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Part of the book: Mining for Jewels

Philip Cavendish

MHRA Texts and Dissertations 51

Maney Publishing for the Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract.  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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