Showing papers on "Dystopia published in 1986"

Yevgeny Zamyatin: The Essential, the Superfluous, and Textual Noise

Abstract: Revolution and heresy have become synonymous with the name of Yevgeny Zamyatin. These terms, employed frequently throughout Zamyatin's writings-in essays like "Scythians?" "I Am Afraid," and "On Literature, Revolution, and Entropy," and in the dystopian novel Wehave been picked up by readers as critical catch-phrases. D. J. Richards's work is entitled Zamyatin: A Soviet Heretic'; Alex M. Shane calls the biographical section of his The Life and Works ofEvgenij Zamjatin "The Biography of a Heretic"'; and Mirra Ginsburg's collection of Zamyatin's essays also bears the title A Soviet Heretic.3 As these titles suggest, revolution and heresy have been seen to be central issues in the works of this Soviet writer. And indeed they are. But their pervasive presence in Zamyatin's writings does not mean that they completely control those writings, or that they offer no problems for the critical reader. For to speak of revolution and heresy is to speak of a certain relationship with law, and it is the ambiguity of this relationship-of the interdependence of revolution and law, heresy and dogma-that interferes with any simple and unproblematic understanding of these two terms. It is an interference that often clouds the transparent clarity of the Zamyatin text. Such clouding obscures even such a seminal essay as "On Literature, Revolution, and Entropy," the piece that perhaps more than any other earns Zamyatin his revolutionary and heretical reputation. Revolution in this essay does not seem to be a problem, with Zamyatin going "one stage beyond the alphabet" to "articulate our answer" to the question, "What is revolution?"4 The answer is given in terms of construction and destruction; in terms of the melting of solidified dogma by the fires of heresy: "When (in science, religion, social life, art) a flaming, seething sphere grows cold, the fiery molten rock becomes covered with dogma-with a