers on Utopian themes and praises Wells' fine literary mixture of classical utopianism, social satire, sciencefantasy, and the adventure novel. 13

7

For a complete list of the works Zamjatin edited, see Alex M. Shane, The Life and Works ofEvgenij Zamjatin (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968), pp. 247-248. 8 'Gerbert Uells', and 'GenealogiCeskoe derevo Uellsa', in Zamjatin's Lica (New York, 1955), pp. 103-128 and 139-146. 8 In his essay 'Back-Stage' ('Zakulisy', Lica, p. 265) Zamjatin writes: Ί remember that for Bloxa [The Flea] this period lasted no less than four months. The diet was as follows: Russian folk-comedies and fairy-tales, the plays of Gozzi and something from Goldoni, some farcical posters, old Russian prints, the books of Rovinskij... To enter the age of Atilla (for the play At ilia) took about two years; I had to read tens of Russian, French, and English volumes...' (The persons referred to are Count Carlo Gozzi (1722-1806), Italian dramatist whose works include satirical comedies based on fairy-tales; Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793), Italian dramatist regarded as the founder of the modern Italian comedy; and Dmitrij Aleksandroviö Rovinskij (1824-1895), editor of many works on the ikons and paintings of Russia.) 10 Bloxa: igra ν cetyrex dejstvijax (Leningrad, 1926). 11 Never published or performed in the Soviet Union. It has appeared only in Novyj iurnal (New York), XXIV (1950), pp. 7-70. 12 In 'Genealogiieskoe derevo Uellsa' Zamjatin mentions only in passing the Utopian works of the Russians Bogdanov, Ehrenburg, Kuprin, Odoevskij, Senkovskij-Brambeus, and A. N. Tolstoj. 13 Ibid., p. 144.

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45

Wells was not the originator of the idea of a scientific socialist Utopia, was not himself a political force in Russia, but he was, during the first quarter of the twentieth century, the most popular and widely read literary proponent of such a utopia. Wells' popularity among socialists and the extensive, detailed descriptions he gives of Utopia in his works make Wellsian utopia the logical candidate for a literary target for Zamjatin's sociopolitical satire. It must have occurred to Zamjatin too that We had a greater chance of escaping censorship and of being published in the Soviet Union if it were recognizable as (and could be defended as) an attack on English ideas rather than on Soviet ones. The following examination of Wells' pre-1920 Utopian works 14 and of We will show the actual extent to which We may be regarded as a satire on Wellsian utopia. Wells' Utopias are filled with scientific innovations, the description of which absorbs more of the author's enthusiasm than does the meagre support given individualism. Science is man's noblest enterprise, a mode of existence. The scientist making scientific progress is working out God's purpose (if there is a God) and hence giving meaning to his own existence. Scientific discovery or accident in Wells' work often serves as a literary deus ex machina device to save mankind. 15 In In the Days of the Comet16 the collision with Earth of a comet composed of a mysterious green gas transforms and purifies human nature and utopia follows shortly. Zamjatin, although himself an engineer, never in his works seems to regard scientific innovation to be of any truly significant value. In the case of We some of them are actually harmful to man; but then Zamjatin (unlike Aldous Huxley) does not regard scientific innovation per se to be any potential source of enslavement either. Wells is enthusiastic over the hygienic cleanliness, perfection, symmetry, 14

Wells' social-scientific fantasy and speculation represent roughly one half of his total literary output. Up to 1920, when Zamjatin began We, some dozen major works contained Utopian themes. A variety of these Utopian works, dating from 1901 to 1914, will be cited here. All the works cited here are mentioned by Zamjatin in his two essays on Wells in such fashion as to indicate that he was familiar with them. Although Wells at different times holds varying opinions on the future of man and whether man is capable of creating or maintaining utopia, the Wellsian vision of a Utopian society remains quite constant not only up to 1914, but also afterwards. It is possible therefore to abstract a more or less complete, consistent Wellsian Utopia from his many Utopian works. 15 Wells seems literarily unable to bring about a convincing salvation of man without resorting to some scientific gimmick. 18 Wells, H. G., In the Days of the Comet (London, 1906).

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'WE' : THE CONTEXT OF H. G. WELLS' UTOPIAN WORKS

and efficiency of his Utopian city. Totally innocent of the alienation from the natural world involved, Wells proposes to shield man even outdoors from the sun and the rain: Moreover, there is no reason but the existing filth why the roadways should not have the translucent velaria to pull over in bright sunshine and wet weather... Now, of course, we tolerate the rain because it facilitates a sort of cleansing process (Anticipations, 33-34).17 Zamjatin uses the same sort of innovations as part of his theme of dehumanization in Utopia. The Utopia in We controls the weather to the extent of permitting no rain and few clouds, and the perfect cleanliness desired by Wells is suggested by the glass houses and pavement. Wells foresees totally efficient dwellings, free of dust-catching corners, dishwashing, cooking, etc., in short, the 'practically automated house' (Anticipations, 124). Zamjatin does not describe all the gadgets in D-503's world, but nothing so revolting as dishwashing or dust is to be seen. And the inhabitants have no need of cooking, since they eat lumps of petroleum food at communal dining halls (22).18 Wells' record of scientific prophecy is remarkable. He predicted military aviation before the Wright Brothers' first craft left the ground, and by 1914 predicted the dropping of atomic bombs by aircraft in war. His social prophecy has not (yet) been so well justified. Zamjatin's primary literary interest was not science, but the threat of collectivism and rationalism to man's humanity. Still, only in passing, Zamjatin introduces such inventions as are necessary to his theme of alienation, like the petroleum food and the control of the weather, a few others for setting, such as the electric toothbrush (!), and the spaceship for symbolism and the requirements of the plot. Yet Zamjatin's record as a scientific prophet seems at least as good as Wells': the glass interplanetary rocket powered by frozen air is related to the rockets of a few decades later using ceramic parts and powered by liquid oxygen and hydrogen; the 'aero', judging by its motion, is a helicopter; students are taught by mechanical lecturers (teaching machines of a sort); and the state controls its citizens by brain operations (and scientists today ponder the implications of the increasing possibilities of physical and chemical control of the brain). In We Zamjatin draws a world aspiring to perfect efficiency in political and police control. Wells eagerly anticipates such a world. If a crime 17 18

Wells, H. G., Anticipations (London, 1901). Refers to the text of We in My (New York, 1952).

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47

should occur in Utopia, the police investigate, assisted by their complete central index-files containing the detailed, day by day life-history of every living person {A Modern Utopia, 163-64);19 once the criminal is apprehended he may be punished by 'good, scientifically caused pain' {Anticipations, 325), or, in extreme cases, the state will 'not be squeamish... inflicting death' on the stupid or criminal {Anticipations, 324). But a really efficient Utopia will largely avoid even the possibility of crime, for, as Wells notes approvingly: 'The psychologists are learning how to mould minds, to reduce and remove bad complexes of thought and motive' {The World Set Free, 279-80).20 Little exaggeration is needed to satirize these elements, which, even in Wells, often read like a parody. We does have the thorough moulding of the mind in childhood and all through life. A central indexfile is implied by the omniscience of the Guardians. (One might be tempted to draw parallels between Plato's Guardians, Wells' Samurai, and Zamjatin's Guardians. But their functions vary. Plato's and Wells' Guardians are elite civil servants with the requisite intelligence and training to administer the state scientifically. Zamjatin's Guardians are political and spiritual policemen, 'Guardian Angels', who protect the individual from his own sins and the state from insurrection.) The execution-transformation of the criminal into water and the torture in the Glass Bell are the sort of scientific punishment Wells might applaud. The brain operation in We removing any possibility of irrational behavior is of the same order as the green gas Wells welcomes in In the Days of the Comet. One imagines Wells living fairly comfortably even in the world of We and joining, as did some Marxist critics,21 in the condemnation of its rebel. Utopias have generally restricted or regulated sexual expression as (1) a manifestation of selfishness at the expense of community spirit, (2) a distraction to man, who might otherwise devote more of his time and energy to nobler deeds, or (3) the cause of indiscriminate procreation of mentally and physically inferior beings. Plato, in The Republic, objects to uncontrolled sexual expression on all three counts, and most Utopias since then have followed his lead. Wells takes partial exception to Plato on the first point, but agrees on the other two. He denies he favors Plato's and Campanella's communism of wives {Mankind in the Making, 372).22 He insists he regards the family as important {A Modern Utopia, 200). Yet he 19 20 21 22

Wells, H. G., A Modern Utopia (London, 1905). Wells, H. G., The World Set Free (London, 1914). See, for instance, Voronskij, op. cit. Wells, H. G., Mankind in the Making (London, 1903).

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would remove children from their parents at birth and put them under the care and control of the community for the benefit of child, parent, and society, as would Plato. A voluntary sharing of 'lovers' is suggested {In the Days of the Comet, 304),23 although the sexual implications are unclear. The source of children is not explicit in We, but unsanctioned motherhood and fatherhood are proscribed (97) and no family institution exists. Since maternal norms are referred to, one assumes that the state sanctions child-bearing (but not child-raising) at certain times to certain citizens.24 Children are state, not private, property. Citizens are not permitted to claim exclusive possession of one sexual partner, but rather are to enjoy the spirit engendered by a community of partners. The state has replaced the family, as in The Republic. Wells tolerates sexual expression as a 'concession to the flesh to secure efficiency' (Anticipations, 116-17), permitted the elite of his Utopia one night in five - cold baths being prescribed on the other four (A Modern Utopia, 294). The hero of In the Days of the Comet renounces the woman he loves for a greater, nobler passion, the building of the 'City of the World'. Wells pays occasional tribute to love as its own justification: 'This Utopia has certainly preserved the fundamental freedom, to love' (A Modern Utopia, 53) and yet these loves are never convincingly developed and often seem to exclude physical love. The citizens in Zamjatin's novel have been trained to regard passion as a 'stupid, uneconomical spending of human energy' (27). Sexual intercourse is tolerated for the time being presumably because the problem of the abolition of the Personal Hours has not yet been solved. Wells is at his most violent in his frequent denunciation of the 'absurdity' of breeding 'our horses and sheep... while we leave humanity to mate in the most heedless manner' (Mankind in the Making, 37), and he calls for control of marriage and procreation (A Modern Utopia, 192). D-503's early argument is nearly the same: ...[the Ancients] left sexual life with no control at all... Anybody, any time, as much as they wanted... Completely unscientific, like beasts... Is it not absurd to understand gardening, chicken farming, fishing... and not dare reach the last step in this logical scale: child production? (15-16).

State regulation of sexual expression in the world of We through its 23

Wells, H. G., In the Days of the Comet (London, 1906). A synopsis of We in Zamjatin's papers explains that 0-90 had no right to a child, because she did not meet the maternal norm in height. 24

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laboratory examinations and pink check system was a part of Wells' Utopian vision:

...it would be for the medical man and the psychologist to decide how far the thing was wholesome and permissible, and how far it was an aggressive bad habit and an absorbing waste of time and energy (Anticipations, 329). Both systems are scientific variations on Plato's scheme allowing only the state's best citizens (through a secretly manipulated system of lot drawing) to have intercourse and children. Utopias of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were Romantic in orientation. They consisted of small, self-sufficient, economically primitive communities, where the individual, free from the inevitably corrupting influence of institutions and 'civilization', might realize his natural goodness and kindness. An ideal community results. But the nineteenth century saw Romanticism end its domination of the Zeitgeist. There was discontent with the fruits of individualism and a realization that the Industrial Revolution was here to stay. Many social thinkers and Utopian writers began to consider the problem of the ideal society, not as a return to primitive goodness and the abolition of 'civilization', but as a matter of finding and erecting the proper institutional structure, of taking maximum advantage of modern industrialism. Utopias became more urban, industrial, larger, often world-wide, and were characterized by a powerful, centralist state. And the dreams of a century ago of industrial socialism have been partially realized in many parts of the world in the twentieth century. The importance of Utopian writers as prophets or leaders is therefore not to be ignored. The scientific Utopias of Wells and the ones suggested by the proponents of Marxism-Leninism were understandably viewed by Zamjatin and others as distinct possibilities. (But in the late 20th century it is interesting to note Utopians moving - paradoxically - in two directions. Utopians in the more primitive communities still dream of scientific and industrial progress, while Utopians in countries with the greatest scientific and industrial progress dream of primitive communities. Zamjatin must be considered one of the first writers to contribute to this reversal of the direction of Western Utopian thinking.) Wells' Utopias, usually set in remote time or space, were generally preceded either by disastrous world wars (in one case, an atomic war) or by a period of decay, an Age of Confusion. Only then does mankind see that its only hope for survival lies in 'acceptance of achieved science as the basis of a new social order' (The World Set Free, 92). We's Single State

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is also preceded by a disastrous war; The Two Hundred Years War killed most of the world's population. Some of the survivors became savages; the others founded and walled off the perfectly rational, totally organized Single State. One of the justifications for the Single State used by its defenders is the elimination of constant small, national wars. Besides guaranteeing citizens against destruction in war, the state must satisfy other needs too. Wells' Utopian residents are invariably fine physical specimens. They eat well; their sleep is untroubled by care. They rarely smoke or drink, and they lead limited or non-existent sex lives. The Single State in We forbids the individual to stay awake at night and licenses occasional sexual activity as conducive to peace of mind. All these measures are aimed at greater health and longer lives for the citizens. But Utopia recognizes spiritual needs also. Wells and Zamjatin's Single State follow Plato in viewing unity and harmony as man's greatest need, in his body and soul as well as in the social body and soul. When D-503 becomes 'ill' and a conflict of selves develops within, he soon transfers his conflict to the social plane, where he participates in a revolt. Indeed, such precisely was the rebel leader I-330's plan. The peace and harmony of soul and society are interdependent, and the state must assure that no conflicts anywhere remain unresolved if unity and happiness are to prevail. Essential to the 'health' of man is the absence of self-awareness. Selfawareness is one of the first signs of D-503's 'illness' (31). Sexual passion is frowned upon as leading to self-awareness. As the individual becomes more aware of Self, he loses his feeling of unity, and, therefore, the argument goes, becomes unhappy, alone, 'ill'. The scientific, materialistic Utopia, Classicist and Positivist in orientation, always opposes any manifestation of the Baroque, Romantic, or Expressionistic. Complexity is to be avoided, as it arouses passion and leads to confusion, both of which are enemies of harmony and reason and consequently of man and state. Plato writes, in reference to music and food: '...complexity engendered license... whereas simplicity... engendered temperance in the soul' (The Republic, 110).25 Wells looks forward to the day when man 'will avoid exciting color contrasts and bizarre contours' and will prefer 'not too imaginative prose... the less sensuous aspects of music' {Anticipations, 118). In We the first attack of the protagonist's 'illness' occurs during the playing of a work by Scriabin (favorite composer of the amateur pianist Zamjatin), a sample of the 'chaotic' music of the ancients. One recalls Damon's perspicacity as to art and the 25

Plato, The Republic (New York, 1941).

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age: '...any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole state... when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them' (The Republic, 135). D-503 is jolted further by the chaos of the apartment in the Ancient House with 'lines distorted by epilepsy, impossible to reduce to any equation' (26). Riotous colors in the Ancient House and later in the world beyond the Green Wall disturb him. But even health and harmony are insufficient in Utopia. If man may have no social conflicts and no internal conflicts, his need for struggle must be met elsewhere. Participation in the struggle toward the Ideal characterizes Utopians in the works of many writers. For Plato the Ideal is realizable in the state. For Wells the movement toward the Ideal is eternal progress in science. His Utopians have a passion for research and little use for art or personal relationships. Only a powerful, centralized state, of course, has the resources and organization necessary to make feasible such research. Zamjatin's Single State has a compulsion and the resources to participate in the movement to the Ideal, to extend the perfection achieved (or nearly so) in its own world, mathematical happiness, to other worlds. Utopia then, by eliminating conflict in and among its citizens transfers the human need for struggle to the state, and through its resources is able to satisfy this need. Finally, the Single State, in the manner of Wells and Plato, having systematically discouraged individualism and self-awareness, and having identified itself with man's only remaining permissible aspiration, emerges as the one possible object of his affection. It thus fulfills his need for an emotional relationship. And the citizen of the Single State has an exceptionally severe need, since he has neither mother, father, spouse, child, nor God. The worship of the state by D-503 and by state poets is more than mere propaganda to assure perpetuation of the order; it fulfills an emotional need. Much of the world of We then coincides, despite a certain measure of satiric exaggeration, with Wells' Utopian vision. But We is more than a parody of Wells. In not only its attitude toward the rebellion against the rational, but in its nature and portrayal, We differs sharply from Wells' works. Rebellions against the rational Utopia appear in Wells' novels as early as A Modern Utopia, but the rebels are mainly harmless, albeit annoying, cranks. His faith in rationalism jolted by World War I, Wells grew more aware of the probability of irrational action in Utopia, and shortly after Zamjatin finished We, he put his first major revolt into Men Like Gods

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(1923). One suspects too that Wells found it increasingly necessary to introduce rebels, major and minor, into his Utopias to save the reader from boredom. Wells pays tribute to the 'fertilizing conflict of individualities... the ultimate meaning of the personal life' (A Modern Utopia, 10), but one finds very little conflict of any kind remaining in his Utopias once the wicked rebels are crushed. Most important, Wells' rebels are outsiders, not products of Utopia, as is also true of Utopian writers in general. But whereas Wells and other Utopian and anti-utopian writers have placed the revolt against rationalism and collectivism on the social plane, Zamjatin (as will be argued further in the fourth subchapter) makes the revolt primarily an internal one.26

C. THE IMAGERY

An elaborate color and core-versus-crust symbolism informs much of the imagery in We.21 Other related imagery involves metals, meteorology, and the endowing of inanimate objects with life. Colors, of course, sometimes have special connotations in specific cultures. For instance, the Russian reader of We will have little difficulty understanding that the general absence of red in the Single State is an ironic comment on the disappearance of the revolution in Utopia. The Russian reader may also associate the light blue uniforms of the Single State's citizens with the light blue uniforms of tsarist Russia. Other than these two cases Zamjatin's use of color has little to do with specifically Russian connotations. For instance, yellow in Russia is associated with madness (an asylum, because of its color, is traditionally called a 'yellow house'), with Orientals, and with depravity (the prostitute's internal passport was yellow). The first two associations of yellow are present, for example, in Andrej Belyj's novel Peterburg (1913), but none are to be found in We. Even the color red, now considered almost exclusively Soviet property, has long been used (no doubt because of its relation to blood and flames) as a color for revolution. Zamjatin's use of these and other colors can best be understood, not by 29 An earlier version of this subchapter appeared as 'Zamjatin, Wells and the Utopian Literary Tradition', Slavonic and East European Review, XLIV (1966), pp. 351-360. 27 Carl Proffer's 'Notes on the Imagery in Zamjatin's We', Slavic and East European Journal, VII (1963), pp. 269-278, offered the first interpretation of the color and coreversus-crust imagery. Proffer does not discuss the significance of the rocket, the variations of the basic colors, such as pink, the blue-to-gray shift, or other elements discussed here.

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reference to Russian traditions, but by reference to fairly universal connotations of individual colors. These connotations were being explored by European Expressionist painters a decade before Zamjatin wrote his novel and were the subject of an important work first published in Germany, On the Spiritual in Art (1912), by the painter and theorist Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944). Zamjatin's subjective use of abstract color closely corresponds to the theories Kandinsky elaborates. But Kandinsky was far better known in Germany where he lived and worked than in his native Russia by 1920, and all the evidence suggests that Zamjatin knew neither the painter nor his theories; apparently the two men had simply breathed the same 20th century European air and had come independently to a similar understanding of the connotative values of specific colors. The color symbolism in We centers on (but is not limited to) the three primary colors - red, yellow, and blue. Yellow is the color of sunshine and of life, red the color of passion and fire, and blue (goluboj) the color of coolness and rationalism. Red and blue may also be regarded as the colors of Energy and Entropy, respectively, and many of the images in the novel are variations of the image of a basic core of fiery, red Energy surrounded by and restrained by a crust of blue Entropy. Conflict and motion result on all levels - cosmic, geological, geographical, political, social, physical, sexual, and psychic - as cores of red Energy attempt to erupt through crusts of blue Entropy. 28 Blue is the color of the sky, of the eyes of 0-90 (the protagonist's legal sex partner), of uniforms, of coolness, and metaphorically, of things associated with Entropy. The first use of blue in the novel relates to the sky: 'a blue, unmarred sky sterile, irreproachable' (7); 'a beatifically blue sky' (8). The weather has been controlled to the extent of eliminating unpredictable, shapeless clouds in the sky, just as unpredictable, shapeless emotions and thoughts have been eliminated in society. Even the sunlight, bright and tearing outside the city, is 'light-bluishly crystalline' (19) in the city. The diffuse, bluish light has a strong calming effect (31). The entire city, because of its glass construction and blue sky overhead, appears blue - the apartment buildings, the Accumulator Tower, all the towers and walls. 28 In his essay Ό literature, revoljucii, entropii i ο proCem' [On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and So Forth] (1924) Zamjatin outlines his theories of Energy and Entropy. In this essay he draws obviously on the imagery and philosophy of We: Energy and Entropy are the two great conflicting forces in the universe, and they operate on all levels. Their colors are, respectively,fieryred and icy blue.

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0-90, whose name and entire physical description suggest roundness, is part of the same calm, rational order as the sky: Ό - tenderly raised her round, blue crystal eyes... blue, unmarred by as much as a speck of cloud' (12). The protagonist, D-503, sees nothing, no clouds, no specks, etc, beyond 0-90's open, blue, window-eyes (34). (As the novel progresses, however, 0-90 shows that she is more complex than we at first suspected. She revolts against the state's rules and conceives a child.) The uniforms worn by all citizens of the Single State are light blue, suggesting not only their common allegiance to the prevailing cool, sterile, calm rationalism, but that the uniform is the cool crust of Entropy containing and restraining the warm core of the body within. The cool crust of the uniform is absent only in the case of the savages outside the Green Wall and of citizens discreetly engaged in sexual intercourse. Blue is all there is; simplicity and rationalism are all there is. "We know that what's up there is [not God, but] a crystal blue, naked indecent nothing' (54). Mathematics and 'the blue heights of beloved abstractions' (199) have a calming effect. All this enthusiastic perception and love of the blue reflects the prevailing condition of rest in the psyche and in the city that dominates the opening of the novel. As the novel progresses and the protagonist and the city experience a revolt, blue acquires a new meaning. Blue begins to appear in connection with coldness. As D-503 sits on the cold floor, growing chilled to the bone, he reflects that this must be the same cold as that found in 'blue, mute, interplanetary space' (69). Blue blocks of frozen air for the Integral, the interplanetary rocket, are often mentioned. The Integral, the city, and its buildings are often described as 'bluishly icy' (155). D-503 eventually comprehends the relation between blue, rational 'happiness', absence of desire, and coldness, in his reasoning that happiness is the 'divine minus, -273°' (158) (absolute zero, where molecular motion ceases). In general, light blue (goluboj) represents the sphere of calm rationalism and peace, whereas dark blue (sinij) pertains to the sphere of emotion. When the pregnant 0-90 tells D-503 of her joy, he notes that she 'shines dark bluely' (sine sijala mne ν lico... esce sinee sijaja). The skies in the calm, rational city are usually light blue in the first part of the novel, but when D-503 is in an agitated emotional state he often sees them as dark blue. The internal walls of the Ancient House are dark blue. There is an obvious, steady shift in the perception of blue toward bluegray and then gray as the novel progresses. The light blue uniforms are described more often as gray-blue, and the previously light blue sky

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becomes a 'gray light blue sky' (75). The unhappy D-503 searches for his lost 1-330 amid metaphoric gray-light-blue waves, with a gray-light-blue shadow behind him, in hopes of finding an explanation of the meaning of the events around him. The city, blocks of blue ice, turns to lead as a cloud passes over (103). The wave-like ranks of the marching citizens, once blue or blue-gray, 'turned into gray crests welded into ice by the sudden frost' (109). During the flight of the rocket, the 'Integral', D-503 sees the faces of the Second Builder and others, previously white, as gray: 'their faces were gray, autumnal... some smiled grayishly' (168). The light blue needle of the Accumulator Tower turns first into a dull, blue spire (161), and finally into a 'lonely, leaden finger' (169). In the city after the rocket seizure fails, D-503, having escaped a roundup in the subway, finds himself alone: 'Wind, twilight - gray, almost directly overhead' (179). The shift from blue to gray has nothing to do with any change in D-503's external world - it derives from the change in his emotions. After the fantasy-removing operation that 'cures' D-503, the weather, the city, and the psyche return to a purely rational condition: 'Day. Clear. Barometer - 760... There are no ravings whatsoever, no preposterous metaphors, no feelings: facts only... my head is light, empty' (199). One might suppose that light blue would be the dominating color of the last chapter to signify the ultimate triumph of the rational, but evidently the operation on the brain has removed the color from life altogether - the only color mentioned is the (non-)color white of I-330's face and teeth while she is being tortured. Red and various shades of red depict fire, blood, lips, and nipples, and represent passion and Energy. Pure, bright red does not normally exist anywhere in the blue-oriented, Entropy-oriented Single State. The first appearance of red in the novel is during the first visit to the Ancient House, where D-503 finds 'a motley splurge of colors and forms' (26). The chaotic mixture of white, dark blue, red, green, orange, and yellow greatly disturbs D-503, who is accustomed to the organized, pale colors of the Single State. Once D-503's passion for 1-330 has been aroused and he has entered the dark red walled Ancient House (147) within the blue city, he is ready to look through the 'two eerily dark windows' (27) (I-330's eyes) to see 'the fireplace blazing within'. (A parallel between the apartment and its fireplace and the human head and psyche is noted by D-503.1-330's mood is defined in many instances in terms of whether the 'blinds' are lowered or not and of the intensity of the fire blazing within.) D-503 grows redder and more violent in his body and psyche during his

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first, frustrating sexual encounter with 1-330. At first, 'My ribs were rods of iron' (48). 1-330 then disrobes: '...the blows, abrupt, with endless pauses, of a sledge-hammer against the rods... The sledge-hammer was pounding away there, within me, against the red hot rods' (49). She pours liqueur into him and he now sees, for the first time, his true physical and psychic condition: .. .·we who live on this earth are constantly walking over a burbling, crimson sea of fire hidden there, within the bowels of the earth. But we never think of that. But now suppose that this thin shell under our feet were suddenly to turn to glass, that we were suddenly to see - I had turned to glass. I saw into myself, deep within me. There were two of me. One - the former D-503, number D-503, and the other - Up to now he had only barely shoved his hairy paws out of the shell, but now all of him was crawling out, the shell was cracking, would fly to pieces any minute and - and then what? (51-52). He seizes 1-330, bites her, starts to take off his uniform, but discovers his time is up and he must leave. On the way home he notes the usual glass houses and glassy sky. But he now realizes that 'under that quiet, cool glass, those things that were riotous, crimson, shaggy, were inaudibly rushing along' (53). When he next meets 1-330, he sees not her teeth, but in the white fog - blood - a gash made with a sharp knife - lips... All women are lips - nothing but lips. The lips of one are rosy, resiliently round: a ring, a gentle enclosure against the whole world. And then these: a second before they had not been here and then, in a moment - the knife - and the sweet blood still dripping (63-64). After his last sexual intercourse with 1-330 he becomes so hot as to approach the melting point, and here the red gives way to great heat in the imagery: ...the bearings have become incandescent; one minute more and the molten metal will start dripping and everything will turn into nothing. Quick - let's have the cold water, logic. I pour it on in bucketsful, but the logic sizzles on the hot bearings and spreads through the air in an elusive white vapor (116). Finally, during the disorders on the election day, the 'Day of Unanimity', D-503 reaches the highest stage of his revolt. Without the teasing, coaxing, baiting and prodding by 1-330 that mark his other acts of revolt, he spontaneously smashes through the crowd, demands that (his rival) R-13 put down 1-330, seizes her, bleeding and bare breasted, and carries her away (125). Energy has now completely burst through: My heart was pounding within me - an enormous heart, and at every stroke

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there lashed out of it such a riotous, hot, such a joyous wave. And what if something down there had flown to pieces - let it, nothing mattered! The only thing that mattered was to carry her thus, to carry her on and on - (125). Dark red (temno-krasnyj) is the color of the outside of the Ancient House (147). The bed in the Ancient House is mahogany - a dark red. Dark red might be seen as a blood-and-passion red that has darkened with age and depth of feeling. Not only the walls of the Ancient House itself are dark red, but things ancient in general 29 are often discribed as dark red or crimson (bagrovyj). D-503 imagines the ancients conducting their elections '(I can imagine the fantastically somber spectacle: night, a plaza; figures in dark capes stealing along the walls; the torches with their crimson flames dancing in the wind)' (119). The same crimson comes to mind in a different form a short time later when D-503 sees R-13 carrying off his beloved 1-330: 'Just as at a conflagration among the ancients, everything turned crimson...' (124). Among the people outside the city-wall, D-503 sees on a boulder the figure of a winged man with a 'dazzling, crimson smouldering ember' for a heart (135). 1-330, so closely connected with the Ancient House and the life of the ancients, is never dark red herself, but D-503 often looks into her 'dark windows' (eyes) to the fire blazing inside. Pink (rozovyj) is the only variation of red that appears regularly in, and is sanctioned by, the state. If light blue indicates a passionless coolness, rationalism, materialism, restriction, then pink suggests a passionless physical healthiness - like the cheeks of a well-scrubbed, well-indoctrinated Sunday-school student. The Single State itself is compared in verse to a pink rose (16). The large pink ears of S-4711, a sort of Guardian Angel assigned to D-503 to protect his health and innocence, are his most important feature. 0-90, D-503's officially sanctioned sexual partner, always appears as 'rosy O-', or as a rosy round mouth (whereas I-330's is red). She gives rosy smiles, opens her mouth in rosy joy, listens rosily, puts her rosy arms around his neck, and is spherically rosy when pregnant. 0-90's rosiness is almost always associated with the roundness of her vacant blue eyes, the roundness of her simple, limited mind, and especially her mouth. The circular mouth (like the vagina to which it obviously refers) keeps D-503 in a state of Entropy: 'The lips of one are rosy, resiliently round: a ring, a gentle enclosure against the whole world' (63). 29 In Boris Pilnjak's later novel Krasnoe derevo [Mahogany] (Berlin, 1929),mahogany serves as the central image and represents the past. For an English translation see the one by Max Hayward appearing in Partisan Review XXVIII (1961), pp. 418-450 and in Patricia Blake's and his anthology, Dissonant Voices in Soviet Literature (New York, 1962).

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Associated with 0-90 and with the regulation of sex purely for health's sake is the pink check system. This pink represents not only health, but the rather diluted, pale sexual passion it sanctions. 0-90's sexuality is licit, gentle, healthy, limiting, pink. I-330's sexuality is illicit, violent, mad, slashing, and red. Emotion may change pink to red. S-4711 's pink ears turn red when he is agitated, and the pink gills of Ju- (a middle-aged woman who serves as a sort of mother to D-503) turn red when she grows angry. Yellow is, paradoxically, both the color of sunlight and life and also the color of death and decay. The first yellow mentioned is the 'yellow, honey pollen' (6) blowing into the city from beyond the wall. The sun's yellow occasionally floods the city. The old woman at the Ancient House has yellow eyes, and the beasts beyond the city-wall have yellow eyes and yellow teeth. Yellow stone ruins are found near the Ancient House. There is 'a boulder, yellow as a skull' outside the wall (134). Men outside the wall have strong, yellow teeth. In the Ancient House 1-330 wears a yellow silk dress when dressing like the ancients. D-503 tells of a rare moment of feeling a part of the natural world: 'And for one instant, I, the sun, the old woman, the wormwood, the yellow eyes - we were all one' (82). Yellow, then, includes sun, animals, life, and also death as a natural event in nature. Inside the city yellow, when indicating age and decay, assumes a different meaning. The aging bald-headed man with the enormous yellow parabola on a forehead furrowed by yellow, illegible lines, and clutching a book with his yellow hands, is a humorless rationalist and turns out to be the city's dictator. The motherly Ju- reveals her yellow, flabby body when she offers herself to D-503. After D-503 fails in the rocket revolt, fails in the happiness 1-330 offers, but has also rejected the happiness the Single State offers him through the great operation, he realizes 'all were saved, but there is no salvation for me, I do not want salvation' (159), he turns immediately to fears of death: .. .have you ever had occasion to believe in this, to believe it definitely, believe it not with your mind but your body, to feel that thefingersholding this very page will one day be yellow, icy... There, of course you don't believe - and that's why, up to now, you haven't leaped from the tenth floor to the pavement... (159-60). Among the primitive people living outside the wall in a condition of total relatedness to Self and nature, the yellow ruins and yellow skull-boulder, although suggesting death, are not experienced as a threat, because these men have achieved salvation in their primitive living. Among the true

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believers inside the city death is also no threat, because they have achieved salvation in their faith in the Single State. At this point it is only D-503 who, like Tolstoj, gives himself completely neither to a Self-expressing natural physical life, nor to a Self-submerging religious faith, and therefore feels and expresses the most bone-chilling fears of death. In the case of colors other than red, blue, and yellow, the symbolic meanings are not so clear or consistent. Nevertheless, an interpretation of the main implications of green, white, and black will be attempted. Green is most frequently mentioned as part of the Green Wall - the wall of glass that preserves the sterile, pure, glass city from the raging storm of green outside, from the green wind that always seems ready to burst through the wall to overwhelm the city. Green is also the color of grass and plants, of course, but it serves here, physically and metaphorically, as the transition color from blue to yellow. Going through, under, or over the Green Wall marks a transition from the super civilized blue world to the yellow, natural, primitive world. The green liqueur poured into D-503 is the means of taking him from his blue world into the yellow, primitive world. (Bagrovyj and temno-krasnyj are also, to be sure, associated with the primitive world, but they relate more to the world of antiquity, to passion, to blood, to the savage aspect of nature, whereas yellow relates to the natural world, of plants and animals and sunlight.) White is first seen in 1-330's sharp white teeth. Thereafter white appears with 1-330 as a background for her knife-like, slashing lips in the white fog, or against a white pillow. But white is much more often an indication of sterility. It is the only color mentioned in the final chapter of the novel. The physicians wear white gowns. When the compulsory, soul-killing operation is performed, the whiteness of tables, robes, sheets, and hands is stressed. Black is most often connected with 1-330. Her first appearance in ancient dress is at the concert-lecture. She plays a black piano and wears a black dress. At the Ancient House her black hat and black stockings contrast with her yellow dress. Her black eyebrows, forming a black triangle, are often mentioned. Her link with the birds and her role in D-503's transcendence are emphasized by the birds' frequent appearance as black triangles in flight. Traveling beyond the earth's atmosphere in the interplanetary rocket D-503 perceives the blinding sun against the black sky, an image of existence not previously noted by D-503 - the complementary brightness of life and the blackness of nothingness. Thus does D-503 learn during the

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rocket flight, during his transcendental journey, that his earlier, confident assertion, 'We know that all that's up there is a crystal blue' (54) is wrong. Another system of imagery is that associated with the metals gold and cast iron (cugun). Gold is traditionally the material of fineness, untarnishable eternal value, material wealth. Gold letters grace the citizens' glass apartment doors and the walls of public institutions. The gold-badge worn on each citizen's uniform is a metaphor of his rational Self: it is associated with state-encouraged materialism; it is dead (unlike, for instance, wood or ivory); it has the citizen's number inscribed on it - the only identity the citizen is expected to have; and it has a watch inside, ticking off time and schedules to which the citizen must so perfectly adhere. The badge is temporarily removed only during sexual relations, just as the citizen temporarily leaves his perfectly rational, scheduled Self and the Table of Hourly Commandments for sexual relations during the Personal Hours. After a disturbing sexual encounter with 1-330, D-503 sees his badge fall from his uniform to the sidewalk. Losing one's badge implies a loss of identity as a perfectly scheduled worker, as a number within a materialistic, collectivist state.30 Cast iron appears in a great variety of literal and metaphorical contexts. At the execution of the poet-rebel the Benefactor appears to be of metal; then his heavy hands are noted, so heavy '...it was clear that they were of stone and that the knees barely sustained their weight' (43). Three 'cast iron gestures' (43) by the Benefactor then summon the criminal to the execution. The Benefactor then speaks with a cast iron voice (123). Cast iron here seems related not so much to machinery as to a feeling of inhuman, crushing inevitability. Before the re-election of the Benefactor on the Day of Unanimity there is an expectant feeling, like 'the ancients had before a storm' (123), and the air soon 'consisted of transparent cast iron' (123), stressing the inevitability of what is to pass. Other uses of cast iron in the imagery also involve a feeling of inevitability. The day before the rocket revolt the newspaper announces the impending fantasy-removing operation. D-503 realizes that the revolt and terrible consequences are in the offing: 'And the cast iron, flying clouds were tumbling down overhead...' (155). A few hours later'.. .there, beyond the wall of the room, a storm, the clouds were becoming more and 30

For a wide-ranging discussion of the significance of the 'riot of clocks' found in modern Western literature, see Theodore Ziolkowskii, Dimensions of the Modern Novel: German Texts and European Contexts (Princeton, 1969), pp. 183-214.

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more cast iron...' (157). The rocket flight is postponed a day but D-503 sees he is more than ever committed to fatal, irreversible action:'.. .broken segments of the cast iron sky were flying on and on, they were fated to hurtle on through infinitude for a day, for two days...' (159). What had been earlier transparent cast iron air, then increasingly cast iron clouds, then broken segments of cast iron, now becomes still heavier and allcovering ('heavy, cast iron layers of sky') as D-503 orders the launch of the rocket (169). The revolt is crushed but D-503 is not immediately apprehended. He suspects Ju- of treachery, and the next day under 'a sky of careening slabs of cast iron' (176) he goes to kill her with a 'cast-iron-heavy parcel' (117), actually a piston-rod. Once the two crimes have been attempted, but their accomplishment frustrated, the feeling of crushing inevitability ceases, and with it, all references to cast iron skies and cast iron parcels. In the case of cast iron we appear to have one of the few instances in the novel where the image may be regarded as a specifically Russian one: the Russian expression 'a cast iron sky' (cugurmoe nebo) denotes a hopeless situation. Zamjatin's imagery of sun and water was already discussed at some length in the case of The Islanders and requires only enough attention here to show that the implications of the imagery are similar. Direct sunlight is feared in the Single State. As long as it 'is proportionately distributed over the mirror surface of the pavement' (132) it is acceptable. Outside the Green Wall '...this sun consisted of some sort of living splinters of incessantly bobbing spots which blinded one's eyes, made one's head go around' (132). The old woman at the Ancient House is always sitting happily in the sun. When 1-330 appears for a tryst with a male companion, the old woman asks her 'It's that sun - eh?' (25). The Single State controls the weather to the point of keeping the skies free of any 'foolishly jostling masses of vapor' (7). D-503 hates and fears fog, while 1-330 loves it (63). Sexual intercourse, desires for it, or memories of it involve the flowing of sap, or water dripping somewhere. As 0-90 persuades D-503 to impregnate her, 'her smile was moist, shining. "Yes, yes! I want to!'" (98). The rocket itself - often described by D-503 in plainly sexual images - has a 'frenzied white-green mountain of water' (169) in its stern as it takes off. It might be noted that in order for the life-giving fluid to flow, some sort of explosion is necessary - whether it is sexual intercourse or the launching of the rocket. 1-330 explains about the people outside the wall:

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'"Who are they? They are the half which we have lost. You take H 2 and O, but in order to get H 2 0 - streams, seas, waterfalls, waves, storms - it is necessary for these halves to unite'" (140-141). 1-330 does not explain here, but the reader may recall that the unification of hydrogen and oxygen ordinarily involves an explosion - the uniting of the two elements in the presence of a spark. D-503's image of 1-330 as having a blazing fire beyond the eye-windows, and the images of the Self as a violent, red core breaking through a glass shell were discussed above in connection with the color red. There are many other complex and interrelated images in the novel based on the same central image. The image derives, of course, from Zamjatin's theories of Energy and Entropy as the two great forces operating on all levels in the universe. The opening of the novel finds D-503 happily walled-in, in a finite, nearly crystallized existence: 'Oh, the great, divinely limiting wisdom of walls... we isolated our machine-perfect world from the irrational hideous world of trees, birds, animals' (81). The Benefactor has bound them in 'the nets of happiness' (121). This limitation, this crust of Entropy exists on many levels and is opposed by the eruptive force of Energy. Cosmic, geographic, social, political, physical, sexual, and psychic walls furnish security to D-503 and his fellow-citizens. They exist in an unfree, perfectly secure state, like the child in the womb. D-503 eventually struggles to break out of the womb, the security of the mother, and to be born as an independent individual. D-503's psychic walls are related to the other walls in his life. His blue uniform keeps his living body properly constrained, except at sanctioned times and places. The uniform is also an expression of his identity with the collectivist state. In his daily routine he is contained by the rigid Table of Hourly Commandments. His internal metronome, his watch-badge, the city's clock, and various crystal-clear bells all serve to regulate nearly his every action. It is appropriate that the instrument of torture is a giant Glass Bell.31 At the beginning of the novel D-503 has his happiest moments when he

31

The bells, particularly the large ones in the Accumulator Tower, are reminiscent of the Kremlin bells and of monastary bells ringing out the schedule for the monks. Compare the prison-like schedule and the constant ringing of bells on the luxury liner in Bunin's 'The Gentleman from San Francisco' (1915), or the alienated Mme Odincova's need for a strict schedule in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons.

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feels like a 'six-wheeled steel hero' (14) caught up in a 'steel rhythm' (73)32 of work. In his social and sexual life he is enclosed by 0-90 in a social and sexual 'gentle enclosure' (63). 0-90 has 'a simple, round mind' (34), and D-503 expects that 'everything will be simple, regular, and limited like the circle' (59) when she comes. Moving outward, the next wall encountered is the Green Wall that keeps the rational city-state and its citizens isolated and free from invasion by beasts and plants, savages, and birds from beyond the wall. It also prevents the citizens from accidental or deliberate wandering beyond the walls. Overhead, there is the blue, crystal sky, which, D-503 feels confident, is 'all there is' (54), since there is A schematic representation of the walls in D-503's world would look like this:

32 This and similar imagery will be recognized as the sort favored by Kirillov and other contemporary Proletarian poets.

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no infinity and no God. And the bald-headed man manages to demonstrate logically that even the universe is finite. D-503's spiritual revolt involves breaking through all these walls and is related to eruptions in and of other people and objects. Besides the basic image of the red Self breaking its crust there are many other variations of the eruption. The first image of eruption occurs in the first Entry and foreshadows D-503's coming crisis. D-503 sees his journal as being nourished with his own juices and blood, like a child - to be born and laid at the feet of the Single State (6). An eruption is involved in sexual relations, both physiologically and in the removing of the uniform from the body. His seeing 1-330 and his revolt involve dropping his watchbadge, having his internal metronome run down, and frequent violations of the Table of Hourly Commandments. His affair with 1-330 leads to the breakup of the happy, secure social triangle of D-503, R-13, and 0-90. Yet, as part of his revolt, he and 0-90 make a literal and metaphoric eruption together and break through their previous relation to a higher, more creative level - the conception of a child. As a result 0-90 begins a break-through of her own. Her belly begins to swell: 'Any moment the thin material would be rent and everything would be out in the open... [just like] seedlings breaking through the ground to sprout twigs, leaves, and flowers as soon as possible' (146). [The natural world, birth, and the related sexual intercourse are also connected in D-503's mental images as he goes blissfally to 1-330 to make love:... 'the millenial buds were quickly and silently bursting' (112).] 0-90's clothes are near bursting. Later she breaks through another wall as she escapes the city through the Green Wall, and hence is to give birth outside the wall - the ultimate, creative, joyous bursting forth, the child leaving the womb. The Green Wall is tunnelled under, broken through, and flown over during the course of the novel. D-503 goes under it through a tunnel to the outside world. At the same time he fears a demolition of the wall above ground. Birds fly through a breach in the wall into the city. The rocket serves as the means of flying over the wall and also carries D-503 beyond the blue, crystal sky to the infinite, the black starry sky and blinding sun. In its own structure the rocket represents another variation of the central image. It is of glass and steel, motionless until moved by the eruption of fire. D-503's conception of the rocket's launching connects it with the sexual variation of the central image: 'Darling - you are so dear. Tomorrow you will come to life - tomorrow for the first time in your life you will shudder from the searing, fiery spurts in your womb' (155). The end of the novel sees the walls in D-503's case all patched up. The

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Self has been annihilated in the operation by the removal of the fantasycenter in the brain. There will presumably be no more sexual activity at all; the uniform will stay on. (D-503 had ironically expressed confidence in the early part of his journal that some day the 'problem' of the Personal Hours would be solved.) Everything is now on perfect schedule. 0-90 and 1-330 are no longer present to breach walls or to encourage D-503 to do so. The Green Wall has been repaired and the birds are dead. The rocket is no longer firing or flying over walls or into the infinite. The bald-headed man claims to have proved that the universe is finite. D-503 no longer breaks through the crust of language with his fantastic metaphors. Still, the triumph of reason is not wholly assured. Life goes on outside the Green Wall and 0-90 will presumably bear D-503's child there. Another important category of images is one involving the reduction of human beings to (inanimate) pieces of machinery, or the reverse, the bringing of inanimate objects to life. We recall that in A Provincial Tale and In the Sticks the metaphor was often used to degrade man to beast. Here - and, to a lesser extent, in The Islanders - the metaphors sometimes degrade man still further, to inanimate machinery. Ultimately responsible for the reduction of man, of course, are the provincial in the former case and the ultra-civilized in the latter case. When D-503 is contented and rational he often thinks of himself as a machine: '...the fly-wheel of logic was humming in me' (8); '...up to now my brain was a chronometrically tested, sparkling mechanism...' (31); '...the Table of Hourly Commandments transforms each of us into a sixwheeled steel hero' (14). The mass of his fellow-citizens are described as machines with spheroid heads, marching, chewing, voting in mechanical unison, speaking, if at all, in metallic voices. One who goes astray is a 'warped bolt' to be thrown out (16). The dictator has hands of iron or stone, speaks like clanging iron and seems metallically immobile. The operation to remove the fantasy-center in the brain is praised by the Single State and partly welcomed by D-503 as providing the chance for becoming perfect, like machines. The operation transforms people into persons having 'not legs, but some sort of heavy forged... wheels; not people, but some sort of humanoid tractors' (161). But when experiencing the joys of creation, D-503 is capable of seeing the inanimate fruits of his hand and brain come to life. One of the first indications that D-503 is less than machine-like is his metaphor, discussed above, of his journal as an unborn child. When he feels in total harmony with the world, and when he has a feeling of pride and joy in his creative

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activity, the building of the rocket, he sees machinery come to life, performing a ballet to unheard music (7). He often sees the Integral as the 'exquisite body' of a woman (32). Just prior to sexual intercourse or shortly afterward, the most extreme metaphors occur to D-503: inanimate objects are brought to life. The morning after his first sexual encounter with 1-330, he observes: The very air is so faintly rose-tinted, and everything is satured with the gentle blood of the sun; everything is alive - the stones are alive and soft, iron is alive and warm, people are alive and every last one of them is smiling... everything is alive (72). After 1-330 misses several sexual days with D-503 she then reappears. He goes down to the controller's desk for a minute to deliver the pink check, and all around me, before my eyes, the millenial buds were quickly and silently bursting, and armchairs, shoes, gold-badges, small electric bulbs, somebody's dark shaggy eyes, the faceted balusters of the railing, a handkerchief dropped on the stairs, the clerks' small desk, above the desk [even!] Ju's cheeks of polkadotted pastel brown - all these were blossoming forth. Everything was extraordinary, new, tender, roseate, moist (112). In The Islanders parallelism and interassociation in the imagery are quite transparent. One example is the following: The moon resembles Johnny the porcelain pug and Johnny resembles O' Kelly. The moon, Johnny, and O'Kelly smile beneficently on one and all. The moon plunges into the clouds, Johnny plunges into the metaphoric waves of Didi's bosom, O'Kelly and Didi plunge into the waves of the ocean and into the metaphoric waves of Didi's desire. In We, the tendency toward multiplanar imagery is carried to its logical end: a conflict of Energy versus Entropy - the fiery core versus the cool crust - serves as the work's central unifying principle. Zamjatin's predilection for multiplanar imagery necessarily made him receptive to the physicist Robert Mayer's 33 philosophy of an all-pervading multiplanar Energy-versus-Entropy conflict. We is then (among other things) the result of the coinciding of the multiplanar image and the multiplanar idea. Zamjatin was so pleased with the result that he continued to use a centrally organized, multiplanar imagery in many of his later works, even ones (like The Flood) lacking an Energy-Entropy conflict.34 33

Zamjatin is the author of a biography of Julius Robert von Mayer (1814-1878): Robert Majer (Berlin-Peterburg-Moscow, 1922). 34 In 'Back-Stage' Zamjatin explains: 'If I firmly believe in an image, then it will

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The world in We owes its forms and colors not to any strictly rational conception of a possible Utopian city, but to the necessity of having colors and forms bear the proper emotional value for the objects they refer to. Thus, the uniforms and the city must be blue. Zamjatin, as author, has subjectively established the basic colors and forms for the city - the blue uniforms, the red-walled Ancient House, the yellow eyes of the old woman, the pink checks, the green liqueur, etc. But then a second subject, the protagonist-narrator, has another subjective perception of this already subjectively established world. As noted above, things established by the author as blue the protagonist-narrator comes to see as gray, and objects around him may quiver, turn upside down, or come to life, depending on his psychic condition. D-503 the engineer initially supposed that the three-dimensional external world was stable, eternally defined, and independent of subject, but he learns otherwise. In his highly subjective approach to imagery Zamjatin shows affinities with European Expressionist painters and writers of his day. Like them his brushwork involves speed, urgency, the application of large patches of pure, bright colors, fantastic associations, and the interrelation of man and cosmos via imagery. Zamjatin even employs many of the same images used by painters, for example: Kandinsky associates light blue and the circular with a condition of rest. Those familiar with Expressionist writers and painters will find hundreds of other examples. The parallels in the theory and practice of imagery are of course not accidental: the imagery used by Zamjatin and the Expressionists is related intimately to their common basic values - a love for the primitive and a dislike of modern, bourgeois, industrial civilization. There seems, however, to be no case of literary influence here; Zamjatin never lived in Germany, did not read German, and does not mention German Expressionist writers or painters in any of his critical works up to the finished We. His imagery, just as his decision to write an anti-utopian novel, simply reflects his breathing of the same cultural air as other Europeans. All this is not to say, as a few critics have, that Zamjatin is an Expressionist : To do so one would have to ignore some important differences, like Zamjatin's lack of faith in the New Man, and one would also get involved Inevitably spawn a whole system of derivative images... In a short story the image can become an integral one, spread itself through the whole thing from beginning to end (for instance, "Mamaj", "The Cave"). · · And in a more complex case, in The Flood, the integral image of the flood informs the story on two planes, the real Petersburg flood is reflected in the spiritual flood, and into their common channel pour all the remaining images of the story' ('Zakulisy', Lica, pp. 259-274).

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in what would undoubtedly prove to be a vain attempt to arrive at a definition of Expressionism satisfactory to most of its students. Yet in seeking to understand the imagery in We, and to some extent the idea, one would do better to study Zamjatin's Expressionist contemporaries than his predecessors in Russian literature. Zamjatin's inclination toward subjective imagery is, of course, hardly unique in Russian literature. What is remarkable in the case of We (and in the case of Ά Story About the Most Important Thing') is that the imagery is so highly subjective, abstract, and systematized that any attempt at plausibility seems forsaken altogether. The fantastic triumphs over the realistic. Most critics regard Zamjatin's technique of the image as both his salient formal feature and his chief weakness. Prince Mirsky (1890-1939) regards Zamjatin's imagery as akin to Cubism and calls his work 'overloaded with verbal expressiveness and imagery'.35 Sklovskij argued that Zamjatin's imagery rather than the weaknesses of socialism was responsible for the unhappy world of We.36 The remainder of the discussion of We here will attempt to show that, whatever our judgment of its imagery, we must disagree with Sklovskij and recognize that the structure and the meaning of the novel derive from more than the system of imagery alone.

D . THE NOVEL AS MYTH

There are in We certain obvious indications that it is not to be taken entirely as a fictional representation of 'real', external life. Early in the novel an unknown woman appears suddenly in the street and begins uttering to the protagonist his own thoughts. Her sudden appearance in the street, the hints made of her psychic origin, and her subsequent important role in the life and spiritual crisis of the protagonist, all recall Dostoevski's The Double. Certain other passages about D-503's finger recall another well-known fantastic work in Russian literature - Gogol's The Nose.37 D-503 hurts his finger falling down a shaft in the Ancient 35

Mirsky, D. S., Contemporary Russian Literature 1881-1925 (New York, 1926), p*

298. 38

Sklovskij, Viktor, 'Potolok Evgenija Zamjatina', Pjat' ielovek znakomyx (Tiflis, 1927), p. 67. 37 Zamjatin was sufficiently interested in Gogol's story to collaborate later (1928) with Dmitrij Sostakovii on an operatic adaptation of The Nose.

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House, but the next day a fellow worker assures him that the finger was actually hurt on a grinding wheel. That evening D-503 compares himself to a finger that has been separated from the body and has assumed an independent existence (90). These apparent similarities to The Double and The Nose suggest that a clearer interpretation of We might be obtained by attempting to separate real life sequences from dream or fantasy sequences, as has been done in studies38 of those two earlier works. However, We steadfastly resists such efforts and requires a more radical approach. The analysis which follows will try to show that a reading of the entire novel as a drama staged within the psyche of a representative modern man, as a myth (in the Jungian sense), is crucial to an understanding of the work's fundamental structure, meaning, and impact. Following the analysis proper, some theories will be ventured as to how Zamjatin came to incorporate mythic elements in We. In The Islanders we saw how Zamjatin presented the problem of alienation from nature and from Self in modern bourgeois society. In the discussion of The Islanders alienation, although including alienation from Self, was regarded more as an external phenomenon, and the separate dramatis personae as individual (although somewhat abstract) people. In the attempt below to clarify We by interpreting it as an internal psychic conflict, mainly Jungian concepts and terms will be employed. Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) regards the problem of alienation fundamentally as an internal one, in which there is a 'dissociation' of the conscious and the unconscious, the rational and the irrational, in the psyche, and therefore in the external life of the individual. But, argues Jung, the unconscious resists dissociation and may express this resistance through archetypal images in dream or myth and a representation of an inner, psychic conflict is then staged. Although my analysis will not rely exclusively on Jungian concepts and will not attempt to carry a Jungian interpretation of the novel nearly to the lengths the great psychoanalyst and his disciples might do, the terms 'myth' and 'archetype' will be used here in the Jungian sense.39 A myth 38

See Erik Krag, 'The Riddle of the other Goljadkin: Some Observations on Dostoevskij's Double', Morris Halle, et al„ For Roman Jakobson (The Hague, 1956), pp. 265-272. See also Peter Spycher's 'Ν. V. Gogol's "The Nose": A Satirical Comic Fantasy Born of an Impotence Complex', Slavic and East European Journal, VII (1963), pp. 361-374. Spycher's work derives partly from I. D. Ermakov's pioneering pyschoanalytic study, Oierkipo analizu tvordestva Ν. V. Gogolja (Moscow, 1924). 39 The many successful applications of Jungian concepts to literature argue that Jung's basic cultural concepts are fairly sound. But some of his attempts to extend and elaborate his theories lead, in my opinion, to interpretations too vague, ambiguous, and unsupported to be of value.

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may be seen as a story about some conflict, movement, development within the psyche. The myth is peopled with 'archetypal figures' who have human appearance and who represent various forces within the psyche. The myth may also contain various symbolically significant objects or forms, 'archetypal symbols'. Archetypes tend to be similar in the fantasies, dreams, and art of men everywhere, since, Jung argues, they derive from an archaic, common part of the psyche, the 'collective unconscious'. Jung here is not talking about 'racial memory' or 'inherited representations' as some of his critics allege, but about some common symbol-making tendencies within the unconscious, ones which have remained basically unchanged for thousands of years. If the hypothesis is correct that the novel here is a representation of the conflict of forces within the Self, then the city in We - the setting for that conflict would have to be regarded as the psyche as a whole and therefore ought to have the appropriate characteristics. The tnandala-like structure of the city (see the discussion below) is the most striking formal evidence that the city must be considered as the whole psyche. The sociopolitical order within the city is also significant: the city is dominated by the rational, where 'all of life in all its complexity and beauty has been minted for eternity in the gold of words' (62). Dissociation is present on all levels - the city walled itself off from the country after a war between them. The citizen of the city eats petroleum food, not bread (he is a machine). No one is permitted to wander city streets at night, which is to say, as is said, that dreaming is prohibited. The citizen's life is part of a rationalistic order and is strictly regulated for twenty-two hours a day by the Table of Hourly Commandments. The unconscious is thus nearly completely suppressed, permitted limited expression only two hours a day during the so-called Personal Hours, when 'the mighty one organism separates into cells' (14). The separate cell may engage not only in occasional, partly regulated sexual relations, but in creative work as well, such as writing a journal. The deliberate repression and dissociation of the unconscious in the city-psyche underlies the appearance of a group of archetypal figures and a battle for the integration of the psyche. It might be ventured that the novel seems to suffer from having only one character, the protagonist-narrator, portrayed in any depth. The other figures, even considering that they are seen entirely through the eyes of the protagonist, lack internal conflicts and may seem uninterestingly consistent. But the one-sided, unreal quality of the figures surrounding D-503 is

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perhaps the first formal indication that the entire novel must be regarded in terms of myth, populated not with separate individuals, each with his own personality, but with archetypal figures who, according to Jung, necessarily display 'all the marks of fragmentary personalities... without problems, lacking self-reflection, with no conflicts, no doubts, no sufferings.' 40 The most important of these fragmentary personalities is 1-330. She appears suddenly in the crowd in the street as D-503 reflects on the chaotic conditions present in the long past twentieth century. She hints immediately at her psychic origin to D-503: And then a moment later - a leap through the ages, from + to There came to mind (an association by contrast - apparently)- there came to mind a painting in a museum: an avenue of their twentieth century, a deafeningly gaudy, confused mob of people, wheels, posters, trees, colors, birds... And just imagine, they say that this really could have and did exist. This seemed so improbable, so absurd, that I could not restrain myself and suddenly burst out laughing. And immediately an echo - laughter - on the right. I turned: before my eyes white - unusually white and sharp teeth, an unknown woman's face. 'Pardon me,' she said, 'but you surveyed everything with such inspiration - like a certain mythical god on the seventh day of creation. You seem so sure that you and you alone created even me. I'm very flattered' (9). Next, she begins to utter the very thoughts he was writing down before his walk. The circumstances of this initial appearance, her character, her role, and her death, all suggest that she is what Jung would regard as a manifestation of D-503's anima. (Jung defines the archetypal anima as a symbol of the female physiologically and psychically present in the male. The anima appears in fantasy, dream, or art in the form of a beautiful, mysterious woman. In her purest form she is associated with water or with the historic past, indicating her connection with birth and rebirth, blood, water, and other life-related liquids, and with the collective unconscious, with the psychic life of the Ancients. An important function of the anima is to appear when the psyche is in danger of being dominated by the rational and to lead the male into an integration with the female side of himself, with the irrational, with love, with the natural world.) Like Goethe's Helen of Troy, the heroine of Rider Haggard's (1856— 1925) best-selling novel She (1877), the heroine of Brigadoon (1947), 41 or 40

Jung, C. G., 'Conscious, Unconscious and Individuation', The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (New York, 1953-), IX, p. 286. 41 Alan Jay Lerner's (b· 1918) musical play (and later movie) apparently derives from Friedrich Gerstäcker's (1816-1872) Germeishausen (1862), a story based on an old German legend.

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the mysterious Fair Lady who dominates much of the verse of Aleksandr Blok, 1-330 indicates her connection with the ancient collective unconscious through her preference for the dress of the past. It is no coincidence that the Ancient House is I-330's favorite place. In her role as anima-guide, 1-330 introduces D-503 to the Ancient House - a museum representing the ancient values still somehow surviving in the rationalized city-psyche, just as primordial survivals are also manifested in the body, in D-503's hairy hands, in the few drops of 'sunny, forest blood' (140) in his veins. Once the anima has shattered his complacency D-530 finds himself 'alone on a desert island' (76), a barren psyche. But she is willing to serve as a guide to another world. 42 D-503 tells her: '"There you are by my side, and yet it seems as if you were after all, behind one of those ancient, opaque walls; through the wall I hear rustling and voices,'" to which she replies: '"You want to learn everything?... And you would not be afraid to follow me?'" (115-16). She inspires D-503 to a frenzy of lust, hate, and violence during the disorders on the Day of Unamity. She later meets him at the Ancient House and conducts him through an underground passage to the outside world. Above ground, at the same time, a hole in the wall of the psyche-city is being blasted. Now free in the outside world, and sensing the emptiness of the psyche-city, D-503 fears it has been overwhelmed, innundated. In immediate reply to his expressed concern, the anima explains the real meaning of the hole blasted in the wall (and of the tunnel underneath it): '"Oh no! We have simply gone beyond the Green Wall'" (132). It is not that reason has been destroyd, it has simply been transcended. Although I-330's primary appeal is on the emotional level - leading him to follow her through passion - she is also able to argue rationally: '"They [the primitive people outside the wall] are the half we have lost... it is necessary for these halves to unite'" (140-41). But he is unable to be convinced by either emotional or rational appeals, his participation in the rocket's seizure notwithstanding. Having won the struggle for possession of the Integral, the forces of tyrannical rationalism go on to triumph in the failure of the attempted maternal-monster murder (discussed below), the death of the birds, the 42

In Jung's theory, an important function of the anima is to serve as a guide for the ego in its attempt to establish a relation with the inner world. Jung's follower, Joseph L. Henderson, notes that the journey of transcendence is most often made in company with the anima. See Henderson's 'Ancient Myths and Modern Man', C. G. Jung (ed.), Man and his Symbols (New York, 1964), p. 152.

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appearance of the Benefactor, the brain operation, the repair of the wall, and amid all this, the gradual death of 1-330. Her final three appearances reflect the death of the anima. Her first appearance after the rocket seizure fails is in the subway, in the underground of the psyche-city, where she makes a vain attempt to rally her supporters. One or two days later (Entry 38) D-503 supposedly awakes early in the morning in a fog and finds 1-330 already in his room in a scene recalling the dream in Entry 18. She learns of his betrayal and leaves him to brood the rest of the day and night. In Entry 39 he awakes late amid recollections of blue convulsions and dead birds but these were the images present when he went to bed, quite tired, in Entry 37, supposedly two nights before. The sequence suggests that the entirety of Entry 38 is a dream early in the morning of the day described in Entry 39. The anima, previously accepted as a real person above ground, went underground after the rocket revolt and by her next appearance has faded into a dream-figure. At the beginning of her final appearance in the torture chamber she and the entire unconscious have been so far repressed that D-503 has only the faintest feeling that there is something familiar about her. Not a sound is heard, no emotion is felt, and she is to be executed, a mere formality at this point. The triumph of rationalism in the case of D-503 seems complete, although life continues outside the Green Wall. 0-90 appears to be the only named figure to represent a real, external person. If a patient were to tell the Jungian psycho-analyst of a dream consisting of the characters and events described in We, the psycho-analyst might well attempt to show that 0-90 was a representation of the dreamer's real-life fiancee or wife, with whom he has difficulty establishing a mature relationship. One of the functions of the anima is to help the male to overcome an inability to have a mature relationship with a real woman. Sexual relations with the anima may lead to feelings of guilt, and the figure representing the real woman may become jealous, but a more complete relationship with the real woman should be the result, as it is here. After seeing 1-330 at her concert, D-503 has a better experience than usual with 0-90, and she tells of her desire for a child. He refuses the responsibility of fathering a child by her. Through the anima"1 s continuing influence, however, D-503 begins to overcome his immaturity and consents to impregnate 0-90. He is to become, biologically at least, a father. It is significant that conception occurs during the intercourse sanctioned (this one time) not by 0-90's, but by I-330's pink check. D-503 later offers to have 1-330 save her, but 0-90 refuses; he must assume the responsibility

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of a father and provide for the welfare of mother and unborn child himself. Though confessing he is obligated to save her (163), D-503 never accepts this responsibility. His failure to be a true father is part of his general failure as a human being. Yet 0-90 escapes the realm of rationalism. Their child is to be born outside the Green Wall and therein lies hope for the future. Ju- is what Jung would regard as another archetypal figure, the 'maternal monster'. In myths involving a struggle between the hero and a monster we are actually dealing with the attempt of the male to mature. The hero must see the mother as a monster and must symbolically destroy her in order to mature into a man, to free himself from a regressive longing to return to the secure, unfree world of the infant. Ju-'s entire role and character is that of the smothering, domineering mother. She mans the entrance to D-503's apartment building, reads his mail, and 'guards' (138) him from the anima figure. Her gill-like cheeks and her pupils' caricature of her as a fish recall the dragons (reptilic maternal monsters) of mythology. She treats D-503 as if he were her small son: '"...you, my dear, are also a child'" (107). She takes maternal pride in D-503's worldly success: '"You have surely heard of him? He's always sitting at his desk like that he absolutely will not spare himself'" (144). In her vocation as teacher of small children she represents the one mother small children have in the Single State. She is identified with that state in D-503's revealing metaphor of 'the maternal breast of the Single State' (168). She and D-503 are the only figures to have unmistakably Cyrillic letters in their names, indicating the family connection. (The others have Latin letters; 0-90's, of course, might be considered ambiguous.) In a burst of filial enthusiasm described in Entry 21, D-503 reads her 'a bit from my Twentieth Entry beginning with: "quietly, the thoughts click metallically'" (106). If the reader turns back to that entry he discovers that this quotation from D-503's journal precedes a passage referring to 0-90's pregnancy. The pregnancy and the planned seizure of the rocket are correctly seen by Ju- as D-503's attempt to escape her mother-prison and to cleave unto another; hence she betrays her 'child'. Recognizing her role in frustrating his attempt at freedom, he then sets out, like the archetypal hero, sword in hand (a piston-rod here) to kill her. His failure to slay the maternal monster, his failure to liberate himself from the child's secure, unfree world, from the 'maternal breast of the Single State', are all part of his failure to achieve maturity. A dual-mother motif, which Jung regards as common in mythology, is

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present in the novel. Just as Ju- attends the entrance to the apartment building, the citadel of rationalism, a contrasting, helpful, grandmotherly figure attends the entrance to the Ancient House. As a mythical 'grand' mother, she represents a higher level of motherhood, the 'just-so love' (prosto-tak ljubov') (26) D-503 longs for, in contrast to the devouring love of Ju-. D-503 mourns: If only I had a mother - like the Ancients; my very own mother. And if only I were not for her the builder of the Integral, and not a number, D-503, and not a molecule of the Single State but a bit of common humanity - a bit of her own self - trampled crushed, cast away... And whether I were crucifying or being crucified - perhaps it is the same thing - if only she would hear what no one hears, if only her old lips, grown over with wrinkles - (185-86).43 The bad mother who would see him only as the builder of the Integral is, of course, a description of Ju-, and the good mother, a kind old woman with wrinkled lips, is a description of the old woman at the Ancient House. As the novel begins D-503 has peacefully shared 0-90 with the poet R-l 3 for three years. R-l3 prefers a purely sexual relationship, poetry, or (non-intellectual) socializing. He replies to D-503's proposal to do some mathematical problems for relaxation: '"Let's simply go over to my place and sit awhile'" (38). That R-13 is a figure representing the male sexual drive is seen not only in his character and role, but in his 'repellently Negro lips' (122)44. To D-503's annoyance these lips constantly spurt saliva. Being of the same sex as D-503 and possessing opposite qualities from those dominating the ego, R-13 fits the role of the archetypal shadow figure. He has values needed by consciousness, but they are rejected by it. Through the help of the anima figure, D-503 comes to recognize the needs of his shadow, becomes lustful, jealous, and even strikes R-13. The ego is not directly attacking male sexuality at this point, but rather is indicating that R-13 is no longer needed as a separate part of the psyche, since D-503 has now incorporated maleness. D-503 is now himself 'repulsive and agile as a gorilla' (124), carrying off the bleeding, barebreasted 1-330. The close association of sexual and creative drives - a favorite theme of Zamjatin's is emphasized by R-13's writing verse to be carried on the rocket. R-13 is 43

The reference to crucifixion here is one of the many direct and indirect references to Christ in the work. Critics have made the obvious observation that the Benefactor and his philosophy of the incompatibility of freedom and happiness derives from Dostoevski's Grand Inquisitor. That would make D-503 a Christ. James H. Billington, in his stimulating The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York 1966), argues that D-503's story is something of a mock-passion of Christ. 44 It is never said that R-l 3 is actually a Negro. His Negro lips are the one feature the author uses to characterize him. In any event, Negroes are often regarded in the dreams

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also by his Negro lips and his profession identified with the bust of the sexual and literary genius Puskin found in the Ancient House. The rocket, as a flying vehicle, is at once a symbol of transcendence, like the birds flying into the city, and also, in its internal structure, a symbol of the thrust of the unconscious against the conscious, fire against steel and glass. The Integral's name is ironic. The forces of rationality so named the spaceship to indicate its mission of integrating the universe on an entirely rational basis. But as the fruit of the creative mind, necessarily incorporating both the unconscious and the conscious, and (consequently) in its actual structure, the Integral represents a balance of thrust and containment, irrationality and rationality, a sort of model of an integrated psyche. As a model and as the means of escape from the prison of rationality, it is potentially a psychic integral, although not in the sense intended by the forces of rationalism. A common myth of transcendence from one stage to another higher, more mature stage of existence is the journey undertaken by the hero, guided by an anima figure, to a strange land. The anima figure takes D-503 to the strange land twice. The first journey is made underground, while the second is made through the heavens, signifying the different routes of the transcendental journey. 1-330 prevails on D-503 to help take the rocket away from the exclusive use of the rational. They seize the rocket briefly, escape the city, and hover over the strange, outer world. The forces of the Benefactor, assisted by Ju-, frustrate D-503's escape. Rationalism still needs the forces of the unconscious, still needs the creative drive of engineers like D-503, but insists on their absolute subordination: '"The Integral shall not be yours! The trial flight shall be carried out to the end, and you yourselves... with your own hands, will carry it out'" (174). The Benefactor is a figure Jung would call the Great Man Within. He is powerful, Godlike, and sits in the centre of the psyche-city on a mandalalike structure (see below). He resolves a conflict in the ego, liberates it from the destructive potential of the anima; in short, he has all the characteristics and myths of white men (not only Americans) as having superior sexual powers. See, for instance, the Jungian analysis of a Swiss engineer's dream in Jolande Jacobi's 'Symbols in an Individual Analysis', C. G. Jung (ed.), Man and his Symbols, pp. 216217. It is noteworthy that the commedia ckU'orte's Harlequin wears a black mask and is often depicted in old illustrations as a Negro, and that his ancestors, the Roman phallophores, daubed their faces with soot.

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of the Great Man Within, an archetypal image of the centre of the Self. But if this rationalistic, authoritarian slave-master is the centre of the Self, whence came such irrational figures as 1-330 and R-13? Jung's colleague, Marie-Louise von Franz, notes that the Great Man of some myths is a false one, an imitation of outside religious forms, who, lacking any sense of humor, is fanatically convinced he has solved the riddles of the Cosmos. 45 This description certainly fits the Benefactor as well as his double, the Somatically bald-headed man. 46 The frequent appearance of the Somatically bald-headed man and his mysterious silence lead D-503 to sense that this old man will play a crucial role in his life: [In the r o o m ] to the right, over a b o o k , is a knobby bald head, and a forehead like an enormous yellow parabola. The furrows o n the forehead are a series o f yellow, illegible lines of print. Sometimes our eyes meet - and then I feel: these yellow lines have to d o with me (179).

Only with the approaching apparent victory of rationalism at the end of the novel does the bald-headed man speak, exclaiming that he has 'proved' there is no infinity. But he is not only a bald-headed citizen, and a victim of the operation the Benefactor orders, he is also - interestingly enough the Benefactor himself.47 As Benefactor, he appears four times. First, in a ritual sacrifice recalling pagan and Christian rites of transformation, he executes a rebellious poet. In his next appearance he presides over, and is re-elected during, the Day of Unanimity festivities. Here he speaks (briefly) for the first time: '"Those for... those against?'" (123). D-503 pays ritual homage to the Benefactor on both occasions, although he is privately staging a revolt against the Benefactor. The Benefactor will not permit purely formal or partial obedience, but speaking fully (for the first time) in his third appearance, crushes D-503 with logic. D-503 is unable to defend irrationality in rational terms. In his fourth and final appearance the Benefactor has already annihilated the unconscious and is killing the anima. 45

Von Franz, M.-L., 'The Process of Individuation', C. G. Jung (ed.), Man and his Symbols, pp. 216-217. 49 N o reader of the day, and especially no one familiar with Zamjatin's earlier fables about Fita would fail to recognize Lenin in the description of the Benefactor and the bald-headed man. Here we have another one of the few cases where We takes on specifically Russian coloring. 47 At the beginning of Entry 36, D-503 recounts his meeting with the Benefactor. The Benefactor's hands seem to crush even the Benefactor himself. D-503 dares not raise his eyes and sees before him-for the first time-the faceof the Benefactor: 'Beforeme sat the

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Another important archetype recognizable in We is the mandala. (The mandala is a sacred form having religious and symbolic significance and is found in many cultures. Its essential formal characteristic is the incorporation of the circular and the fourfold. 48 Common variations include a circle divided into four, a circle within a square, a group of four circles, etc. Jung views the mandala as an archetypal pattern symbolizing the entire psyche, with a well-integrated design signifying a well-integrated psyche.) The city in We is laid out in a circular and fourfold geometric pattern. At the centre is the Plaza of the Cube surrounded by sixty-six concentric rows of seats. Through the streets march 'quadrangles' (108) of marchers, displaying 'the square harmony of their gray-blue ranks' (9). Aniela Jaff6 observes that in the traditional mandala, the circular and the fourfold are completely integrated, symbolizing what she regards as the connection between the circle (the psyche) and the square (earthbound matter, the four-limbed body), but that 'in most modern art, the connection between these two primary forms is either non-existent, or loose and casual... [a] symbolic expression of the psychic state of 20th-century man.' 49 In D-503's psyche-city the mandala is distorted; the square dominates the centre, and the circular is connected only by its complete submission to the square, to the material. The gaze of those seated in the concentric rows of seats is necessarily directed upward toward the gigantic Cube in the centre, where executions take place. It is appropriate that the Benefactor sits on that Cube, in the centre of a mandala structure, for, as Marie-Louise von Franz observes, 'among the mythological representations of the Self one finds much emphasis on the four corners of the world, and in many pictures the Great Man is represented in the centre of a circle divided into four'. 50 The Cube is also in shape and function a sort of Earth altar, representing, as does the Benefactor seated upon it, the Self to which one must submit.

bald, the Socratically bald-headed man...' (185). In Entry 40, the 'cured' D-503 relates that both he and his neighbor in the men's room - the Socratically bald-headed man were taken away and operated upon. 48 Jung comments repeatedly on the significance of the number four in religions and in symbolic structures of the psyche. This quaternity is manifested in the four Christian evangelists, the four sons of Horus, the four stages of the anima, the four corners of the world, the fourfold structures in mandates, etc. 49 JafK, Aniela, 'Symbolism in the Visual Arts', C. G. Jung (ed.), Man and his Symbols, p. 249. 50 Franz, M.-L. von, op. cit., p. 213. She also notes here that the Naskapi Indians 'pictorially represented [the] Great Man not as a human being but as a mandala'.

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The many archetypal images and patterns shown above lead us, consciously or unconsciously, to comprehend the entire novel in terms of myth. This myth-like work is populated with strong, serious figures engaged in a deadly archetypal struggle. But it does not have the ending we expect - the maternal monster survives, the anima dies, Perseus does not slay the Medusa and save Andromeda, and a false Self triumphs. Psychic wholeness remains unachieved. The impact felt at the novel's end derives from the violent denial of the expectation of fulfilled desires, the reconciliation of opposing forces, the victory of a true Self that myth has encouraged in the past. 51 We may now ask how Zamjatin came to incorporate such obvious examples of Jung's archetypes in his novel. At the time Zamjatin completed We, Jung was little known outside the field of psychology; he was discovered by English literary critics only in the late 1920's. As far as the present writer can determine, Jung remains unpublished in Russian translation down to the present day. 52 Zamjatin does not mention Jung anywhere in his critical essays. Zamjatin's late widow testified that her husband had never heard of Jung. 53 It seems extremely doubtful, therefore, that Jung's theories had any influence on We. In his essay 'Back Stage', Zamjatin offers an explanation as to the origin of his characters. He writes that they derive from his inner world and are only rarely connected with real people. 54 He discusses at some length how he works himself into a sort of trance before he can write. The first several pages of 'Back Stage' are devoted to a description of the mental state he finds necessary for writing. The essay begins: In sleeping-cars in each compartment there is a small ivory switch: if y o u turn it t o the right y o u get bright light, if y o u turn it to the left, y o u get darkness, if y o u turn it to the middle, a blue light comes o n : y o u can see everything, but this light does not keep y o u f r o m falling asleep, does not wake you up. When I sleep and dream, the switch o f consciousness is turned to the left. When I write, the switch is turned to the middle; consciousness glows like the blue light. I dream o n paper, my fantasy works just as in a dream, it moves along the same path o f associations, but consciousness (the blue light) carefully guides [rukovodit] this 51

An earlier version of this analysis, 'Zamjatin's We as Myth', appeared in Slavic and East European Journal, X (1966), pp. 125-133. 52 The first extensive discussion of Jung in a Soviet literary journal appeared only recently: S. Averincev, '"Analitifieskaja psixologija" K.-G. Junga i zakonomernosti tvorCeskoj fantazii', Voprosy literatury, 1970, No. 3, pp. 113-143. 83 Interview in July 1962 with the late Mme L. N. Zamiatine by the present writer. 54 'Zakulisy', Lica, p. 267.

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dream. And just as in a dream, as soon as you start thinking it is a dream, as soon as you turn consciousness all the way on, the dream disappears.55 Zamjatin goes on to relate how his efforts at teaching a course in 1922 in the technique of writing at The House of Art made creative work impossible for several months afterward - he had simply become too rational in his approach to writing. The archetypes appearing in We, Zamjatin's own testimony, and the absence of any other plausible literary or psychological explanations - all make it difficult not to admit that Zamjatin's own unconscious must somehow be the ultimate source of the characters and the structure of the novel. We need not, however, go so far as to accept entirely Jung's theory of an inherited collective unconscious as the source of archetypes. Even many Jungian critics, while not ruling out the possibility that Jung might be right, tend to feel that archetypes derive instead from a common cultural tradition. The writer is necessarily immersed in such a tradition almost from birth, and it is therefore entirely natural that he should absorb many of its most basic patterns into his unconscious. (See, for instance, Zamjatin's testimony quoted in note 9 above as to how he deliberately absorbed into his unconscious in just a few months specific material necessary for writing The Flea.) Jung holds that the unconscious is not only the source of archetypes appearing in dreams and myths, but that dreams and myths are representations of conflicts and movements within the psyche, and not of those in the external world. (He does not, of course, deny the many interactions between the internal and external worlds.) We have no way of conclusively proving or disproving this theory. The reader must simply ask himself whether certain literary works do not make more sense when interpreted as internal dramas rather than as fictional representations of external life. The present writer, while not rejecting other interpretations of We, hopes that he has shown that We not only admits but invites an interpretation as an internal drama. If, however, one rejects such an interpretation, one must nevertheless admit the relevance of the Jungian approach to archetypes : it is still of value in attempting to interpret the symbolism of the work within the context of a wider cultural tradition.

55

Ibid., p. 261.

IV 'THE JOLA' AND THE FLOOD

With We Zamjatin ended his most productive period of writing. In the years 1917-1921 he had written what was to prove nearly half his total lifetime fiction. The Islanders, The North, Tales for Grown-Up Children, and We were among the works written (but not all published) during the period.1 He also found time to serve on a variety of committees, editorial boards, and in publishing organizations. During the years following the Civil War Zamjatin wrote a few excellent stories in the skaz manner, some plays and motion-picture scenarios, and one attempt (generally considered unsuccessful) to develop further the multiplanar image - Ά Story About the Most Important Thing' (written 1923, published 1924). But despite the craftsmanship seen in many of these works, many readers would agree that Zamjatin seemed to have lost his talent for the fantastic, for the mythic, that he had displayed in The North (written 1918), and in We. We may note several factors of possible relevance: The dates of his most productive period coincide with those of the Civil War; an atmosphere of crisis was apparently most helpful to this revolutionary. Second, he was unable to obtain approval from Soviet censors to publish We, his longest work. The thought of risking so much time and energy on another large, non-publishable work must have given him pause. (And with good reason. The only work which cost Zamjatin more time and effort than We was the historical play Attila, finished in 1927. It was approved for performance but was never actually performed or published in the Soviet Union. The play itself was apparently ideologically acceptable, but the playwright was on his way to becoming an 'unperson' in the late twenties. A novel on the same theme as 1

Ostrovitjane [The Islanders] was written in 1917 and first published in 1918. Sever [The North] was written in 1918 but first published only in 1922. Most of the Bol'fim detjam skazki [Tales for Grown-Up Children] were written (and published separately) in 1917-1918, and the entire collection published as a book in 1922. We was written in 1920 and published in 1921.

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Attila remained less than a quarter complete at the time of Zamjatin's death.) Third, in the period 1917-1921 Zamjatin gave up his bachelor's freedom and married the woman he was to remain with the rest of his life. Although - in the absence of evidence2 - we can only speculate, it is not improbable that the end of a period of love-affairs (or of celibacy?) or a calming down of passion for his bride may have had some effect on his writing. Fourth, the bad aftereffects of too much rational analysis of literary craftsmanship in 1922 may have continued longer than Zamjatin realized. In any event, it was not until the beginning of the first five-year plan (crisis years again) that Zamjatin was able once more to write works of fiction that may be considered worthy successors to We. With the writing of 'The Jola' in 1928 and The Flood in 1929, Zamjatin considered that he had transcended 'complexity' and had achieved a hard-earned 'simplicity'. 3 By complexity he must have been referring to the complex plot of Ά Story About the Most Important Thing', to the skaz manner of such works as 'Comrade Curygin Has the Floor' (written 1926) and possibly to the sociopolitical questions raised in these and in some other works of fiction. In 'The Jola' and The Flood we find none of these qualities; instead we find two compact, tragic works on simple, universal themes. The themes, plots, and characters of 'The Jola' and The Flood may seem simple enough; but when we begin to examine the imagery, the symbols, and the cultural contexts of the two works, we see that we cannot take the claim to 'simplicity' too literally. The first two sub-chapters here represent separate, detailed examination of the many 'converging patterns of significance' in the two works. This

2

Zamjatin, his few friends, and his widow were careful to leave no evidence of his love life. There are a few cryptic references to love in his autobiographies (but none to his marriage to L. N. Zamiatine). Shane was unable to find enough evidence to make even a reference in his biography of Zamjatin to the writer's wife. It is clear, however, that Zamjatin married Ljudmila Nikolaevna some time in the period 1917-1921, but his widow would say nothing to the present writer or to others as to when or where they met and were married. There is a rumor that Zamjatin had been previously married, and it is fairly certain he was not happy with Ljudmila Nikolaevna. He appears to have had at least one mistress in the 1920's. The present writer hopes he will not be denounced for being the first to venture some speculation on Zamjatin's love life and to hope that more evidence may turn up. It would certainly be a matter of legitimate interest to the critic to know whether the childless Zamjatin shared the love life of his free-wheeling fictional lovers, or whether his own love life was more in accordance with the cool, correct, and reserved manner he presented the world - in other words, whether Zamjatin was more an O'Kelly or a Campbell. 3 'Zakulisy', Lica (New York, 1955), p. 273.

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chapter will conclude with an attempt to relate a larger symbolism in 'The /ο/α' and The Flood to Zamjatin's work as a whole.

A. 'THE JOLA' The analysis of 'The Jola' here will approach the story from three directions. First, this story of a man's passion for a sailboat recalls a Russian literary classic and will be examined in that literary context. Second, as the protagonist himself recognizes, a symbolic wedding takes place. A reading of the story in light of Russian marriage customs reveals the significance of many of 'The Joltf s details. Neither of these approaches however is capable of revealing the meaning of the ending or of the work as a whole. In an attempt to deal with these fundamental problems a psycho-analytical approach (similar to the one used in the case of We) will be employed. The basic story of 'The Jola1 recalls that of Gogol's 'The Overcoat': the protagonist saves all of his small income possible in order to purchase an important object, finally obtains the object, but soon loses it and his life. Less obvious are many similarities in detail in the two stories. There are, however, important differences in the protagonists' characters and in the endings. A n examination then of Zamjatin's story in the literary context of the well-known 'The Overcoat' should contribute to an understanding of'The/ο/α'. A s the title of each of the two stories indicates, the single 'figure' that becomes most important to the protagonist is the inanimate object itself. The object is both a useful thing in the life and work of the protagonist and a status symbol. More importantly, the object serves as a surrogate mistress. The noun designating the object is of the feminine gender, and the object is not a native Russian one. The sineV, although made by Akakij's Russian tailor, shows its foreign origin in its name. The jola4 was built in Norway. The foreign femme fatale is more mysterious, alluring, and dangerous than the domestic one. Akakij envisions his overcoat, even before it is made, as his 'pleasant

Ela apparently is a borrowing from Norwegian jolle and refers here to a sloop (single-masted sailing vessel) with a cabin. It is not to be confused with the English cognate 'yawl' which designates a two-masted sailing-vessel with a short mizzen-mast aft of the rudder post. 4

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friend in life' (prijatnaja podruga zizni) (0., 142).5 Critics have noted that the 'friend' is indeed female. The coat is not only an object of adoration, but suggests the female sexual organs: it envelopes the wearer, warms him, and has a collar of fur. (Akakij preferred, but could not afford, a marten collar (kunica). In Russian marriage lyrics the word kunica is often a metaphor for the bride - 'oddaiite nasjomu knjaz'ju kunicu, vasu krasnu divicu' (R., 23).6 The connection between the coat, the fur, the bride, and European words for the female genital organs seems obvious. The present writer rejects Ermakov's Freudian interpretation 7 of the coat as a phallic symbol.) Zamjatin's protagonist too sees his desired object as a female friend. Cybin has scarcely been able to sleep for three years, so great is his passion. As the time for obtaining the jola approaches he reveals his love for it so openly that his friend teases him about the 'bride' (100).8 Cybin realizes the truth of the jibe and accepts it: '...all right then, it's to the bride' (100). The jola later appears to him as his bride when he first sees it in the harbor in Murmansk. As the new mistress, the object in each story replaces an already existing, but worn-out and unexciting podruga zizni. Akakij's old coat has worn so thin that it can hardly be honored with the name of coat any longer; where it is not worn through it is 'baggy and unsightly' (O., 135). He abandons his old 'friend' when he obtains the new mistress. In Zamjatin's story the displaced podruga zizni is Cybin's wife. The silver wedding-ring is frequently described as being loose on her finger. Like Akakij's old coat, Cybin's wife is baggy and unsightly: '...Anna resembled a half-empty package-something has fallen out of the package, the packing has collapsed, and everything may spill out any minute' (91). Her breast 'was now like a bag which had lost half its grain, although earlier it had been full to the top' (97). Despite the similarities noted, there is a great difference between the shy, weak Akakij and the aggressive, masculine Cybin. Akakij didn't want to buy a new coat in the first place; only when it becomes an unavoidable necessity does he begin to want it. N o circumstances force Cybin to con5

Refers to the text of Sinei' in Ν. V. Gogol's Sobranie soiinenij ν 6-i tomax (Moscow, 1952), III, pp. 129-160). β This and similar subsequent references are to Elsa Mahler's Die russischen dörflichen Hochzeitsbraiiche (Wiesbaden, 1960). This 508-page book is by far the most comprehensive and well-documented work on Russian marriage customs. 7 Ermakov, I. D., Ocerkipo analizu tvorcestva Gogolja (Moscow, 1924). 8 Refers to the text of Ela in volume IV of Zamjatin's Sobranie socinenij.

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sider acquiring a jola - many fishermen in the community apparently spend their lives without one. Unlike Akakij, Cybin is no lonely recluse. He married an attractive woman. (That she is no longer attractive is apparently due to his neglect to caress her and give her a child and to the inadequate diet occasioned by the saving of money for the jola.) Cybin lusts so much for the jola that he has hardly slept in three years. He refuses the bread9 offered by his wife because he is too busy fishing, making the money necessary to obtain his heart's desire (95). The obtaining of the object represents a major investment. Both Cybin and Akakij must save their money for a long time, depriving themselves of all but the barest necessities. In each case, half the money necessary has already been saved as the main action in the story commences. Then, just as Akakij receives an unexpectedly large bonus from the director, Cybin suddenly earns the money he still needs from an unprecedented, wildly successful three days' fishing - the result of the fortuitous appearance of a school of herring just off-shore. Here again, we may contrast the passive Akakij, entirely dependent on the director's generosity, and the aggressive Cybin, working hard to take advantage of a stroke of fortune. In each case the help of a more powerful, wise man - a father figure - is sought. The father figure is properly an expert on passion. Akakij turns to the one-eyed tailor, Petrovic. He is embarrassed and confused when he approaches Petrovic, just as a son might be in talking to his father about obtaining a mistress. Petrovic's bare foot and crooked toenail fascinate Akakij - a reflection of what might be regarded as the fascination of the son for the sexual power of the father. In Zamjatin's story, Fomic not only plays a similar role as an expert on the desired object, but there are striking similarities with 'The Overcoat' in detail. Both Petrovic and Fomic go by their patronymics. Petrovic is one-eyed, and Fomic squints one eye all the time. The embarrassed Akakij finds a barefooted Petroviß trying to thread a needle, and the embarrassed Cybin finds Fomic with his pants off, patching his trousers. The obtaining of the object involves in both cases a transcendental journey to what seems to be a higher level of existence - the physical joy of possession, the expression of love, and the realization of the increased status of the proud possessor. His co-workers invite Akakij to a party to celebrate his new overcoat. 9

In The Flood bread is frequently associated with female sexual desire.

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As Akakij approaches the party, the scene changes from bare, dark streets, to lively lighted ones. On entering the house where the party takes place, Akakij notes the many other coats and galoshes present. Cybin's approach to Murmansk, although he does not yet have his jola, is parallel. As he leaves the open sea and nears his jola and the small party that is to be held there, the other ships, the only other objects to which he pays any attention, become more numerous and more magnificent. At the party Akakij celebrates his new overcoat in the presence of others and they congratulate him. He drinks champagne. During and following the purchase of the jola the others present join Cybin in a few drinks. Cybin and Akakij leave their respective joyous gatherings in extremely good spirits and head for home. Reversing the process by which they arrived, they go from populated areas to deserted areas. The deserted expanses permitted their passage earlier but now become threatening. In 'The Overcoat': 'Soon there stretched before him those deserted streets which even in the day are not busy, and even less so at night. Now they became even more remote and lonely: the lights began to appear less frequently' (0., 148). The barren expanses, the night, and the cold suggest a menacing sea - in fact, Gogol sums up the scene:'.. .there was a real sea all around him' (tocnoe more vokrug nego) (0., 148). It is an actual dark, cold and menacing sea that appears in 'The Jola': 'Ahead was water, a desert' (111). The sea was not previously inimical but is now determined to take the mistress and the life of the protagonist. Akakij has his coatmistress stolen and soon dies. Cybin dies in a 'deep, watery pit' soon after possessing his 'bride'. The similarities between the two stories are numerous enough to suggest that Gogol's 'The Overcoat' provides a literary context for 'The JolcC. But Zamjatin's story is no mere retelling of Gogol's, and, moreover, the personalities of the two authors and of their protagonists differ. A change in approach seems in order here, if other aspects of 'The JolcC are to be plausibly interpreted. That a sort of marriage takes place here is emphasized by the protagonist's viewing and calling his jola a bride. An analysis of the story as a symbolic marriage will show the significance of the search for and purchase of the jola and the taking possession of it. Four important parts of the traditional Russian marriage are reflected in 'The Jola' : the match-making, the betrothal, the wedding, and the

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wedding-night. Fomic may be regarded as the druzka, the groom's 'Best Man'. In this case - as is sometimes the case in the traditional marriage (R., 12) - the druzka also serves as the match-maker. His advice on where a bride is to be found and purchased is sought. The groom and the druzka set out on a Sunday, the traditional day for both match-making and for weddings. In the case of 'The Jola\ the entire sequence takes place on one swift Sunday. Formerly, as Elsa Mahler notes (R., 35), there was an interval of three weeks from betrothal to wedding, but the period is much shorter in modern times. In contrast to tradition, and to the story in 'The Overcoat', Zamjatin compresses the process into one day. (In his important critical essay, O n Synthesism' (1922),10 Zamjatin views the sense of speed and the compression of time as one of the main features of the modern age and of modern art.) The groom and the druzka proceed to the residence of the bride. The bride's traditional two best friends (R., 49) - the two other jola's - stand beside the bride. Like a bride, the jola has been properly scrubbed (101); 'the jola stood and waited, all dressed up, like a bride' (101). The groom and the druzka enter the residence of the bride's parent for bargaining with the parent, the widow-owner of the jola in this case. True to tradition, the groom does not bargain directly for the bride, but does so through an intermediary. Klaus Ostrand, a Norwegian fisherman from Cybin's village, serves as intermediary here. (On the realistic plane, Klaus must serve as an interpreter between the Norwegian-speaking owner and the Russian-speaking Cybin.) The host-parent then offers Cybin a glass of bitter vodka (gor'kaja). There is a foreshadowing of the fate that awaits Cybin and a suggestion of the cries of'bitter, bitter' (gor'ko, gofko) at the traditional wedding-feast. After the drinking follows the traditional examination of the bride, the sgljadiny (R., 17). Cybin goes over the jola very carefully. Just as the bargain seems about made, a round-faced, effeminate, middleaged man appears and makes a better offer. Such is Cybin's passion that, when the rival sneers '"it's not your jola'" (106), Cybin attempts to knife the rival on the spot and is restrained only by the druzka. Cybin does succeed in disposing of his rival by throwing him overboard onto the pier. 11 10

Ό sintetizme', in Ju. P. Annenkov, Portrety: Tekst Evgenija Zamjatina, Mixaila Kuzmina, Mixaila Babeniikova (Petersburg, 1922), pp. 19-40. 11 One does not find in Russian custom any basis for the appearance of an actual or ritual rival. The middle-aged womanish figure here who attempts to keep the hero and

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The rival disposed of, the bargaining for the bride is then completed and the betrothal is made and followed by more drinking. Then Cybin and his groomsmen retire temporarily to Klaus' boat to prepare for the journey home. Since the next event following Cybin's return from Klaus' boat is plainly a sort of wedding-night, one must regard the betrothal as also the wedding, or view the marriage as one without benefit of clergy, unsanctified. The ironic Russian expression for a 'natural marriage' is possibly significant: 'They married by the fir-tree' (Oni vencalis' okolo el'i) (R., 294). ('Fir-tree' in Russian is eV or elka, whereas the sailboat here is ela (jola).) In any event, Cybin's appearance after his brief absence leads immediately to his climbing aboard the jola. The wedding-night begins. Cybin takes off his new shirt, worn especially for the occasion, and slips into his sea-wear. Sexual relations with the bride soon commence: 'Then he went topside, locked the door, and once more gazed lovingly on his jola. Everything was ready for the voyage, the hold was sealed, the anchors secured. On the stern Cybin noticed that the iron tiller was slightly bent - the jola must have been caught in a storm once' (108-109). The revelation of the bride's non-virginity was regarded in former times as a monstrous insult and as justification for recriminations against the bride's parents and even against the match-maker. But times, as Zamjatin often tells us, have changed. Cybin accepts the fact of the bride's non-virginity with good humor: '"That's all right! This one will take any storm!" Cybin looked lovingly on the jola' (109). The bride may not be a virgin, but after all, the only important thing is that her capacity and endurance remain undiminished. Although Cybin has had sexual experience before, this experience is entirely new: 'In his time he had thrown thousands of lines like that, but now he seemed to be doing it for the first time...' (109). Sexual relations continue: 'The tow-line was already leaping out of the water, taking a strain, the jola's whole body shuddered and she began to move. She was his, Cybin's jola, and tomorrow, and in the winter, and always...' (109). The rise of the storm and the storm itself follow. In this section images with sexual significance abound: 'The wooden rings slipped up the mast. The sails filled out like breasts...' ( I l l ) ; '...it became even merrier and more desperate...' (113); 'For one instant she stood up there, Cybin threw back his head, looked lovingly at her and said to her in a loud his beloved apart may be regarded as simply a literary descendant of Ju- in We and Lady Campbell in The Islanders.

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whisper "That's the way, my sweet, that's the way!'" (114); and '...the water rustled like a thousand arshins of silk' (114).12 A reading of'The Jola1 in the light of Russian marriage-customs, although helpful as to some points, does not reveal the implications of the ending or the meaning of the story as a whole. In an attempt to deal with these problems a discussion of the interrelated woman, water, and death symbolism is in order. As bride and object of passion, the jola plays here the role of the anima - and one of the most basic forms of the anima, the beautiful water-spirit. Sirens and mermaids are common versions of the anima in mythology. The anima's general function, as was discussed in the case of We, is to lead the male into a closer relation with the inner world, with the unconscious. Water is the commonest symbol of the unconscious, according to Jung. The hero must descend into the water, into the unconscious, in order to ascend again a more complete and stronger being. But he must not remain there, for that means spiritual (and often physical) death. This is the essential meaning Jung sees in the many myths of rebirth through temporary immersion in water on the one hand, and the myths of death through the beautiful water-spirit on the other. In myth the hero often is assisted on a perilous sea-journey by an older, wiser man. Theseus was accompanied by Poseidon, god of the sea. Fomic is Cybin's Poseidon on his perilous day and night sea-journey, able to travel on and live and work on the sea unharmed. He is described as a man of great physical strength and of great wisdom: he once killed a man with his fists. Just such a man (perhaps he himself) is said to have been a tribe leader a thousand years ago. The local citizens turn to him to ask whether to pay taxes or not, whether to go to sea or not. He is a powerful, natural leader: 'Cybin... [realized] that Fomic knew best, that he was the one now [during the storm] who could and had the right to kill, to command' (113). 'Fomic is the judge, and what he will say is law' (116). Fomiö is especially wise in the ways of the sea. He knows where the best jola's are constructed, where they are to be purchased and at what price. He commands Klaus' boat in the storm and gives the order to cut loose the jola when it starts smashing the boat towing it, threatening to sink it and the four seafarers. Fomic, then, in his description and role may be regarded as a representation of the Great Man Within, the centre of the 12

Rustling silk and silk in general are associated with sexual relations in The North and in We.

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Self. It is the Great Man's traditional function to assist the hero on the perilous journey and then - if need be - to save him from the destructive potential of the anima. Cybin had been reasonably wise in the ways of the sea for most of his life. In the earlier part of the story he is content to stay inside the fishingboat, casting his net into the water to pull out 'happiness', to pull out the fish. At work on the sea he is 'wet, white-toothed, intoxicated, happy' (95). He will work near or on the water but does not leap into it. In especially important matters he wisely seeks and follows Fomic's advice. He purchases the jola with Fomic's help. He obeys Fomic's orders during the storm and finally accepts the cutting loose of his beloved jola when it threatens to drown them all. But the jola is not to be denied. After being cut loose, it pursues the boat on which Cybin and his friends are now safely riding. The jola beckons to Cybin. He is unable to resist the siren: And he managed to see Fomic, with one eye on the jola, turning the boat sharply so that the jola would pass by and not collide. All this happened nearly instantaneously. The jola's bow flashed by the stern, he came alongside, the wind caught her, for one second she tenderly and firmly pressed against the boat. And that second was enough for Cybin to leap over, to his own, to his jola. That seemed to be all that she needed; she immediately moved away from the boat, and Cybin was already unable to hear Fomic, Klaus and Olaf yelling after him. Through the slanting, lashing dusk they saw the jola twice more. The second time she was separated from them and from the whole world by a deep watery pit; they couldn't make out Cybin any more (118). Zamjatin's male protagonists suffer from a tendency toward extremes of rationalism or irrationalism. In The Islanders Campbell alternates between the two extremes: he refuses sexual relations with his beloved, but he needlessly gets himself knocked unconscious in a boxing-match for her sake. His sense of propriety drives him to make a special trip to return a fountain-pen to his rival, but then he murders him. In We a Great Man Within emerges to preside over the conflict between the rational and the irrational: but he saves the hero from the destructive potential of the anima by simply annihilating her and making the hero into a perfectly rational being, thereby spiritually killing him. In 'The Jola' we see the danger of the other extreme. This time a truly good and wise Great Man Within emerges and can recognize the beneficial as well as the dangerous aspects of the anima. However, his wisdom and strength are to no avail: at the crucial moment the hero rejects his wisdom and chooses passion and death.

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Β. THE FLOOD

In The Flood we again find that Zamjatin has placed his work within the context of a Russian literary classic, in this case one by Doestoevskij. The work will first be examined in that context. As Zamjatin himself observed, the flooding of the city depicted in the work is a central, integral image that is reflected throughout the story on many levels. The second part of the discussion here will explore The Flood's complex, multiplanar imagery. Related to the theme of flood-caused destruction and fertility is a complex symbolism of death and rebirth. In an attempt to reveal some of the implications and meanings of the death, dismemberment, burial, and symbolic rebirth of the murder victim, the work will be examined in the light of relevant myths and traditional beliefs. The reader of Zamjatin's story will quickly recognize certain parallels with Dostoevskij's Crime and Punishment, in particular, the axe murder, the compulsion to confess, and the dreams. There are many others, but there are also crucial contrasts. The most obvious similarity involves the dreams in each work foreshadowing and later re-enacting the axe murder. Raskolnikov's dream of the killing of the old mare with the gentle eyes precedes the murder of the old pawnbroker. Sofja, the female protagonist of The Flood, dreams of finding her hands in something wet and bloody in the dark Smolensk field; later she is to bury there the sexual rival she will murder. Each murderer has such frequent, disturbing dreams after the crime that he grows pale and sick. The most terrifying of each one's dreams involves a re-enactment of the axing of the victim, but in the dream, having to strike the victim repeatedly without apparent effect (239; Crime, 238).13 The fact that the criminal must begin a life of constant apprehension as soon as the murder is committed is emphasized in each work. Raskolnikov and Sofja each have unexpected visitors knock on the door and nearly break the latch while the murderer trembles inside with the bloody, still warm body of the victim(s) on the floor (229; Crime, 98). Sofja and Raskornikov each have a stove in their (clean and dirty, 13

The first figure refers to the text of Navodnenie [The Flood] in Zamjatin's Povesti i rasskazy (München, 1963), pp. 215-241. The second figure refers to the text of Prestuplenie i nakazartie [Crime and Punishment] in volume V of Dostoevskij's Sobranie soiinenij (Moscow, 1956-1958). Subsequent references to these two works will be made in similar fashion.

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respectively) rooms in which they put bloody, incriminating bits of clothing. But Sofja's fire quickly and cheerfully consumes the bloody remnants (229), whereas Raskolnikov's stove remains cold (Crime, 96 and 133). The unburned bloody clothes remaining so long among the cold ashes in Raskolnikov's stove indicate the feelings of revulsion and guilt that continue to disturb him, whereas Sofja at first is almost free of such feelings; in her case these feelings appear only much later. Flies appear in each work and express the murderer's feeling of rev.ulsion at the crime and also his feeling of being trapped. During a dream in which Raskolnikov re-enacts the crime, there is a fly buzzing helplessly against the window-pane. He awakes in his room and finds a fly trapped in it. And his evil genius, Svidrigajlov - making his first appearance in Raskolnikov's life - is at the door (Crime, 288-89). Sofja is already controlled by powers greater than herself long before she has any conscious notion of murder, when, one hot summer day, she finds a fly crawling around helplessly inside a glass jar (223). After a horrible nightmare and shortly before his suicide, Svidrigajlov (whose role, appearances, and welltimed suicide suggest he is a manifestation of one side of RaskoTnikov) notes that 'Some flies, which had awakened, were settled on an untouched portion of veal on the table' (Crime, 534). A fly crawls too on Sofja's victim's dead flesh, and Sofja keeps seeing flies in dreams and in real life. In both works the flies are seen no more once the murderer is released through confession f r o m feelings of revulsion and being trapped. The victim in each work has something the murderer needs, although nothing in the way of material loot is made use of. Raskolnikov murders to free himself of dependence on his mother, to escape his abysmal poverty, and to resolve a destructive inner conflict. Sofja murders to regain her husband and to end her barrenness. Raskolnikov buries the loot in the ground, does not use it, and neither crime nor loot bears any actual or symbolic fruit whatever. But Sofja buries her sexual rival and adopted daughter, Gan'ka, in the ground and symbolic fruit is immediately forthcoming in the form of a child conceived in Sofja that night and the delivery of a child nine months later. In each work there are suggestions of a symbolic rebirth of the murder victim. In the case of Crime and Punishment the rebirth is not so plain as in the Flood, but there are clear implications of it. The old pawnbroker's half-sister, Lizaveta, if not reborn after her murder, at least seems to make a later appearance in a different form. The young prostitute Sonja first appears only some time after the murder of Lizaveta. The gentle eyes of the two and of the mare in Raskolnikov's dream are emphasized.

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Lizaveta once gave Sonja a Bible, the very one that eventually plays such an important role in Raskolnikov's life. Lizaveta's patronymic is not mentioned, but since she has the same father as Alena Ivanovna, we can assume it is Ivanovna. A certain fixation in the central figure's mind is indicated by Lizaveta's patronymic never being mentioned in the novel, and by Raskolnikov's hasty correction when Razumixin incorrectly refers to Sonja as 'Ivanovna'. Raskolnikov comes to see Lizaveta's face in Sonja's (Crime, 428). In The Flood the narrator explicitly states the rebirth of the murder victim: the day Gan'ka is murdered, the murderer conceives a new girlchild. Each murderer finds himself under a compulsion to confess. (The compulsive aspects of the confessions recall the compulsive aspects of the crimes.) Raskolnikov takes a perverse pleasure in teasing himself and others with the idea that he might confess. A long period of suffering, reflection, and wavering precedes his confession, just as it did his crime. Sofja does not reflect on her crime either before or after; her confession bursts out one day, just as her murderous hate for Gan'ka had burst out earlier. In each work the hot summer weather of Petersburg is associated with mounting tension and frustration. A hot stifling summer precedes Raskolnikov's crime. The flowing of water, liquid, and rain is associated with the release of tension and frustration in Crime and Punishment just as in the case of The Flood. After a bad dream foreshadowing the murder Raskolnikov renounces the murder he has been planning, crosses over a canal and feels immediate relief: 'Just as if an abscess [naryv] on his heart, having formed for a whole month, had suddenly burst [prorvalsja]' (Crime, 66). Zamjatin uses precisely the same metaphor to describe the relief Sof)a feels after murdering her sexual rival: 'It broke [prorvalo] some sort of abscess [naryv] in her...' (228). But Raskolnikov gets no relief from his crime, and the day after the murder 'the heat was again unbearable; if only there had been one drop of rain all those days' (Crime, 99). The waters break loose for Raskolnikov when the confession of murder is made. It has been raining the whole night that precedes Svidrigajlov's suicide and Raskolnikov's decision to give himself up: '[Raskolnikov's] clothes were awful: soaked all night with rain, torn, frayed' (Crime, 536). He comes to his mother and the emotional waters finally burst: 'Now after all that terrible period his heart was softened for the first time. He fell down before her, kissed her feet, and having embraced, they both wept' (Crime, 539-40). Raskolnikov's fever (in the Epilogue), with its implica-

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tions of heat, then sweat, then relief and health, is regarded as marking the end of his spiritual illness. Zamjatin's Sofja makes her one complete confession (described metaphorically as the bursting of waters) during maternal fever and then seems greatly relieved. At the end of Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov is able to meet Sonja alone on the bank of a river, and the presence of the water and the flowing of tears and (apparently) semen14 are all necessary to mark Raskolnikov's break-through to becoming a man, a whole person: How it happened, he didn't know himself, but suddenly it seemed as if something had picked him up and thrown him to her feet. He wept and embraced her knees. In the first instant she was terribly alarmed, and her whole face grew stiff. She leaped up and began to tremble and stared at him. But immediately, in that same instant, she understood all. In her eyes infinite happiness began to shine; she understood, and for her there was no longer any doubt that he loved her, infinitely loved her, and that, at last, the moment had arrived... They wished to speak, but were unable. They had tears in their eyes. They were both pale and thin; but in these sick and pale faces there already shone the dawn of a new future, of a complete resurrection into a new life {Crime, 573). Themes and details from Dostoevski's novel are thus found reflected throughout The Flood, although in altered forms. The major differences in the two works are those in the characters and crimes of the two protagonists. Dostoevskij's murderer is a highly intellectual being, whereas Zamjatin's is at the other extreme, a non-thinking, instinctual being. Raskolnikov's crime, stemming from the mind, can only lead to internal disintegration, external alienation, and to sterility and disgust. Sofja's crime, stemming from instinct, passion, and the body, even though it leads her eventually to confession and imminent death, still leads her to internal integration, close relations with her husband, and to fertility and creation. Like Crime and Punishment, The Flood employs several variations of the image of bursting water, but Zamjatin makes bursting water the one central, integral, multiplanar image that effectively dominates his entire story. The actual flood of Petersburg parallels many other metaphoric floods. The central ones are Sofja's murder of Gan'ka, Sofja's impreg14 Raskol'nikov's spiritual recovery and the passage quoted here from the end of the novel seem to make more sense if we assume that sexual intercourse occurs after the narrator discreetly withdraws - note Dostoevskij's ellipses, rare elsewhere. The intercourse of course is not the cause of Raskol'nikov's recovery. The fact that Raskol'nikov is now able to have intercourse (for the first time in his life?) signifies that he is at last capable of getting outside his own lonely intellectualism and achieving a physical, emotional relationship with another human being.

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nation, Sofja's giving birth, and Sofja's confession. These events (1) are closely interrelated within the story, (2) are each presented by the narrator as the release of pent-up life-giving waters, and (3) actually involve (with the exception of the confession) the bursting forth of water, tears, semen, or blood. The flooding of the Neva remains in the background throughout the story; its repeated rising and falling reflect the events in Sofja's life and are related to the many metaphoric floods. As the story gets under way the Neva is rising (215). That evening 'all night from the shore the wind beat against the window, the panes rattled, the water in the Neva rose. And seemingly connected with the Neva by underground veins, the blood rose' (216). Trofim, Sofja's husband, has been brooding about his factory being unproductive and about his wife being barren. Apparently for the first time he reveals aloud his dissatisfaction with Sofja: '"You're not bearing children, that's what's the matter'" (216). Sofja understands: '...if there is no baby, Trofim Ivanyc will go out of her, all will flow imperceptibly out of her, drop by drop, like water from a dried-up barrel' (216). Thus, the rising of the Neva here is connected with the heightening of Trofim's and Sofja's feelings of frustration at their unproductivity and with the beginning of Sofja's dreaded menstrual period. But these problems seem solved with the adoption of a teenage orphan, Gan'ka, and as Part I ends Sofja' thinks: '"Now everything will be all right" - and she falls asleep' (218). No more is heard of the Neva at this point and we may assume that its waters have subsided. The adoption of Gan'ka helps fill Sofja and Trofim's apartment and family life, and life goes smoothly for a year or two. Sofja is happy, and the flood is not mentioned. Sofja's torment begins all over again, however, when she discovers an affair between Trofim and Gan'ka. Worse, Trofim then openly sleeps with Gan'ka. But Sofja is unable to cry, scream, or do violence, and her emotional state is reflected in the weather: Clouds often gathered in the afternoon, got heavier, any minute the green glass overhead will crack, and the rain will finally break through and pour down. But the clouds slipped by unheard, at night the glass became all the thicker, more stifling, more still. ...Thus, glassily, tearlessly, crushing with its dry clouds, the entire summer passed, and the fall was passing just as dry (223).

But the dry period in the weather and in Sofja is not to last: One blue and un-fall-like warm morning the wind began blowing from the sea. Through the closed window Sofja heard a plump, quilted cannon-shot, then quickly another and a third - the water in the Neva must be rising (223-24).

The water rises and floods the city, driving Sofja, Trofim, and Gan'ka

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upstairs to the neighbors'. Here Trofim is no longer able to sleep with Gan'ka, and Sofja's heart is somewhat eased. The flood subsides and Sofja and Gan'ka begin preparing their apartment on the ground-floor to be lived in again. But once more the wind rises and a flood threatens. Finally Sofja understands - for the first time - that the gathering of the clouds is no mere external event and that they must burst this time: The pane hummed, the wind beat, the gray, urban, low, stony clouds flew - it seemed as if those same stifling clouds had returned, the ones that had not once the entire summer burst into a thunderstorm. Sofja felt that these clouds were not beyond the window, but within her, inside, they had been stonily piling up one on top of another for whole months now - and, so as not to be suffocated, it was necessary to smash everything to bits, or run away, or scream... (227). This most intense gathering of clouds and rising of water is followed immediately by Sofja's axe murder of Gan'ka. Sofja has just moved back to her own apartment again. Gan'ka comes in to make the fire and to prepare for Trofim's arrival home from work. Trofim and Gan'ka obviously intend to go back to sleeping together again. Overcome by jealousy and rage, Sofja seizes an axe and strikes Gan'ka: '...and with each drop [of Gan'ka's blood], it became easier for her' (228). A feeling of complete relief and calm follows the murder and the burial of Gan'ka's remains in a distant field. Nothing more is heard of the rising of wind and water - in fact, Sofja notes that the water in the canal that evening is glassy (229). Part IV thus ends, as did Part I, with the subsiding of the actual and emotional waters. In Part V Trofim, having given up hope that the missing Gan'ka will return that night, comes to the bed of his wife - to her indescribable joy and 'above, a thousand versts away... now furiously dashed the clouds' (232). These are the same sort of fast clouds that are reflected in the still water of the canal when Sofja is taking Gan'ka's body to be buried. These fast clouds are associated with anticipation and happiness, whereas the heavy clouds which ought to rain but cannot are associated with frustration and sterility. The day after the murder and Trofim's return to his wife's bed is perfectly calm: 'During the night all had grown still, a calm, transparent column of smoke, straight and pink, went up to the sky' (233). The imagery here suggests the beginning of Sofja's pregnancy. The next rising of wind and water is seen when Sofja awakes after dreaming of the murdered Gan'ka and is related to Sofja's increasing desire to burst forth with child and with confession: She heard; the wind beat on the other side of the window, the pane barely rattled

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- just like it had done on that day... she saw: a piece of marble oilcloth on the floor and a fly crawling on the pink back... 'and I am going to have a baby'... 'not I, not I, not I' screamed Sofja... 'Lord - must bear this child as soon as possible!'(236). But the child is not quite ready to be born and she is not yet ready to confess and hence: '...outside the window surged the heavy, bright water...'(237). Sofja's complete bursting forth with blood, water, tears and child occurs with giving birth. She becomes one with the now, finally, thoroughly soaked earth: Sofja felt how the warm tears, warm milk, warm blood were flowing out of her, all of her had opened up, and flowing with juices she lay warm, blessed, resting, like the earth - for this one minute she had lived her entire life, for this had everything existed (237). Sofja soon gets maternal fever and her ever-increasing feeling of guilt over the murder of Gan'ka expresses itself in a dream in the re-enactment of the murder. The urge to burst forth with a confession begins to overpowier her, and thus again the Neva rises: The cannon echoed, the wind howled in her ears, the water rose all the higher in a minute it will pour, it will take away everything - quick, quick - The familiar pain of yesterday tore her in half, Sofja spread her legs. 'Must bear this child, bear this child as soon as possible!' she grabbed the doctor by the sleeves. 'Easy, easy. You've already borne one child, who else do you need?' Sofja knew who, but she could not say her name, the water rose all the higher, one must quickly (239). She then bursts forth with her confession, apparently the final bursting she is to do before her death. 15 This final bursting forth is expressed in a final, metaphoric bursting of the waters: ...out of her poured huge waves and they rolled over him [Troflm], over everyone, all was suddenly quiet... All around it was white, it was very still, like in the winter... Now everything was all right, blessed, she was completed, she had poured out everything... In the evening the white became ever so greenish, like still water, and the sky beyond the window was like that too (240). Related to the flood symbolism is a complex symbolism which connects Sofja's womb, her apartment, and an abandoned house in the neighborhood. 15

Whether she is to live or to die from fever or at the gallows is left unsaid. The conclusions of many of Zamjatin's other stories - for instance, The Islanders, We, The North, Ά Story About the Most Important Thing', and 'The Jola' - suggest that she will die.

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Sofja's womb has been empty her whole life. She has no children in her life or in her apartment. She compares herself to an empty house that she sees on her walks: ...she was winter-empty. On Maly Prospekt, across from the church, stood just such an empty house with decaying windows. Sofja knew: no one would ever live in it anymore, the joyful voices of children would never be heard (219). But one December day Sofja is quite surprised to see a light in the house and a gypsy boy there with white teeth: .. .it can't be! She turned back, looked into the window. Inside, among pieces of brick, burned a fire, around it sat four ragged boys. One, with his face to Sofja, with black eyes, undoubtedly a gypsy, was dancing, a silver cross leaped about his bare chest, his teeth were shining. The empty house had come to life. The gypsy boy looked a little like Trofim. Sofja suddenly felt that she too was still alive and that all could still change (220). It is significant that those who frequent the empty house include what appears to be a representative of Sofja's husband (see the descriptions of Trofim on 219, 226, 230, 234) and that Gan'ka herself is said to go to the empty house (223). So it is the playing of Trofim and Gan'ka in the empty house (and their actual sexual play in Sofja's apartment) that foreshadows the life to come in Sofja's womb. 16 The lights in the darkness in the empty house are connected with the lights Sofja sees in her earlier dreams of blood in the dark field - '.. .there in the darkness someone was lighting matches' (216) - and with the lights she sees in the dark when burying Gan'ka - 'Far away, it must be on the shore, a light flared up arid died down, but perhaps it was quite close - someone lighting a cigarette in the wind' (229). These lights in the house and in the darkness are still another foreshadowing of the light and life that is to come in Sofja's womb and apartment after her conception and delivering a child. The flooding of the Neva washes out Sofja's apartment. Its cleansing prepares the apartment for what turns out to be the renewal of marital sexual relations and Sofja's immediate conception of a child. The apartment and Sofja and Trofim's marital life have both been unsoiled by the Gan'ka-Trofim affair ever since the flood began three weeks previously. The morning of the moving back to the apartment Trofim tells Gan'ka: '"Really fire up the stove this time, don't spare the wood, so that it'll be

1β As in We, before the central couple can conceive, the male must first have illicit sexual relations with a different, highly sexed woman, and this other woman must eventually die childless, the victim of violence.

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warm for the evening'" (226). The real meaning does not escape Sofja: 'Sofja understood: not for the evening, but for the night' (226). To cleanse the apartment of adultery and herself of hate and frustration, Sofja murders Gan'ka, and the blood is spilled in Sofja's room: 'And it was as though this blood were from her, from Sofja...' (228). She dismembers and then buries Gan'ka, but Sofja herself and the room are still not entirely clean. She scrubs herself and the floor, puts on a new dress to symbolize the beginning of a new life, and burns various bloodstained items (229). Zamjatin again emphasizes the relation between Sofja and her apartment: Sofja threw [into the fire] the bag, the oilcloth, all the pieces of trash that still remained. The fire flared up brightly, all of it burned up, now it was entirely clean in the room. And just the same way all the pieces of trash burned up in Sofja, within her it also became clean and quiet (229). All is now clean and ready. Trofim arrives home and is disappointed at Gan'ka's unexplained absence. Later in the evening Sofja proposes locking the door. Trofim thinks, then shouts, '"Lock it!'" (231). His action completes Gan'ka's exclusion and marks the end of her interference in the apartment and in the married life of Sofja and Trofim. Womb and room are thus now completely prepared, and hence Trofim that night comes to Sofja and impregnates her. The death and symbolic rebirth of Gan'ka are necessarily a part of the flood symbolism discussed above. They also recall certain myths and traditional beliefs concerning death and rebirth. The following is an attempt to make clear some of the implications of the murder, dismemberment, burial, and rebirth of Gan'ka. One implication of Sofja's killing of her sexual rival, is that it is thus that she acquires Gan'ka's sexuality. Gan'ka has been responsible for an increase of sexual passion in Trofim, and although she does not become pregnant, her sexual power is implied in her passion and in her identification with fire and bread. 17 Killing Gan'ka with an axe, Sofja immediately

17

The hot stove, hot bread, and sexuality are all related here. Gan'ka's bread is untouched on her knees at her father's death. Trofim, hearing of Sofja's plan to adopt Gan'ka, began to smile as if opening a package of bread (218). Sof)a smells hot black bread when Gan'ka and Trofim are making love (221), and Gan'ka laughs as Trofim spills bread in his lap that night. Gan'ka is the one who builds the fires that bake the bread. As she squats in front of the stove to build the fire, she spreads her knees wide and smells sweet (223,227).

100

'THE FLOOD'

increases her sexual powers; she brings her husband back to her bed and conceives a child that very night. The idea is an old one: It was for this reason that, when Hector was dead, the Greek chiefs struck him with their spears, to gain each his share of their dreaded enemy's might. This idea is almost universal, and is still preserved in the schoolboy's game of chestnuts: every chestnut gains the strength of every chestnut it kills.18 The murder of Gan'ka might also be seen as an echo of a ritual human sacrifice made to insure the fertility of woman and earth. Mircea Eliade notes that 'creation depends both upon sexuality and upon sacrifice' and that creation cannot take place except from the sacrifice of a living being, especially a 'mythic Young Woman'. 19 Frazer notes that in India a child was often killed to end the barrenness of its mother, 'the theory being that the soul of the murdered boy becomes reincarnated in the woman, who performs the rite with a desire to secure offspring'.20 He also notes that not only American Indians and Northern Europeans sometimes sacrificed their first born, but that '...heathen Russians often sacrificed their firstborn to the god Perun' to insure the fertility of woman and earth. 21 Associated with the sacrifice is the dismemberment motif. In the manifest story the cutting in two of Gan'ka's body prior to burial is necessary so that Sofja can carry the body unaided and unnoticed in a bag to a dark field for burial. In the latent story the dismemberment is a necessary part of the rebirth symbolism. Frazer, discussing the dismembering and burial of Osiris, Dionysus, Halfdan the Black, Romulus, and others, concludes: Taken altogether, these legends point to a widespread practice of dismembering the body of a king or magician and burying the pieces in different parts of the country in order to ensure the fertility of the ground and probably also the fecundity of man and beast.22 The dismemberment of the Egyptian Cora God, the sowing of his body, and his subsequent rebirth are related, of course, to the way in which corn itself grows. St. Paul's admonition about the grain of wheat that must die to bring forth fruit is an obvious statement of one of the themes of Zamjatin's story. The dismemberment, burial, and later symbolic rebirth of ι» Kellett, Ε. E., The Story of Myths (New York, 1927), pp. 164-165. 19 Eliade, Mircea, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (London, 1960), pp. 183-184. 20 Frazer, J. G., The Golden Bough, 3rd ed. (New York, 1935), V, p. 95. 21 Ibid., IV, 193. 22 Ibid., VI, pp. 96-102.

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Gan'ka in the person of Sofja's baby girl connect the human and vegetable worlds in one great cyclical system of life, death, and rebirth. (Gan'ka may be seen as going through three births: her actual birth some twelve years prior to the opening of the story; her adoption 23 by Sofja and Trofim; and her symbolic rebirth in the person of a girl-child conceived the day Gan'ka was murdered.) The relationship between the human and vegetable world implied in myths of burial and rebirth is further emphasized in Zamjatin's story in the comparisons of Sofja to the earth. There are many references to the empty pit {jama) in Sofja's body and soul in the early part of the story. But when she 'plants' the dismembered Gan'ka in an actual jama in a field, Sofja's own jama begins to fill up also. Zamjatin explicitly states the relationship: 'Sofja's belly was round, it was the earth. In the earth, deep, not seen by anyone, lay Gan'ka, and in the ground, not seen by anyone, the grain moved upward with white shoots' (235). The cycle of life, death, and rebirth here is also related to the sun. The rising of the sun, its later descent into darkness and its ascent again the next day, and similar changes in the sun as the seasons change - all parallel the career of Sofja and Gan'ka. Gan'ka is left an orphan. Some writers regard the frequently seen abandonment of the hero in myth as related to the sun's leaving the earth in the morning.24 Gan'ka is murdered in the evening, just as the sun, as it dies (descends into darkness), turns the color of blood.25 The burial is at night, and the rebirth takes place in the day (nine months later). Sofja understands these relations: '...she thought about the oiler [a worker who was killed at Trofim's factory], about death, and it seemed that it would be perfectly simple - just like the sun goes down, then darkness, and then again day' (237). Gan'ka's career parallels the sun's motions not only in a twenty-four hour period, but also in a year. She is orphaned and adopted in the spring, reaches the peak of her sexual power in the summer, is murdered in the early autumn, is dead in the ground in the winter, and is symbolically reborn in the late spring. Like the sun's, Gan'ka's and Sofja's revitalization necessarily involves a long winter: 23 Jung, discussing the cases of Buddha, Romulus and Remus, and others, argues that adoption by foster-parents should be regarded as rebirth. See his 'Symbols of Transformation', in his The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (New York, 1953-), V, p. 321. M Moloney, James Clark, 'The Origin of the Rejected and Crippled Hero Myth', American Imago, XVI (1959), p. 321. 28 Ibid., p. 291.

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The days... got shorter and shorter, as though, today or tomorrow, they would flare up for the last time, like an ember, and then it would be dark, the end of everything. But tomorrow came and there was still no end. And all the same something began to be wrong with Sof)a. She didn't sleep one night, the next night, and a third night, it was dark under her eyes, they had sunk somewhere. Just as the snow gets dark, sinks, and breaks - and suddenly there is earth under it, but it was a long way to spring (234).

C. FIRE AND WATER

In 'The Jola" and The Flood we see a clear difference between the Zamjatin of the early 1920's and the Zamjatin of the late 1920's. The change in Zamjatin's art and thought might best be illustrated by comparing the central imagery of We and Ά Story About the Most Important Thing', with that of 'The J old and The Flood. In the first two, the central imagery has to do with fire; in the latter two, it has to do with water. Zamjatin holds throughout his works that revolution is eternal, inevitable, and necessary for new creation. The shift from fire to water, however, reflects a maturing, if we may say so, in his understanding of revolution. In We, Ά Story About the Most Important Thing', and other earlier works, the main thing is the destruction of old forms and the exhilaration and grandeur of revolution. Central to Zamjatin's concept of revolution is sexual intercourse. But the emphasis in the early works is on the sexual act itself, and frequently on violence associated with it, not on the birth of a child. 'The Jola' and The Flood each concern a middle-aged, married, childless couple.26 In each of the two works the husband actually or symbolically commits adultery. Conception by Zamjatin's protagonists is, if we recall The Womb, We, and In Old Russia, necessarily preceded by adultery. We might expect then that Cybin's 'affair' with his jola might lead to conception of a child by his wife or mistress. But Cybin abandons himself to his mistress to such an extent that he dies; neither he, wife, nor mistress have any offspring. In 'The Jola' we no longer have the molten lava and destructive fire that play such an important role in the early works. Instead we have water, but the water, the adultery, and the marriage still do not produce a child, and the revolution therefore remains uncompleted. In The Flood Zamjatin takes the water, the adultery, and the childless 28

It is not without significance that this description of the couples also fits the Zamjatins. His failure to sire any children by his wife -or (apparently) by any other woman must have been a source of great anguish.

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marriage, seen in the transitional 'The Jola\ and at last completes the revolution. Like D-503 in We, the husband must have an affair with a highly sexed (but sterile) young woman before he can conceive a child by his legal partner. All this is to say that the fiery young mistress of revolution, as Zamjatin calls her, 27 is highly appealing and even necessary to creation, but she proves sterile herself. In The Flood then, Zamjatin places his greatest emphasis on the creative ends of revolution. He has shifted from revolution as fire to revolution as water. Fire destroys; water destroys too, but it also brings life, is necessary to life. Intercourse with the fiery young mistress may be the supreme emotional experience, and may be a necessary stage in growing up, in creating, but it is the middle-aged wife who actually bears the child.

27

'L. Andreev', Lica, p. 53.

IV CONCLUSION

The clearest critical statement by Zamjatin himself on the nature of his art and that of his Russian contemporaries is his essay Ό Sintetizme' [On Synthesism] (1922). In it he enumerates many of the features generally included in discussions of the broad twentieth-century phenomenon known to us as Modernism. As his title suggests, Zamjatin's chief concern is a new synthesis. Having found traditional artistic, religious, ethical, philosophic, scientific, and political forms rendered no longer valid by late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century developments, the modern artist necessarily begins by participating in the destruction of these wornout forms. But he must not remain content with destruction; he must seek a new synthesis, new forms, a new way of finding a unity in 'seemingly a chaos of seemingly contradictory things'. 1 Ultimately, Zamjatin may be seen as seeking, through art, to put himself and his reader into a complex, rich relationship with the elements of existence. Zamjatin understands alienation, but he does not wail about it, nor does he talk about lonely existential courage in the face of alienation. He seeks to defeat alienation. The many fronts of his attack, revealed in the stories examined in the preceding chapters, may be summed up as follows: (1) A highly developed sense of literary form, especially of the image, may be noted even in his early, satirical works. Form denies chaos and hence contributes, it is often said, to the idea of a structured universe in which man can play a small, yet meaningful role. (2) In his idea of the 'cooperative creativity'2 of the modern artist and his audience, Zamjatin seeks a relationship with his fellow-man. (3) Beginning with The Womb, Zamjatin abandons his antisexual, antirural attitude and begins to see and emphasize the good of the natural life, of the primitive. A man in close contact with the natural world and with his natural Self, as expressed in 1 2

Ό sintetizme', Zamjatin's Lica (New York, 1955), p. 239. Ibid., p. 241.

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his work, love, and life, leads a meaningful (if not always happy) existence. Through his imagery Zamjatin emphasizes relations between man and the natural world and, on occasion, even brings inanimate objects to life. (4) The natural, even primitive, meaningful life, as we see in The Islanders, is possible not only in the country, but also for some city-dwellers. The true bourgeoisie, by contrast, are not in relation with Self or with the natural world and consequently lead dull, meaningless lives, killing themselves and others as well. (5) Finally, Zamjatin, like so many of the greatest twentieth-century writers, builds his works within increasingly firm and complex traditional structures. Well-known works by other authors, a variety of symbols, rituals, and myths pertaining to sex, marriage, transcendence, birth, rebirth, and death are all reflected in Zamjatin's works. Thus, through the use of traditional contexts, especially in the later works, Zamjatin has attempted what his contemporary T. S. Eliot, in 1923 in a discussion of myth in Joyce, referred to as 'a method... of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.' 3 The patterns discerned in the works examined here (and undoubtedly in Zamjatin's other works too) are so complex that, although Zamjatin certainly recognized the essential truth of his finished work, he must, like Goethe, have granted his inability to understand fully his own creation. Indeed, as he reads Zamjatin, the critic must again admit the truth of the argument that the meanings of great works of art can be profitably discussed and much light shed on them, but they are never ultimately explicable in rational terms.

s

Eliot, T. S., 'Ulysses, Order and Myth', The Dia!, LXXV (1923), p. 483.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 1

I. BOOKS BY ZAMJATIN IN RUSSIAN

Bii Bozij (Paris, 1939). Bol'Sim detjam skazki (Berlin-Peterburg-Moscow, 1922). Contents: Bog, Ivany, Angel Dormidon, Xrjapalo, Elektriöestvo, D'jaiek, Arapy, Petr PetroviC, Xaldej, Cerkov' Bozija, Pet'ka, Kartinki, Bjaka i Kaka, Cetverg, Xeruvimy, Ognennoe A, Pervaja skazka pro Fitu, Vtoraja skazka pro Fitu, Tret'ja skazka pro Fitu, Poslednjaja skazka pro Fitu. Lica (New York, 1955). Contents: Aleksandr Blok, Fedor Sologub, Cexov, L. Andreev, Vstreii s B. M. Kustodievym, Andrej Belyj, M. Gor'kij, Anatol' Frans (Nekrolog), Gerbert Uells, Genealogi&skoe derevo Uellsa, O'Genri, RiCard Brinsli Seridan, Zavtra, Cel', Ja bojus', Novaja russkaja proza, Ο segodnjaänem i ο sovremennom, Ο sintetizme, Ο literature, revoljucii i entropii, Dlja sbornika ο knige, Zakulisy, Pis'mo Stalinu. My (New York, 1952). My (New York, 1967). Povestii rasskazy (München, 1963). Contents: Pisatel' i ego tvorCestvo (by Marc Slonim), Avtobiografija, Uezdnoe, Spodruönica greänyx, Sever, Lovec öelovekov, PeäCera, Mamaj, Rus', Rasskaz ο samon glavnom, Iks, Navodnenie, Lev, VstreCa, Bid Bozij. Robert Majer (Berlin-Peterburg-Moscow, 1922). Sobranie socinenij, I-IV (Moscow, 1929). Contents of Vol. I (Uezdnoe): Avtobiografija, Uezdnoe, Alatyr', Bloxa, Prilozenie k 'Bloke'. Contents of Vol. II (Na kuliikax): Na kuliikax, Neputevyj, Crevo, Znamenie, Aprel', Spodruönica greänyx, Pis'menno, Krjazi, Stargina, Pravda istinnaja. Contents of Vol. Ill (Ostrovitjane): Ostrovitjane, Lovec öelovekov, Zemlemer, Detskaja, Mamaj, PeSöera, Glaza, Rasskaz ο samom glavnom, Ogni sv. Dominika. Contents of Vol. IV (Sever): Sever, Afrika, Ela, Rus', Iks, Slovo prinadleiit t. Curyginu, Tri dnja, Ο torn, kak iscelen byl inok Erazm, Ο dude, proisäedäem ν Pepel'nuju Sredu, Bog, Petr PetroviC, D'jaöek, Angel Dormidon, 6lektriCestvo, Kartinki, Drjan'-maPdiSka, Xeruvimy.

II. WORKS BY ZAMJATIN IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION 'The Cave', in Gleb Strove (ed.), Russian Stories (New York, 1961), pp. 293-313. 1

Alex M. Shane's The Life and Works ofEvgenij Zamjatin (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968) missed a few items by and about Zamjatin and of course does not include works published since 1968, but it is the only work containing an essentially complete bibliography of works by and about Zamjatin.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

107

'Comrade Churygin has the Floor', in A. Yarmolinsky (ed.), Russians: then and now (New York, 1963), pp. 239-249. The Dragon: Fifteen Stories, trans, and ed. Mirra Ginsburg (New York, 1967). Contents: Translator's Introduction, Letter to Stalin, A Provincial Tale, The Dragon, The Protectress of Sinners, Two Tales for Grown-up Children - The Church of God - The Ivans, The North, The Cave, The Healing of the Novice Erasmus, In Old Russia, A Story About the Most Important Thing, The Miracle of Ash Wednesday, X, Comrade Churygin Has the Floor, The Flood, The Lion. 'God', in Bernard G. Guerney (ed.), New Russian Stories (Norwalk, Connecticut, n.d.), pp. 190-192. The Essays of Yevgeny Zamyatin, trans, and ed. Mirra Ginsburg (Chicago, 1970). Contents: Autobiography (1922), Autobiography (1924), Autobiography (1929), Sirin, Scythians?, Contemporary Russian Literature, Tomorrow, I am Afraid, Paradise, Gryadushchaya Rossiya, The Serapion Brethren, On Synthetism, The New Russian Prose, On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters, The Day and the Age, The Goal, A Piece for an Anthology on Books, Moscow-Petersburg, The Psychology of Creative Work, Theme and Plot, On Language, Backstage, Alexander Blok, Fyodor Sologub, Chekhov, Meetings with Kustodiev, Andrey Bely, Maxim Gorky, H. G. Wells, O. Henry, Anatole France, Letter of Resignation from the Writers Union, Letter to Stalin. Five Plays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, trans, and ed. Mirra Ginsburg (Chicago, 1971). Contents: The Fires of Saint Dominic, The Society of Honorary Bell-Ringers, The Flea, The African Guest, Attila. O n Literature, Revolution and Entropy', in Patricia Blake and Max Hayward (eds.), Dissonant Voices in Soviet Literature (New York, 1962), pp. 12-19. Also in Irving Howe (ed.), Literary Modernism (Greenwich, Connecticut, 1967), pp. 173-179. 'The Watch', trans. Jacques Le Clercq, Fiction Parade, I (1935), pp. 117-122. We, in Bernard G. Guerney (ed. and trans.), An Anthology of Russian Literature in the Soviet Periodfrom Gorki to Pasternak (New York, 1960), pp. 167-353. We, trans. Gregory Zilboorg (New York, 1924 and 1959). III. WORKS ABOUT EVGENIJ ZAMJATIN 2 Annenkov, Jurij, 'Evgenij Zamjatin', Dnevnik moix vstret, I-II (New York, 1966), I, pp. 246-286. The author is a stage decorator and an artist best known to many for his portraits of Axmatova, Pasternak, and other Russian and European cultural figures. He knew Zamjatin from 1917 until Zamjatin's death. This essay - a slightly revised version of an essay appearing in Grani in 1962 - represents the only published work in existence containing a genuinely personal sketch of Zamjatin. Annenkov relates details from the life of his best friend and presents a number of . Zamjatin's personal letters. Billington, James H., The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York, London, 1966). This intriguing analysis considers the key cultural forces of the early 20th century to be Prometheanism, sensualism, and apocalypticism. Billington seems to view Blok and Zamjatin as the most significant writers of the era. In the four-page discussion of the 'modernist' Zamjatin, D-503's internal conflict is considered one between Prometheanism and sensualism. 2 These are not to be considered necessarily as the thirty-eight best works touching on Zaiqjatin. Some are representative of standard approaches to Zamjatin, others were chosen because they offer unusual interpretations or furnish information not found elsewhere.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blake, Patricia, 'Literature as a Lash', New York Times Book Review (Feb. 26, 1967), pp. 1 and 32-34. Miss Blake discusses Zamjatin as a satirist. This review was the first of many in leading American newspapers and magazines to call attention to the first collection of Zamjatin's stories in English translation, The Dragon: Fifteen Stories. Brown, Edward J., 'Eugene Zamjatin as a Critic',, in To Honor Roman Jakobson, I-III (The Hague, 1967), I, pp. 402-411. Professor Brown reviews some of Zamjatin's many excellent critical articles and discusses him as a literary historian and as a student of the craft of writing. As an historian Zamjatin deals with the general Russian need for a great faith. For himself he prefers irony, relativism, although recognizing it requires 'great strength of soul'. As a student of the craft, Zamjatin is interested mainly in the dialectic of new forms, the death of old forms, hence he finds Gor'kij not at all 'revolutionary'. —, 'Zamjatin and English Literature', in American Contributions to the Fifth International Congress of Slavicists. Sofia. 1963 (The Hague, 1964), pp. 21-40. Chapter headings in this critical survey of Zamjatin's work, art, and philosophy include: Zamjatin's Literary Production, Zamjatin's Chief Theme, Zamjatin's Philosophy, Zamjatin's Art, Zamjatin's English Relatives, and The Legacy of H. G. Wells. Deutscher, Isaac, "Ί984" - The Mysticism of Cruelty', Heretics and Renegades and Other Essays (London, 1955), pp. 35-50. Deutscher argues in his discussion of Orwell that My is perhaps as much anti-American as anti-Soviet, and is intended as a warning to Russia against Western industrialism. Deutscher errs in stating that Zamjatin wrote My as an emigre in Paris in 1920. Dmitriev, Ju., 'Zamjatin', Teatral'naja inciklopedija (Moscow, 1963), II, p. 737. This is remarkable mainly for being a recent Soviet evaluation which fails to attack Zamjatin. This brief article, however, is limited almost entirely to praising the antibourgeois and pro-narod qualities of Bloxa [The Flea]. The article does note in passing Ogni sv. Dominika [The Fires of St. Dominic], but does not even suggest that Zamjatin also wrote essays and fiction. Eastman, Max, 'The Framing of Eugene Zamyatin', Artists in Uniform: A Study of Literature and Bureaucratism (New York, 1934), pp. 82-93. A careful documentation of the literary campaign leading to the silencing of Zamjatin in 1929. Edgerton, William B., 'The Serapion Bothers: An Early Soviet Controversy', American Slavic and East European Review, VIII, 1 (1949), pp. 47-64. Those desiring to examine Zamjatin's role as a teacher of the Serapion Brothers will find the background information and the bibliography helpful. Efremin, Α., 'Evgenij Zamjatin', Krasnaja nov\ 1930, No. 1, pp. 228-235. Zamjatin is called a sincere, but misguided 'heretic in the name of heresy'. Efremin admits that Soviet methods are similar to those of the Spanish Inquisition portrayed in Zamjatin's play Ognisv. Dominika, but insists on the differences in the ends involved. Ehre, Milton, 'Studies in the Prose of Yevgeni Zamyatin', unpublished Master's thesis, Columbia University (1965). Ehre approaches Zamjatin 'primarily as a literary artist'. The discussion concentrates on the skaz, on Lovec ielovekov, PeiCera, and Navodnenie. Symbolist and other aesthetic theories are applied. Fischer, Peter Alfred, Ά Tentative New Critique of Ε. I. Zamjatin', unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, (1967). The title signifies not a 'New Criticism' approach, but a new critical evaluation. It consists for the most part of an attack on Zamjatin on moral and literary grounds. Professor Fischer finds Zamjatin's works to be largely artificial and lacking in convincing characters. Zamjatin personally is seen as a cold, vain man whose passion for revolution represented an irresponsible attempt to fill a meaningless life. Uezdnoe is considered his most interesting work, but Zamjatin's works are seen as steadily declining thereafter. Nothing Zamjatin wrote after 1922 is found worth discussing.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

109

Gallimard, T. F., 'Nous autres', Dictionnaire des oeuvres, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1955), III, p. 547. We's similarity to the works of H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and to Capek's Krakatit and R. U. R. is noted. Gregg, R. Α., 'Two Adams and Eve in the Crystal Palace: Dostoevsky, the Bible, and We\ Slavic Review XXIV, 4 (1965), pp. 680-687. Includes a discussion of the philosophical and symbolical patterns in We that derive from Genesis and from Dostoevsky. Hayward, M., 'Pilnyak and Zamyatin: Two Tragedies of the Twenties', Survey, XXXVI (April-June, 1961), pp. 85-91. Hayward argues that the campaign against Pilnjak and Zamjatin, chairmen of the Moscow branch and Leningrad branch, respectively of the All-Russian Union of Writers, was aimed at cowing all remaining independent writers into submission, and at demonstrating to all the beginning of a new stage in literary repression, just as was to be the case with Zoäienko and Axmatova in 1946. Holthusen, J., Russische Gegenwartsliteratur. Vol. I: 1890-1940 (Bern and München, 1963), pp. 106-110. The four-page discussion of Zamjatin's style includes an examination of Belyj's influence on Zamjatin, seen especially in the case of The Islanders. Holthusen refers to Zamjatin's rhythmic-symbolic-ornamental style, grotesque metaphors, and geometric leitmotifs. Jackson, Robert Louis, Έ . Zamyatin's We\ Dostoevsky1 s Underground Man in Russian Literature (The Hague, 1958), pp. 150-157. The novel is discussed as the realization of the Underground Man's vision of a rationalistic Utopia. Kral, Andrzej Wladyslaw, 'Czekaj^c na Targ W^glowy (II)', Teatr (Warszawa) (Feb. 16-28,1963), pp. 8-10. This article includes a lengthy, illustrated, and enthusiastic review of Pchla (a Polish translation of Zamjatin's Bloxa [The Flea]), presented at the Wybrzeze theater in Gdansk in 1963. Lunaöarskij's delight at the 1925 presentation of the play is mentioned in political support of Zamjatin, but nothing is said of Zamjatin's personal or literary fate. Krai concludes: 'The market-place theater, the commedia dell'arte, is flagrantly grotesque. This work is written in precisely that manner. Here is the place one may and ought to run riot, delight in new ideas, improvise, juggle, and elaborate, all in an artful, theatrical manner*. Kuznecov, M., 'Socialisti&skij realizm i modernizm', Novyjmir, XXXIX, 8 (1963), pp. 220-245. This essay deals with Zamjatin, Pil'njak, and Belyj as representatives of 'modernism'. Its significance lies mainly in the fact of the appearance in a fairly recent Soviet publication of an extensive (albeit hostile) discussion of Zamjatin, together with lengthy quotations from his post-revolutionary works. Kuznecov writes that in the case of We 'Zamjatin considered he was writing a pamphlet against socialism'. Kuznecov quotes Voronskij's outraged reaction to We (not mentioning Voronskij's subsequent fate at the hands of the regime he defended), but then goes on to agree with some critics of the 1920's that We has no special Russian coloring, and was a satire on Bismarckian, rather than Marxist socialism. Although the author concludes that modernism is associated with pessimism, decadence, imperialism, capitalism, and the bourgeoisie, and that only socialist realism expresses life-giving optimism and a true respect for man, the Soviet reader has been given here a brief taste of forbidden fruit. Lo Gatto, E., Storia della letteratura russa, 3rd ed. (Firenze, 1944). In his discussion of Zamjatin, Lo Gatto observes the influences of Gogol', Remizov, Dostoevsky, and A. K. Tolstoj. Lunin, Ε. B., 'Zamjatin, Evgenij Ivanoviö', Literaturnaja enciklopedija (Moscow-Leningrad, 1930), IV, pp. 302-310. The length of this attack on Zamjatin is an indication of his importance in the Soviet Union, even in the 1930's. Early works criticizing tsarist Russia and the bourgeoisie are praised. Zamjatin's later critical attitude toward the BolSeviks is explained, argues Lunin, by his hate for those who

110

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deprived the bourgeoisie of their wealth [i/'c], We's contents are summarized, and the novel called a slander on the socialist future, but no attempt is made to refute Zamjatin point by point. Mihajlov, Mihajlo, Moscow Summer, foreword by Myron Kolatch and an Introduction by Andrew Field (New York, 1965). Mihajlov (who reviewed a 1963 Yugoslavian collection of Zamjatin's stories) makes repeated references to Zamjatin in this book. He finds a growing interest in Zamjatin in Yugoslavia and in the Soviet Union. Mirsky, D. S., Contemporary Russian Literature 1881-1925 (New York, 1926). Prince Mirsky views Zamjatin's early works as 'the direct progeny of Remizov's "Stratilatov'". He discusses the "mosaic of details" involved in what he considers Zamjatin's 'Cubism', and outlines Zamjatin's structural principle - 'a large family of metaphors (or similes) dominated by one mother metaphor'. Orwell, G., 'Freedom and Happiness', Tribune (London), No. 471 (Jan. 4, 1964), pp. 15-16. Orwell wrote this essay on We before writing his own dystopian novel, 1984. Orwell considers Zamjatin superior to Huxley in his presentation of the irrational side of totalitarianism. Oulanoff, Hongor, The Serapion Brothers: Theory and Practice (The Hague, 1966). Includes a brief examination of Zamjatin's 'metonymic representation' of character. Poggioli, Renato, Poets of Russia 1890-1930 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1960). The substance of a lecture delivered in Prague by Zamjatin shortly after leaving the Soviet Union is given. Poggioli notes the influence of Esenin and Sklovskij on Pescera [The Cave], but certainly errs in calling Zamjatin Gor'kij's protigi. Pozner, Vladimir, Panorama de la litterature russe contemporaine (Paris, 1929). Includes a critical discussion of Zamjatin's style. Pozner, a Serapion Brother himself, notes that Zamjatin served 'more as master than model' for the brotherhood. Proffer, Carl, 'Notes on the Imagery in Zamjatin's We\ Slavic and East European Journal, VII, 3 (1963), pp. 269-278. Contains a discussion of some of the variations of the central image - that of a core of fire (Energy) attempting to erupt through the crust (Entropy). Remizov, Α., 'Stojat' - negasimuju sveiu pamjati Evgenija Zamjatina, 1884-1937', Sovremennye zapiski (Paris), LXIV (1937), pp. 424-430. This obituary includes several unique critical observations. Remizov modestly denies any personal influence on Zamjatin, and notes Zamjatin's language is like Gogol"s, hispriemy like Cexov's, his plots like Sologub's, and his allegories like Andreev's. Richards, D. J., Zamyatin: A Soviet Heretic (New York-London, 1962). This was the first book published in any language to attempt a general interpretation of the art and philosophy of Zamjatin. Chapter I is a short survey of Zamjatin's life, based on the rather unrevealing autobiography of 1929. Chapter II is devoted to a survey of Zamjatin's basic metaphysical and ethical views - the Energy-Entropy confict, the resulting eternal dialectic, the Dostoevskian concepts of freedom and irrationality, and the function and responsibility of the artist-heretic. Later chapters deal with Zamjatin's pre-revolutionary satirical tales, his 'Psychological Tales', his works about the West, and We. Shane, Alex M., The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968). This book is a much more thorough and extensive treatment of Zamjatin's life and art than D. J. Richards' earlier book. The work begins with a 91-page biography of Zamjatin as aman of letters. The well-known paucity of letters, diaries, memoirs, or of almost any source material on Zamjatin's private life necessarily limits this (and any future) biography. Zamjatin's wife is not even mentioned, and his other loves and friendships are hardly mentioned. As for Zamjatin's literary production, Professor Shane divides it into four periods: Early (1908-1917), Middle (1917-1921), Transitional (1922-1927),, and Late (1928-1935) The domi-

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

111

nant themes and styles of works in each period are discussed. The well-organized bibliography is the first one of works by and about Zamjatin to approach completeness, and contains about 1000 entries. Sklovskij, Viktor, 'Potolok Evgenija Zamjatina', Pjat'(elovek znakomyx (Tiflis, 1927), pp. 43-67. Like an airplane, Zamjatin has a 'ceiling'. His is the concentration on the image. Sklovkij discusses the 'systematization of the image' in Zamjatin at the expense of the sjuzet. Slonim, Marc, Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems (New York, 1964). Slonim views Zamjatin as 'head of that brand of neo-realism closest to European expressionism'. He argues: 'In a way Zamyatin's devices were similar to those of modern painting, not only did he render the psychological through the visual, but he also utilized surrealist multiplane composition and symbolic representation of unconscious drives.' Strove, Gleb, 'Novye varianty sigalevsöiny; ο romanax Zamjatina, Xaksli i Orvella', Novyjzurnal, No. 30 (1925), pp. 152-163. One of Professor Struve's many discussions of We. Voronskij, Α., '[Ε. Zamjatin]', Na styke: sbornik statej (Moscow-Petrograd, 1923), pp. 47-75. The most stimulating and fair-minded Marxist analysis of Zamjatin in print. Vorsonkij praises Zamjatin's style but attacks his ideas as 'heresy for the sake of heresy'. Unlike other Marxist critics, Voronskij attempts a point-by-point refutation of We. He criticizes D-503's individualism and cannot help sympathizing with the vision of mathematically guaranteed happiness. White, John, 'Mathematical Imagery in Musil's Young Törless and Zamyatin's We', Comparative Literature, XVIII (1966), pp. 71-78. Robert Musil, like Zamjatin, an engineer turned writer, wrote his novel in Austria in 1906. White argues that 'the turning point for both novels is the idea behind the square root of a minus number'. Woodcock, George, 'Utopias in Negative', Sewanee Review, LXIV (1956), pp. 81-97. This is the best of several articles in the West in the past two decades on antiutopias. Woodcock notes that We was 'the first novel of literary importance that presented a relatively complete vision of the negative results involved in the realization of Utopia'. Yershov, Peter, 'Science Fiction and Utopian Fantasy in Soviet Literature', Mimeographed series No. 62, Research Program on the U.S.S.R. (New York, 1954). A short survey of science fiction and Utopian fantasy in Russian literature from 1783 to 1951. Yershov summarizes relevant works by Söerbatov, Xeraskov, RadiäCev, Bulgarin, Odoevskij, CernySevskij, and others. H. G. Wells is mentioned several times, but the extent of his influence on Russian writing is not noted. Yershov seems to consider We the most significant of the works discussed, but its relation to other Utopian works is not examined. A number of dates listed for writers and works are in error.

IV. LIST OF OTHER WORKS CITED Brown, Edward J., The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature, 1928-1932 (New York, 1953). Dostoevskij, F. M., Prestuplenie i nakazanie, in Sobranie soiinenij (Moscow, 19561958), V, pp. 5-574. Eliade, Mircea, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (London, 1960). Eliot, T. S., 'Ulysses, Order and Myth', The Dial, LXXV (1923), pp. 480-483. Ermakov, I. D., Oierkipo analizu tvoriestva Ν. V. Gogolja (Moscow, 1924). Franz, M.-L. von, 'The Process of Individuation', in C. G. Jung (ed.), Man and his Symbols (New York, 1964), pp. 158-229.

112

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Frazer, J. G., The Golden Bough, 3rd ed. (New York, 1935). Frye, Northrop, 'The Archetypes of Literature', Kenyon Review, XIII (1951), pp. 92110. Gogol', Ν. V., Sinei', in Sobranie socinenij ν 6-i tomax (Moscow, 1953), III, pp. 129160.

Gross, Seymour L., 'Nature, Man, and God in Bunin's "The Gentleman from San Francisco'", Modern Fiction Studies, IV (1960), pp. 153-163. Guerney, Bernard, 'Evgenii Ivanovich Zamiatin (1884-1937)', Anthology of Russian Literature in the Soviet Periodfrom Gorki to Pasternak (New York, 1960), pp. 163-166. Henderson, Joseph L., 'Ancient Myths and Modern Man', in C. G. Jung (ed.), Man and his Symbols (New York, 1964), pp. 104-157. Howe, Irving (ed.), Literary Modernism (Greenwich-Connecticut, 1967). Jacobi, Jolande, 'Symbols in an Individual Analysis', in C. G. Jung (ed.), Man and his Symbols (New York, 1964), pp. 273-303. Jaffö, Aniela, 'Symbolism in the Visual Arts', in C. G. Jung (ed.), Man and his Symbols (New York, 1964), pp. 230-271. Jung, C. G., The Collected Works ofC. G. Jung (New York, 1953-). Kellett, Ε. E„ The Story of Myths (New York, 1927). Krag, Erik, 'The Riddle of the other Goljadkin: Some Observations on Dostoevski]'s Double', Morris Halle, et al. For Roman Jakobson (The Hague, 1956), pp. 265-272. Kirillov, Vladimir, Veiernye ritmy (Moscow, 1927), p. 56. —, 'My', in Z. S. Paperny (ed.), Proletarskie poity pervyx let sovetskoj έροχϊ (Leningrad, 1959), pp. 228-229. —, 'Zeleznyj messija', in Paperny, p. 233. Lenin, V. I., 'Vystuplenie protiv popravki Buxarina k rezoljucii ο programme partii 8 marta (ve&rom)', Socinenija, 4th ed. (Moscow, 1941-1957), XXVII, pp. 122-123. Mahler, Elsa, Die russischen dörflichen Hochzeitsbraiiche (Wiesbaden, 1960). Moloney, James Clark, 'The Origin of the Rejected and Crippled Hero Myth', American Imago, XVI (1959), pp. 271-328. Pilnjak, Boris, Krasnoe derevo (Berlin, 1929). Plato, The Republic (New York, 194[1]). Proffer, Carl, 'Notes on the Imagery in Zamjatin's We', Slavic'and East European Journal, VII (1963), pp. 269-278. Spycher, Peter, 'Ν. V. Gogol's "The Nose": A Satirical Comic Fantasy Born of an Impotence Complex', Slavic and East European Journal, VII (1963), pp. 361-374. Wells, H. G., Anticipations (London, 1901). —, In the Days of the Comet (London, 1906). —, Mankind in the Making (London, 1903). —, A Modern Utopia (London, 1905). —, The World Set Free {London, 1914). Wilson, Edmund, The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature (New York, 1947). Winner, Thomas, 'Myth as a Device in the Works of Chekhov', in B. Slote (ed.), Myth and Symbol (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1963), pp. 71-78. Ziolkowskii, Theodore, Dimensions of the Modern Novel: German Texts and European Contexts (Princeton, 1969).

INDEX

Adultery, 20,32-33, 35-37,98,102 'Alatyr', 18,20,25 Alienation, 28-29, 33-36, 38-39, 46, 69, 94, 104 Ancient, the (see also Past, the), 50, 57, 72 Anima, 71-77, 79, 89; as guide, 72, 76; death of, 77, 79; destructive potential of, 76, 90 Annenkov, Ju. P., 87n Anti-utopian, 7,40-41,52,67 Archetypes, 9,69-71,74-75,77-80 Art, archetypes in, 70-71, 78; modern, 28-29,87,104-105 Attila, 26, 44, 81-82 'Avtobiografija', 19n 'Back-Stage' ['Zakulisy'], 44n, 66n-67n, 79-80,82n Bells, as symbols, 62 Belyj, Α., 52 Bid Bozij [The Scourge of God], 8 Billington, J., 75n Biographical approach, 10 Biographical points, Zamjatin, 7, 10, 15, 19n, 27, 39, 41, 43-45, 50, 67, 79-82, 102n Birth, 20,23-26,47-48,63,71,95,102,105 Bläke, P., 57n Blok, Α., 72 Bloxa [The Flea], 26, 44, 80 Bogdanov, Α., 44n Boläevism, Zamjatin's relation to, 15,19n, 40 BoVsim detjam skazki [Tales for GrownUp Children], 81 Bread, as symbol, 85, 99 Brown, E. J., 42n Bunin, I., 36, 62n Burial, 91-92,96,99-100 Buxarin, N., 42

Campanella, T., 47 Capek, K„ 40-41 Cave', 'The ['Mamaj'], 67n Cexov, Α., 26, 28 Child, 19, 24-25, 54, 73-74, 85, 92-93, 9698, 100-103 Children, 26, 47-49, 74, 95, 98, 102n Christ, 28, 75n Circular, the (see also Roundness), 78 City, the, 29, 35,46; as psyche, 70,72-73, 76, 78; in We, 53-55, 58-59, 67 Civilization (see also Society), 17, 20, 26, 40, 49, 67 Clocks, as symbols, 60, 62 Clothing, as symbols, 31, 34, 37-38, 5354, 58, 59, 63 Clouds, 36-37, 60-61, 95-96 'Collective unconscious', 70-72, 80 Colar, 51, 52, 67, 77; symbolism in We, 52-60, 62 Complexity vs. simplicity, 50-51; in We, 54,63, 70; in Zamjatin's writing, 9, 82, 105 'Comrade Curygin Has the Floor', 82 Confession, 91-97 Conflict (see also Struggle), 38, 53, 71; in the ego, 76; psychic, 69-70,80 Conscious, the, 69, 75-76, 79-80 Contexts, 9, 26; cultural, 80, 82, 86-89; literary, 9, 26, 28, 43-52, 83-86, 91-94, 105; politico-cultural, 39-43, 52; symbolic, 10; traditional, 86-89,105 Core-vs.-crust symbolism, 52-53,56,62-66 Cosmists, 42 Creation, 24-26, 63, 65, 94,100, 102-103 'Creative cooperation', 104 Creative process, Zamjatin's, 28, 44, 7980,104-105 Creativity, 70-71,75-76 Crew [The Womb], 20, 24-26, 102, 104

114

INDEX

Cubism, 68 Death, 23-24, 30-31, 38, 47, 58-59, 71-73, 86, 89-91, 94, 97, 99, 101, 105 Dismemberment, 91, 99-100 Dissociation, 69-70 Dostoevskij, F., 8-11, 28, 32, 68-69, 75n, 91; Crime and Punishment, 91-94; The Brothers Karamazov, 28; The Double, 68-69 Drama, internal, psychic, 39,69,80 Dream(s), 69-71, 73, 75n-76n, 79-80, 9192, 97 Druzka, the, 87 Dual-mother motif, 74-75 Earth altar, 78 Ego, 75-76 Ehrenburg, I., 44n 'Ela' ['The Jola'], 8-9, 25, 28, 81-90, 97n, 102-103 Eliade, M„ 100 Eliot, T. S., 105 Emotion, 36, 54-55, 58, 67, 72-73, 93, 9596 Energy and Entropy, 8, 25, 27, 30, 53-57, 62, 66 Ermakov, I., 69n, 84 Expressionism, 50, 53, 67-68 Father figure, 85 Fedin, K., 7 Fertility, 91, 94, 100 Finger episode, 68-69 Fire, 30, 55, 57, 62, 76, 92, 96, 98-99,102103 Fires of St. Dominik, The [Ogni sv. Dominika], 26 Fisher of Men', 'The ['Lovec celovekov'], 27 Fita fables, 77n Flea, The [Bloxa\, 26, 44, 80 Flies, 92, 97 Flood, as symbol, 93-97, 99 Flood, The Navodnenie, 8-9,15, 20, 24-26, 28, 66, 67n, 81-83, 85n, 91-103 Fog, 17, 38; in We, 56, 59 Form, 104-105 Fourfold, the, 78 France, Α., 9 Frazer, J., 100 Freedom, 8, 16-18, 21-22, 24-25, 28, 74 Freudian approach, 10, 84

Frye, N., 9 Future, the, 25-26, 42, 45-51, 74 Gerstäcker, F., 71 η Ginsburg, Μ., 16η Goethe, J. W. von, 71, 105 Gogol', N., 9-11, 18-20, 27, 68-69, 83, 84n, 86; The Nose, 68-69; 'The Notes of a Madman', 19; 'The Overcoat', 8387; Revizor, 19, 27 Goldoni, C., 44n Gor'kij, M„ 7, 41, 44 Gozzi, C., Count, 44n Grand Inquisitor, 21, 28, 32, 75n Grandmother figure, 75 Great Man Within, 76-77, 78n, 89-90 Gross, S., 36n Guerney, Β., 16n, 22 Guilt, 91-92 Haggard, R., 71 Hayward, Μ., 57n Henderson, J. L., 72n Heretic(s), 8, 15-16, 22, 25, 29 Historical approach, 10 House of Art, The, 80 Howe, I., 8 Huxley, Α., 41, 45 Ikon, 29-33 Imagery, 39, 66-67, 96, 102-103, 105; in We, 52-68; multiplanar, 66, 81, 91, 94; subjective, 67-68 Images {see also Metaphor, Symbols), 18, 28-33, 38, 63, 82, 91, 104; of motion, 21, 23-25, 32, 43, 63 Impregnation, 25, 94-95, 99 Industrialism, 29, 32-33, 41, 49 Industrial totalitarianism, 40-41 In Old Russia [Rus'], 20, 26, 102 In the Sticks [Na Kuliikax], 9, 16, 26, 28, 65 Irrational, the, 51,62,69,71,76-77,90,94 Islanders, The [Ostrovitjane], 8, 21-23, 25, 27-39, 61, 65-66, 69, 81, 90, 97n, 105 Jacobi, J., 76n Jaff6, Α., 78 Jola\ "The ['Ela'], 8-9, 25, 28, 81-90, 97n, 102-103 Joyce, J., 105 Jung, C. G., 69-71, 72n, 76, 77n, 78-80, 101η

INDEX

Jungian analysis, 73, 76η Jungian terms and concepts, 10, 69 Jungian theory, 9, 69, 79-80 Kaiser, G., 40 Kandinsky, V., 53, 67 Kaverin, V., 7 Kellett, E„ lOOn Kirillov, V., 42, 63n Krag, Ε., 69n Kuprin, Α., 17, 28, 44n Kuznica [Smithy], 42 'L. Andreev', 103n Lang, F., 41 Lenin, V. I., 42, 77n Lerner, Α., 71n Leskov, N., 9 Lica, 44η, 67η, 79η, 82n, 103n, 104n Life cycle, 100-101 Light, as symbol of life, 98 LjaSko, Ν., 42 Love, 25, 28, 33, 71, 74-75, 84-85, 94,105 'Lovec öelokov', ['The Fisher of Men'], 27 Love life, Zamjatin's, 82n Machines, 42, 65, 70 Mahler, E„ 84n, 87 'Mamaj' ['The Cave'], 67n Mandala, 70, 76, 78 Man-nature relationship, 20-21, 25-26, 29, 35, 58, 105 Marriage customs, 83, 84, 86-89 Marriage symbolism, 83, 86-89 Marx, K., 9 Maternal monster, 72, 74, 79 Maturing, 73-74, 76, 102-103 Mayer, R., 66 Metal, 43, 52,56; imagery, 60-61 Metaphor (see also Images, Symbols), 21, 38, 55, 59-60, 65-66, 74; downward directed, 18; flood and water, 94-95,97; inanimate objects to life, 52, 65-66, 105; reduction of human beings to machinery, 65 Mirsky, D., 68 Mistress, 83-86, 102-103 Modernism, 8, 104-105 Modern times (see also Art, modern), 8788, 105 Molidre, 27 Moloney, J., 101η

115

Motion (see also Images), 25, 43, 56, 6364 Multiplanar imagery, 66, 81, 91, 94 Murder, 18-19, 21, 24, 31, 34, 38, 61, 7273,90,92-94,97,99-101; axe, 91,96,99 My [We], 7-9, 15-16, 22-26, 28, 36, 38-43, 45-81, 89, 97n, 98n, 102-103 Myth, 68-71, 74, 76-77, 79-80, 89, 91, 99, 101, 105 Mythic, the, 81,100 Na Kulitkax [.In the Sticks], 9, 16, 26, 28, 65 Natural, the, 17, 31, 33-34, 38, 46, 63, 71, 104-105 Nature, 29, 33, 35, 38, 58-59 Nature symbols, clouds, 36-37, 60-61, 95-96; flood, 93-97, 99; sun, 35-37, 59, 61,101; water, 35, 37-38, 61-62, 71, 8990, 93-97, 102-103; weather, 35-38, 93, 95-97 Navodnenie [The Flood], 8-9, 15, 20, 2426, 28, 66, 67n, 81-83, 85n, 91-103 Negro, 75-76 Nietzsche, F., 9 Non-freedom, 20-21, 23 North, The [Sever], 25, 81, 89n, 97n Obscestvo pocetnyx zvonarej [The Society of Honorary Bell-Ringers], 21n, 27 Odoevskij, V., 44n Ogni sv. Dominika [The Fires of St. Dominik], 26 Ό literature, revoljucii, entropii i proiem' ['On Literature, Revolution and Entropy'], 8, 16, 25, 53n 'On Literature, Revolution and Entropy' [ Ό literature, revoljucii, entropii i proCem'], 8, 16, 25, 53n 'On Synthesism' [ Ό sintetizme], 87, 104 Orwell, G., 41 Ό sintetizme' [On Synthesism'], 87, 104 Ostrovitjane [The Islanders], 8, 21-23, 25, 27-39, 61, 65-66, 69, 81, 90, 97n, 105 Paperny, Ζ., 42n Past, the (see also Ancient, the), 26, 44, 71-72 Pasternak, B., 7 Petersburg, 67n, 93-94 Petrograd, 39 Pilqjak, Β., 57n Plato, 47-48, 50-51

116

INDEX

Povesti i rasskazy, 91 η Pregnancy, 20, 57, 96 Primitive, the (see also Provincial, the) 15-26,49,72,104 Proffer, C., 52n Proletarians, 42-44, 63n Proletkult, 42 Provincial, the (see also Primitive, the) 18, 20, 29 Provincial Tale, A [Uezdnoe], 8-9, 15-20, 26, 65 Psyche, 54-55, 69-70, 72, 75-76, 78, 80 Psychic, the, 39, 67-69, 71, 79 Psycho-analytical approach, 83 PuSkin, Α., 11, 76 'Rasskaz ο samom glavnom' [Ά Story About the Most Important Thing'], 8, 24-25,68, 81-82,97n, 102 Rational, the, 50-51, 54-55, 60, 63, 67, 69-72, 76-77, 80, 90, 94, 105 Rationalism, 52, 54, 57-58, 72-77, 90 Realism, 10, 27 Realistic, the, 10, 27, 68 Rebellion, 51 Rebels, 47, 51-52, 77 Rebirth, 71, 89, 91-93, 99-101, 105 Remizov, Α., 9 Revolt, 52, 63, 77 Revolution, 16, 22, 24-26, 40, 102-103 Richards, D. J., 8n, 15, 41n Romanticism, 49-50 Roundness (see also Circular, the), 54, 57 Rovinskij, D., 44n Rus' [In Old Russia], 20, 26, 102 Sacrifice, 100 Satire, 8, 10, 15, 19, 27, 40-42, 44-45, 47, 51, 104 Science, 39, 44-46, 49, 51 Scourge of God, The [BiC BoZij], 8 Scriabin, Α., 50 Sea-journey, 89-90 Self, 29, 33-35, 38, 50, 58-60, 62-64, 6970, 77-79, 90, 104-105 Senkovskij-Brambeus, O., 44n Sever [The North], 25, 81, 89n, 97n Sexual, the, 16-21, 23-25, 29-35, 37, 4750, 53-56, 58, 60-61, 63-64, 66, 70, 73, 75-76, 84-85, 88-93, 94n, 98-103, 105 Shadow figure, 75 Shane, A. M., 8n, 10, 15, 22, 25n, 44n, 82n

Simplicity, 50-51; in We, 54, 63, 70; in Zamjatin's writing, 9,82,105 Skaz, 81-82 Jklovskij, V., 7, 68 Smithy [Kuznica], 42 Socialism, 7, 38, 40, 49 Society (see also Civilization), 29, 39, 40, 49-50,53; bourgeois, 35,38,69 Society of Honorary Bell-Ringers, The [ObSöestvo poietnyx zvonarej], 2In, 27 Solzenicyn, Α., 7 Sostakovic, D., 68n Soviet, 52; reaction to Zamjatin, 7, 15, 27, 39-40, 47, 79n, 81; Union, 15, 27 40-41,81 Speed, 67, 87 Spycher, P., 69n Square, 78 Stalin, J., 7, 15, 41 State, the, 24, 40, 47-51, 74 Sterility, 95-96, 100, 103 Story About the Most Important Thing', Ά ['Rasskaz ο samom glavnom'], 8, 24-25, 68, 81-82, 97n, 102 Struggle (see also Conflict), 17, 51, 62, 74, 79 Subjective imagery, 67-68 Submission, 21-25, 78 Sun, 35-37, 59, 61, 101 Symbolism, 10, 34-35, 37, 80, 83, 91, 97, 99-100; color in We, 52-60, womb, 9799 Symbols (see also Images, Metaphor), 28, 30-34, 36-37, 82-83, 88-89, 92, 105; archetypal, 70 Synthesis, 104-105 Tales for Grown-Up Children [BoVsim detjam skazki], 81 Time, compression of, 87 Tjut&v, F., 43n Tolstoj, Α. Ν., 44n Tolstoj, L., 11, 18, 20, 59 Tragic, the, 9, 82 Transformation, 77 Transcendence, 59-60, 72, 76,105 Transcendental journey, 76, 85-86 Turgenev, I., 35, 62n Uezdnoe [A Provincial Tale], 8-9, 15-20, 26, 65 Unsconscious, the, 69-70,73,76-77,80,89 Underground, the, 72-73, 76

INDEX Utopia, 41-52, 67 Vegetable world, 100-101 Von Franz, M.-L., 77-78 Voronskij, Α., 15n, 22, 41, 47n Walls, 62-65, 73 Water, 35, 37-38, 61-62, 71, 89-90, 93-97, 102-103 We [My], 7-9, 15-16, 22-26, 28, 36, 38-43, 45-81, 89, 97n, 98n, 102-103 Weather, 35-38, 93, 95-97 Wedding symbolism, 83, 86-89 Wells, H. G., 9, 36, 39, 41n, 43-52; Anticipations, 46, 48, 50; In the Days of the Comet, 45, 47-48; Mankind in the Ma-

117

king, 47-48; Men Like Gods, 51; A Modern Utopia, 47-48, 51-52; The World Set Free, 47, 49 Wilson, Ε., 28n Winner, Τ., 28n Womb, The [Xrevo], 20, 24-26, 102, 104 Womb symbolism, 97-99 World Literature, 43 'Zakulisy' ['Back-Stage'], 44n, 66n-67n, 79-80, 82n Zamiatine, Mme L. N. (see also Biographical points, Zamjatin) 79n, 82n Zavety, 17 Ziolkowskii, Τ., 60n Zoä&nko, M., 7

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