The Icon and the Axe

Revolution is everywhere, in everything; it is endless, there is no last revolution, no last number. Social revolution is only one of innumerable numbers: the law of revolution is not social, but infinitely greater-a cosmic and universal law. . . .13i

He invokes Nietzsche to show that dialectical materialism has become the ideological "crutch" for a "weak-nerved" generation unable to face "the fact that today's truths become tomorrow's mistakes. . . . This (the only) truth is only for the strong. . . ." Realism was the literary language appropriate only for the outmoded "flat coordinates of a Euclidian world." True realism now requires a feeling for

The absurd. Yes. The meeting of parallel lines is also absurd. But it is absurd only in the canonical, flat geometry of Euclid: in non-Euclidian geometry it is an axiom. . . . For today's literature the flat surface of life is what the earth is for an airplane: a take-off path for the climb from ordinary life to true being [ot byta ? bytiiu] to philosophy to the fantastic.

Into the world of the fantastic, Zamiatin plunged along with others of the "Serapion Brotherhood," the brilliant new literary group named for a story of Ernst Hoffmann about a hermit in a cave who believed in the reality of his own visions. Primitive images of apocalypse continued to populate the visions of Zamiatin, as can be seen simply from the titles of his later works: Attila and The Flood.135 Zamiatin's work stands as a kind of valedictory not only for the imaginative Silver Age but for the century of cultural ferment that had led up to it. He was gloomily convinced that "the only future for Russian literature is its past";136 and he left behind one last image of the writer's task, an elegiac reprise on the symbol of the sea as apocalypse.137 In times such as these, Zamiatin contends, the writer is like a lonely lookout

on the mast of a storm-tossed ship. He still stands high above the din of the ordinary deckhands, and is better able to survey dispassionately the dangers that lie ahead. Yet he too stands to sink with the ship of humanity, which is already listing at a forty-five-degree angle and may soon be confronted with the all-consuming ninth wave of the apocalypse.

Silence soon fell on this anti-authoritarian modernist. We and many of Zamiatin's other writings could only be published abroad, where he too went in 1931, dying six years later in Paris at the very time when Babel, Pil'niak, Gorky, and others were going to their death within the USSR. Zamiatin's belief in infinite numbers and unending Revolutionary aspiration was giving way to Stalin's world of fixed quotas and five-year plans; crescendo, to silence; electrification, to liquidation.

In summarizing the cultural upheaval during the first three decades of the twentieth century, one may say that all three major currents-Prome-theanism, sensualism, and apocalypticism-helped sweep Russia further away from its moorings in tradition. Intellectuals drifted from one of these rushing currents to another-unable to chart a stable course, but unwilling to look back for familiar landmarks. Each of the three attitudes of the age was an extension of an idea already present among the anguished aristocratic philosophers of the nineteenth century: Prometheanism made explicit the transfer from God to man of the title to dominion over the external world; sensualism brought to the surface their secret fascination with the world of immediate physiological satisfaction and with its demonic patron; apocalypticism represented an agonizing, often masochistic clinging to the Judeo-Christian idea of retribution by those unable to believe in salvation.

The first two emphases in Russian thought can be considered an Eastern intensification of a general European trend. Russian Prometheanism reflected the faith of many Europeans in the new creative vistas opened up by the growth of science, industry, and human inventiveness. This faith was particularly vivid in Eastern Europe, where the rapidly growing, increasingly cosmopolitan cities seemed to offer new possibilities to hitherto static peasant empires.

Sensualism tended to be the creed of the aging aristocrat rather than the prodding parvenu-of those who saw in industrial development the multiplication rather than the solution of the world's problems. Russian sensualism was closely related to the contemporary turn toward sex and irrationalism in men like Swinburne, Wilde, Lawrence, and Rimbaud. Nevertheless, with a few exceptions which properly merit the overused designation of decadence, Russian sensualism was generally less pictorially lurid and programmatically anti-moral than that of the Anglo-French sen-