The followig post is
the original essay of Yevgeny Zamyatin, which is copued from the book A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin
On Literature, Revolution,
Entropy, and Other Matters (1923)
Name
me the final number, the highest, the greatest.
But
that’s absurd! If the number of numbers is infinite, how can there be a final
number?
Then
how can you speak of a final revolution? There is no final one. Revolutions
are
infinite. (From We)
Ask point blank: What is revolution?
Some people will answer, paraphrasing Louis XIV: We are the
revolution. Others will answer by the calendar, naming the month and the day.
Still others will give you an ABC answer. But if we are to go on from the ABC
to syllables, the answer will be this:
Two
dead, dark stars collide with an inaudible, deafening crash and light a new
star: this is revolution. A molecule breaks away from its orbit and, bursting
into a neighbouring atomic universe, gives birth to a new element: this is revolution.
Lobachevsky cracks the walls of the millennia-old Euclidean world with a single
book, opening a path to innumerable non-Euclidean spaces: this is revolution.
Revolution is everywhere, in everything. It is infinite. There
is no final revolution, no final number. The social revolution is only one of
an infinite number of numbers: the law of revolution is not a social law, but
an immeasurably greater one. It is a cosmic, universal law- like the laws of
the conservation of energy and of the dissipation of energy (entropy). Some
day, an exact formula for the law of revolution will be established. And in
this formula, nations, classes, stars- and books- will be expressed as
numerical quantities.
The law of revolution is red, fiery, deadly: but this death
means the birth of new life, a new star. And the law of entropy is cold, icy
blue, like the icy interplanetary infinities. The flame turns from red to an
even, warm pink, no longer deadly, but comfortable. The sun ages into a planet,
convenient for highways, stores, beds, prostitutes, prisons: this is the law.
And if the planet is to be kindled into youth again, it must be set on fire, it
must be thrown off the smooth highway of evolution: this is the law.
The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. (In
the Book of Genesis days are equal to years, ages). But someone must see this
already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the
only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.
Where the flaming, seething sphere (in science, religion,
social life, art) cools, the fiery magma becomes coated with dogma- a rigid,
ossified, motionless crust. Dogmatisation in science, religion, social life, or
art is the entropy of thought. What has become dogma no longer burns: it only
gives off warmth- it is tepid, it is cool. Instead of the Sermon on the Mount,
under the scorching sun, to upraised arms and sobbing people, there is drowsy prayer
in a magnificent abbey. Instead of Galileo’s ‘But still, it turns!’ there are dispassionate
computations in a well-heated room in an observatory. On the Galileos, the engineers
build their own structures, slowly, bit by bit, like corals. This is the path
of revolution- until a new heresy explodes the crush of dogma and all the
edifices of the most enduring stone which have been raised upon it.
Explosions are not very comfortable. And therefore the exploders,
the heretics, are justly exterminated by fire, by axes, by words. To every today,
to every evolution, to the laborious, slow, useful, most useful, creative,
coral-building work, heretics are a threat. Stupidly, recklessly, they burst
into today from tomorrow; they are romantics. Babeuf was justly beheaded in
1797; he leaped into 1797 across 150 years. It is just to chop off the head of
a heretical literature which challenges dogma; this literature is harmful.
But harmful literature is more useful than useful
literature, for it is antientropic, it is a means of combating calcification,
sclerosis, crust, moss, quiescence. It is utopian, absurdlike Babeuf in 1797.
But it is right 150 years later.
We know Darwin. We know what followed Darwin- mutations,
Weissmanism, neo- Lamarckism. But all of these are attics, balconies: the building
itself is Darwin. And in this building there are not only tadpoles and fungi,
but also man. Fangs are sharpened only when there is someone to gnaw on.
Domestic hens have wings only for flapping. The same is true for hens and for
ideas: ideas nourished on chopped meat cutlets lose their teeth, like
civilised, cutlet-eating man. Heretics are necessary to health; if there are no
heretics, they should be invented.
A literature that is alive does not live by yesterday’s
clock, nor by today’s, but by tomorrow’s. It is a sailor sent aloft: from the
masthead he can see foundering ships, icebergs, and maelstroms still invisible
from the deck. He can be dragged down from the mast and put to tending the
boilers or working the capstan, but that will not change anything: the mast
will remain, and the next man on the masthead will see what the first has seen.
In a storm, you must have a man aloft. We are in the midst
of a storm today, and SOS signals come from every side. Only yesterday a writer
could calmly stroll along the deck, clicking his Kodak (genre); but who will
want to look at landscapes and genre scenes when the world is listing at a
forty-five-degree angle, the green maws are gaping, the hull is creaking? Today
we can look and think only as men do in the face of death: we are about to die-
and what did it all mean? How have we lived? If we could start over again, from
the beginning, what would we live by? And for what? What we need in literature today
are vast philosophic horizons- horizons seen from mastheads, from airplanes; we
need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless ‘Why?’ and ‘What
next?’.
This is what children ask. But then children are the boldest
philosophers. They enter life naked, not covered by the smallest fig leaf of
dogma, absolutes, creeds. This is why every question they ask is so absurdly
naïve and so frighteningly complex. The new men entering life today are as
naked and fearless as children; and they, too, like children, like Schopenhauer,
like Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, ask “Why?’ and ‘What next?’ Philosophers of
genius, children, and the people are equally wise- because they ask equally
foolish questions. Foolish to a civilised man who has a well-furnished European
apartment, with an excellent toilet, and a well-furnished dogma.
Organic chemistry has already obliterated the line between living
and dead matter. It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead:
there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The
dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only
machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive
are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.
The same is true of what we write: it walks and it talks,
but it can be dead-alive or alivealive. What is truly alive stops before
nothing and ceaselessly seeks answers to absurd, ‘childish’ questions. Let the
answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken- errors are more valuable than
truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs.
And if answers be impossible of attainment, all the better! Dealing with answered
questions is the privilege of brain’s constructed like a cow’s stomach, which,
as we know, is built to digest cud.
If
there were anything fixed in nature, if there were truths, all of this would, of
course, be wrong. But fortunately, all truths are erroneous. This is the very
essence of the dialectical process: today’s truths become errors tomorrow;
there is no final number.
This truth (the only one) is for the strong alone.
Weak-nerved minds insist on a finite universe, a last number; they need, in
Nietzsche’s words, ‘the crutches of certainty’. The weak-nerved lack the
strength to include themselves in the dialectic syllogism. True, this is
difficult. But it is the very thing that Einstein succeeded in doing: he
managed to remember that he, Einstein, observing motion with a watch in hand,
was also moving; he succeeded at looking at the motion of the earth from outside.
This
is precisely how a great literature, which knows no final numbers, looks at the
movements of the earth.
The formal character of a living literature is the same as
its inner character: it denies verities, it denies what everybody knows and
what I have known until this moment. It departs from the canonical tracks, from
the broad highway. The broad highway of Russian literature, worn to a high
gloss by the giant wheels of Tolstoy, Gorky, and Chekhov, is Realism, daily
life; hence, we must turn away from daily life. The tracks canonised and
sanctified by Blok, Sologub, and Bely are the tracks of Symbolism, which
renounced daily life; hence, we must turn toward daily life.
Absurd? Yes. The intersection of parallel lines is also
absurd. But it is absurd only in the canonic, plane geometry of Euclid. In
non-Euclidean geometry it is an axiom. All you need is to cease to be plane, to
rise above the plane. To literature today the plane surface of daily life is
what the earth is to an airplane- a mere runway from which to take off, in order
to rise aloft, from daily life to the realities of being, to philosophy, to the
fantastic. Let yesterday’s cart creak along the well-paved highways. The living
have strength enough to cut away their yesterday.
Whether you put a police inspector or a commissar into the
cart, it remains a cart. And literature will remain the literature of yesterday
even if you drive ‘revolutionary life’ along the well-travelled highway- and
even if you drive it in a dashing troika with bells. What we need today are
automobiles, airplanes, flickering, flight, dots, dashes, seconds.
The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the
past: today the rule is brevity- but every word must be supercharged,
high-voltage. We must compress into a single second what was held before in a
sixty-second minute. And hence, syntax becomes elliptic, volatile; the complex
pyramids of periods are dismantled stone by stone into independent sentences.
When you are moving fast, the canonised, the customary eludes the eye: hence,
the unusual, often startling, symbolism and vocabulary. The image is sharp, synthetic,
with a single salient feature- the one feature you will glimpse from a speeding
car. The custom-hallowed lexicon has been invaded by provincialisms,
neologisms, science, mathematics, technology.
If this becomes the rule, the writer’s talent consists in making
the rule the exception. There are far more writers who turn the exception into
the rule.
Science and art both project the world along certain coordinates.
Differences in form are due only to differences in the coordinates. All
realistic forms are projections along the fixed, plane coordinates of Euclid’s
world. These coordinates do not exist in nature. Nor does the finite, fixed
world: this world is a convention, an abstraction, an unreality. And therefore
Realism- be it ‘socialist’ or ‘bourgeois’- is unreal. Far closer to reality is projection
along speeding, curved surfaces- as in the new mathematics and the new art. Realism
that is not primitive, not realia but realiora, consists in
displacement, distortion, curvature, nonobjectivity. Only the camera lens is
objective.
A new form is not intelligible to everyone; many find it difficult.
Perhaps. The ordinary, the banal is, of course, simpler, more pleasant, more
comfortable. Euclid’s world is very simple, and Einstein’s world is very
difficult- but it is no longer possible to return to Euclid. No revolution, no
heresy is comfortable or easy. For it is a leap, it is a break in the smooth
evolutionary curve, and a break is a wound, a pain. But the wound is necessary:
most of mankind suffers from hereditary sleeping sickness, and victims of this sickness
(entropy) must not be allowed to sleep, or it will be their final sleep, death.
The same disease often afflicts artists and writers: they
sink into satiated slumber in forms once invented and twice perfected. And the
lack the strength to wound themselves, to cease loving what they once loved, to
leave their old, familiar apartments filled with the scent of laurel leaves and
walk away into the open field, to start anew.
Of course, to wound oneself is difficult, even dangerous.
But for those who are alive, living today as yesterday and yesterday as today
is still more difficult.
From A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin
