Evgenii Zamiatin's reputation rests on the pivotal role he played in the development of Russian modernism. Hitherto, however, critical engagement with the experimental nature of his fiction has been largely confined to his middle period: the satirical stories set in Great Britain, the dystopian novel My, and related works. As a writer who came to prominence at the time of the October Revolution, Zamiatin is best known as an early and vocal critic of the new culture of conformism, and as the author in the 1920s of various artistic manifestoes in which he engaged with the problem of literature's future in relation to the Revolution, and sought to articulate his own brand of synthetic modernism.
This study presents a different and complementary view of Zamiatin as a writer whose fiction, whilst certainly modernist, conformed to what Eikhenbaum termed 'literary Populism'. Zamiatin's intimate knowledge of the Russian provinces and the world of folk-religious culture are key elements in the skaz-style conceit which underpins his early fiction.This study stresses Zamiatin's enormous debt to such writers as Leskov and Remizov, and locates his work within a rich tradition of ethnographic belles-lettres and oral-based fiction. The texts analysed exploit materials from the folk-religious imagination in an attempt to refresh and 'democratize' the literary language through the use of the peasant vernacular. Zamiatin sought immediacy and dynamism in his provincial prose, and his works in this mould are best appreciated through the prism of twentieth-century neoprimitivism and expressionism. Their lubok-style simplicity, however, conceals a complex attitude towards the folk-religious world at their core. The poetic and celebratory is balanced by the sceptical and ironic, and the resulting tension characterizes these texts as essentially modernistic.
This book, originally published in paperback in 2000 under the ISBN 978-1-902653-27-3, was made Open Access in 2025 as part of the MHRA Revivals programme.
Contents:
i-xiv, 1-285
Mining for Jewels: Evgenii Zamiatin and the Literary Stylization of Rus' Philip Cavendish Complete volume as single PDF
Alex M. Shane wrote his ground-breaking study of Zamiatin more than thirty years after his death; since then, another thirty years have passed. During this period a great deal has changed in our under- standing of this writer. His status as a key figure in the development of modern Russian literature, a status long accepted in the West, but vigorously resisted for almost six decades by the Soviet cultural establishment, is no longer a source of dispute. The situation could not be better for those interested in his achievement. His previously banned works of fiction have now been published, many for the first time since 1929, and his stories are part of the school syllabus. Despite the cornucopia of material which has accumulated over the decades since the appearance of Shane's study, it is striking nevertheless how relatively one-sided and narrow the focus of attention has been.
(i) Background - (ii) Early career and critical reception - (iii) The influence of Remizov and the poetics of neorealism - (iv) Skaz and the invisible author - (v) The scope of this study.
'Poludennitsa (Kuny)' is an incomplete text which Zamiatin offered for the approval of the military censors at some point between 1914 and 1916. The manuscript, made available to the editors of Neimanis by Natal´ia Borisovna Sollogub, and published for the first time in 1988, consists of some twenty pages, along with two alternative introductions.
The opening lines of 'Kriazhi', which picture a forest so dense that a person can walk for an entire day without meeting another soul, establish the themes of isolation and marginality with an explicitness rare in Zamiatin's prose fiction. For the first time, moreover, this entity is given a sobriquet, Rus', with all its connotations of primordial solidity, strength, and durability.
The short story 'Afrika', which Zamiatin published in issue no. 4/5 of the journal Severnye zapiski for 1916, explores the twilight zone between dream and reality. Its use of a seemingly celestial female figure, associated symbolically with the colour white to imply the existence of a transcendental reality, to a great extent anticipates Zamiatin's reading of the eternal feminine theme as it appears in the work both of Sologub and the Symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok.
If 'Afrika' is about a searcher who undertakes a spiritual quest in order to recapture an unearthly experience, 'Znamenie' is about a sceptic who seeks but ultimately fails to find salvation in religious faith.
Zamiatin's carnivalesque predisposition was illustrated by a number of laughter texts in the post-revolutionary period, some of them satirical, some of them merely jocular. The four Theta tales, possibly the first attempt to lampoon the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin in literature, were published in October and November 1917 in Delo naroda. These were followed shortly afterwards by 'Tulumbas', Zamiatin's response to Remizov's Obezvelvolpal manifesto; the coded 'history' of the World of Literature publishing venture; the Panoptikum section of the journal Russkii sovremennik, penned by Zamiatin himself and his co-editor Kornei Chukovskii; and the 'epitaphs' and greetings delivered at various gatherings of writers and satirical societies. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the playful impiety of the hagiographic parodies had their analogy in the anarchic, sometimes obscene, and anticlerical antics for which itinerant players acquired their reputation in pre-Petrine Russia.
Irreconcilable and conflicting elements lie at the very heart of Zamiatin's writing. He was an agnostic who encouraged his students to study the ecclesiastical literature of antiquity; a modernist who delved deep into the ancient strata of the language in order to give his prose muscularity, durability, and exoticism; and an intellectual who succeeded in evoking the life and language of the folk with tremendous resonance, and yet at the same time with an almost patrician sense of irony and humour. Unlike his Populist predecessors, Zamiatin refused to idealize the peasant; and it was precisely the mercilessness of his gaze which caused Marxist critics after the Revolution, wrongly in my view, to accuse him of reactionary sympathies. Such attacks, which were politically motivated rather than honestly felt, confused moral imperative with cynicism and a sense of superiority, and it can only be hoped that now scholars are free to engage with Zamiatin's work in an independent way this aspect of his fiction will receive due recognition.
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Bibliography entry:
Cavendish, Philip, Mining for Jewels: Evgenii Zamiatin and the Literary Stylization of Rus', MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 51 (MHRA, 2000)
First footnote reference:35 Philip Cavendish, Mining for Jewels: Evgenii Zamiatin and the Literary Stylization of Rus', MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 51 (MHRA, 2000), p. 21.
Subsequent footnote reference:37 Cavendish, p. 47.
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