Chapter 4: Petrograd (1917–1921)
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Chapter 4: Petrograd (1917–1921) Upon his return to Russia, and finding himself caught up just weeks later in the tremendous upheavals of the October Revolution taking place in the city all around him, Zamiatin promptly jettisoned his primary career in the shipyards as an engineer, retaining only his part-time teaching post at the Polytechnic. With a new world appar- ently opening up, he decided that now was the moment to throw himself fully into pursuing his vocation as a writer. His role during the 1920s would be not only that of an author, but also that of a lit- erary specialist — as a critic, reviewer, editor and administrator — and equally as a teacher of the new generation of writers. He brought to these tasks an uncommon degree of professionalism, the legacy of his previous experiences of employment. Now in his early 30s, he was someone accustomed to working independently and to taking respon- sible decisions, and he possessed considerable personal authority. In the documents that have survived to illustrate the next decade or so, the personal largely recedes from view, and the public figure steps for- ward. The Zamiatins created a striking impression when they arrived back home: “I recall a greyish autumn day in 1917. At that point Petersburg was no longer Petersburg, nor yet Leningrad — but Petrograd. […] There was a ring at the door. […] In came a young cou- ple, fresh and cheerful and smartly dressed, not in a Petersburg style, but precisely in an English style. The Zamiatins had only just returned then from England. […] The English way of life had suited them, they had quickly adapted to it and taken on some aspects of English ways, and to the end of their days they preserved English manners in their look, their style of dressing and of welcoming guests. […] He was liv- ing at that time with his wife, who was a graceful, extremely attractive small woman with frail health.” His neighbour Avgusta Damanskaia goes on to describe him chopping wood in the bitter winter months Chapter 4 87 with a short English pipe clenched in his teeth, then sitting down afterwards to relax at the piano by playing studies or nocturnes by Scriabin, not as a virtuoso, but with a genuine lyricism which belied the apparent cold restraint of his outward manner.1 Even though his first impressions of England had been rather hostile, he had brought back with him to Russia the outward trappings of an English gentle- man. His somewhat formal guise as an “Englishman” in dress and manner in post-Revolutionary Russia was an image which he would foster, since this conservative mask seemed to embolden him to assume a certain independence of spirit amongst his peers, something which he cherished above all things. One crucial new friendship he made at this time was with Maksim Gor’ky. He was the notorious author of socialist classics such as his play set in a doss-house, The Lower Depths (1902), and the novel about rebellious factory workers which was later to provide the design model for Soviet Socialist Realism, Mother (1906). After his return from political exile in 1913, Gor’ky had thrown himself into the literary and cultural life of St Petersburg, establishing himself as the leader of progressive literature through his publishing ventures and his encouragement of young writers, especially those of humble social origins.2 He had already published some of Zamiatin’s stories in Letopis’ during 1916, and immediately after the latter’s return in 1917 he accepted a new story, Eyes. This was Zamiatin’s allegorical sketch about a yard-dog with beautiful, painfully human eyes, who runs away briefly from his brutal master, but returns abjectly for a bowl of rotting meat. However, his first conversation with Gor’ky in the edi- torial office was not about this text, but all about technology and the construction of icebreakers. Gor’ky himself was patchily educated as far as mathematics (and indeed foreign languages) were concerned, and he was fascinated by Zamiatin’s range of expertise. Much later, Zamiatin recalled: “I returned to Petersburg only in the autumn of 1917, and met Gor’ky then for the first time. And so it happened that I encountered him and the Revolution simultaneously. For this reason the image of Gor’ky is unfailingly linked in my memory with the new, post-revolutionary Russia.” Soon he would be caught up in helping to run the ambitious projects Gor’ky, in his role as unofficial Bolshevik Minister of Culture, undertook in order to preserve literature and keep writers alive during the grim years of the Civil War (1918–21): the “World Literature” scheme to publish foreign classics in translation, a series of the “100 Best Books of Russian Literature,” the Committee 88 Chapter 4 for “Historical Drama,” teaching at the Literature Studio, and at the House of Arts.3 Meanwhile, however, one essential reason for their closeness lay in their very similar reactions to the October 1917 seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, and its aftermath. Zamiatin’s fictional and non-fictional writings of 1917–19 convey his instant hostility to the Leninist leadership, and to Bolshevik pol- icies and methods. The excitement he had felt in England about the overthrow of the Tsar in February 1917 soon turned to dismay when the liberal constitutional aspirations of the Provisional Government were swept aside in the Bolsheviks’ October coup, consolidated in January 1918 when they forcibly closed down the democratically- elected Constituent Assembly. He accused the Bolsheviks of “stealing the honourable title of socialists and democrats, until it became entirely indecent for them to bear these names.”4 Within weeks of the October Revolution, he started publishing blatant personal attacks on Lenin in his four Fairytales about Fita, where Fita is a strange “predominantly male” being, balding and pot-bellied, who is born spontaneously from a pile of dusty papers in a police basement. In one tale, Fita attempts to quash starvation and cholera by decree; in another, he tears down a cathedral to build a pointless road; in the third, he compels the “free” citizens to march and sing songs of praise to him; and in the final tale, anticipating the One State in We, Fita obliges all citizens to live in a barracks and wear identical grey uniforms, with shaved heads and numbered metallic badges. Ultimately, Fita decrees that every- one — including himself — should become equally moronic in the name of happiness and egalitarian democracy, and utter nothing but grunts. In June 1918, using the pseudonym “Mikh[ail] Platonov” (based on his mother’s surname), which he adopted for many of his publications during these months, Zamiatin published The Great Sewage Disposal Man, about a man who takes power in Russia, “poetically” obsessed with sewage schemes, and who simply comes to stink more and more of excrement. His absolute abhorrence of violence finds expression in a sketch he wrote in the final weeks of 1917, Thursday, in which the igno- rant older brother (called “bol’shen’kiy” to associate him with the Bolsheviks) mindlessly slaughters anyone and anything which dis- agrees with him.5 Opposition to violence is also the theme of the very first article he wrote after the Revolution, which was published in Gor’ky’s short-lived anti-Leninist journal Novaia zhizn’ (New Life) on 11 January 1918. It was prompted by the lynching on 6–7 January of two Chapter 4 89 Constitutional Democrat politicians, who were under arrest, by sailors who burst into the hospital where they were being treated. Zamiatin indicted the recent articles in Pravda (The Truth) which had fomented the violence by calling for a campaign of mass terror, in the wake of an assassination attempt on Lenin at the beginning of the year.6 Gor’ky echoed his outrage about the lynching in articles of his own in Novaia zhizn’ during these weeks.7 In articles written during that spring of 1918 (“About Lackeys” and “The Rebellion of the Capitalists”), Zamiatin tried to show how violence breeds violence. Furthermore, he condemned the left wing of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party for joining forces with the Bolsheviks at the very moment when Soviet militias were arresting and executing the workers in whose name they had carried out the Revolution, after those self-same workers demonstrated against them.8 In December 1917 he wrote The Cherubim, in which Russia is depicted as a land of bayonets, torture and executions, where angels simply dare not settle.9 One of his most powerful miniatures of this period, The Dragon, pub- lished in March 1918 in the Socialist-Revolutionary newspaper Delo naroda (The People’s Cause), portrayed a “dragon” man who boasts of having mercilessly despatched a member of the intelligentsia, and whose eyes, the only “two slits through from the world of delirium into the world of men” remain for the most part concealed under his heavy cap. Only very briefly does he emerge as a human being when he puts his bayonet down on the floor of the tram, and warms a fro- zen sparrow back to life in his cupped hands. Zamiatin was appalled when the death sentence, triumphantly abolished the very day after the October Revolution, was reintroduced the following summer to deal with opponents to Soviet power.10 In the spring of 1919, he issued a heartfelt plea for the phase of Revolutionary destruction, however necessary it had been, to cease, and for peace and reconstruction to take place: “You cannot plough with a machine-gun. And it has long since been time to get down to some ploughing.”11 He was also dismayed by developments on the cultural scene.