Shortly before his death in 1919, this prince of sensualism retreated altogether from the Revolutionary chaos around him to the Monastery of St. Sergius and the Holy Trinity, where he wrote his Apocalypse of Our Time. The Russian Revolution was, he declared, a catastrophe of apocalyptical proportions for all human civilization. It was the result not of Revolutionary agitation but of the total failure of Christianity to deal with the social and physical spheres of life. Believing that the original apocalypse of St. John was written as an indictment of the early Christian Church, Rozanov designed his new apocalypse as an indictment of the modern church, which has stood by helplessly amidst war, famine, and revolution, making the flight to Bolshevism all but inevitable. Rozanov seemed to be longing for the church to reassert in this Time of Troubles the leadership that it had assumed during the Smuta three centuries earlier, which had led to the national revival of the seventeenth century under the new Romanov dynasty. Appropriately enough, Rozanov wrote his Apocalypse in the Monastery of St. Sergius, which alone had not fallen under foreign domination during this earlier Time of Troubles. He received the sacrament shortly before his death, which took place (to cite the title of one of his best works) 'in the shadow of church walls.'129
In Rozanov's religion, the flesh was made word, rather than the word flesh, as Berdiaev noted. His views represented the fulfillment of the cult of earthy immediacy (pochvennosf) that his idol Dostoevsky had launched. He called for a 'return to the passions and to fire' near the end of the Apocalypse, insisting that there is more theology 'in a bull mounting a cow' than in the ecclesiastical academies, and citing Dostoevsky in support of the
view that 'God has taken the seeds of other universes and sowed them in the earth.'130
Apocalypse and judgment were immediate sensuous realities for Rozanov just as the physical world had been. He could not believe in 'the immortality of the soul' (he invariably put such abstract phrases in quotation marks) but could not bring himself to believe that 'the little red beard' of his best friend would ever perish. He envisaged himself as standing before God on Judgment Day saying nothing, only sobbing and smiling.
Rozanov died early in 1919 before finishing his Apocalypse; but in the following year there was written an even more remarkable description of the coming end, in the prophetic novel We by Eugene Zamiatin. A former naval engineer and Bolshevik, Zamiatin portrays the coming totalitarianism with such penetrating acuteness that We has never yet been published in the USSR. The scene of the novel is 'the United State,' a horrendous Utopia of the future, which has subordinated the earth to a mysterious 'Well-Doer' and a uniform 'Table of Hours.' The latter is a kind of cosmic extension of the railroad timetable: 'that greatest of all monuments of ancient literature.' Election Day is the Day of Unanimity, and order is maintained by electric whips, with death by evaporation the ultimate sanction.
The narrator and hero-like everyone in the United State-is known by a number (D-503) rather than a name. D-503 is still, however, a recognizable human being-indeed, in some ways, a distilled representation of the silver age. He combines Prometheanism and sensualism, the two abiding attitudes of that period; and the tension in the novel arises from the inherent conflict between the two. On the one hand he is the ultimate Prometheus: a mathematician who has built 'the glass, electric, fire-breathing Integral,' an object that is about to 'integrate the indefinite equation of the Cosmos' by sending to all other planets 'the grateful yoke of reason … a mathematically fauldess happiness.' At the same time, however, D-503 suffers from an irrational attachment to a woman, I-330, who is associated with the music of the past, which, unlike the mathematical harmony of the present, is the product of purely individual inspiration ('an extinct form of epilepsy').
I-330 leads D-503 out beyond the Green Wall of the United State to a wilderness in which live the Mephi: semi-bestial survivors of the Two Hundred Years' War which preceded the founding of the United State. The Mephi are, of course, the ultimate sensualists, children of Mephis-topheles, as their name suggests. In their world the breasts of women break through the uniforms of the state like the shoots of plants in spring; fire is worshipped; and insanity advocated as the only form of deliverance. Only
the Mephi have not succumbed to 'the mistake of Galileo' in believing that there is 'a final number.'
In a series of surrealistic scenes, D-503 almost succumbs to their world of energy, which is contrasted with the entropy of the United State. Insisting on the infinite and Dionysian in face of the need for rationality is, however, ominously likened early in the novel to placing one's hand over the barrel of a rifle. As D-503 begins to succumb, this image becomes magnified to apocalyptical proportions. With the 'forces of unreason' on the loose, Doomsday is at hand. D-503 prepares for suicide, but, at the very end, he is mysteriously brought back to daylight. His faith in finitude and the power of reason is restored by an operation which removes his soul. We is not only a brilliant forerunner of the anti-utopian Brave New World and 1984, it is also a culmination of the essentially anti-Christian preoccupation with Prometheanism and sensualism in the late imperial period. It might even be called a kind of black scripture for the satanists. Black masses had, after all, become a fashionable form of diversion in certain aristocratic circles; and Khlebnikov had not been alone in seeing 'the world upside down' and life itself as little more than 'a game in Hell.'131 We is divided into forty 'records' (rather than chapters), a number almost certainly suggested by the length of Christ's temptation and of the flood. It is related in the chronicle form of the Gospels, beginning with a black parody of the first chapter of St. John ('I am only copying-word by word . .. Before taking up arms, we shall try out the word') and a kind of annunciation ('The great historic hour is near, when the first INTEGRAL will rise into limitless space'). It ends with a surrealistic mock passion, crucifixion, descent, and resurrection of a hero whose age is that of Christ at the time of his passion. These events occur in the final 'records,' which correspond to the last days of Christ. The wall is shattered like the temple of Jerusalem; his descent into hell is portrayed through the image of the latrine in the underground railway, where he meets the Anti-God of the sensualists in a satanic parody on the image of Christ seated in glory at the right hand of God the father. Amidst the 'unseen transparent music' of the waters in the latrine, Satan approaches D-503 from a toilet seat to the left. He introduces himself with an affectionate pat, and soon proves to be nothing more than a gigantic phallus: the true God of this neo-primitive and unnaturally erotic age. His 'neighbor' is nothing but 'a forehead-an enormous bald parabola' with 'indefinable yellow lines of wrinkles' that suddenly seemed to be 'all about me.' This strange shape assures D-503 that he is capable of orgasm and not the 'discarded cigarette butt' (which D-503 had assumed himself to be after an unsuccessful attempt at sexual union with I-330).
I understand you, I understand completely-he said-but just the same you must calm down: it is not necessary. All of that will return, it will inevitably return.132
He then tries to get D-503 to believe that 'there is no infinity.' Comforted by this thought, D-503 hastens to finish his chronicle on toilet paper and 'put down a period just as the ancients placed a cross over the pits into which they threw their dead.' In the last record, the fortieth, he is mysteriously resurrected and shown the path to salvation. This is again a kind of parody of the final vision of glory in the New Testament. The walls of the New Jerusalem are 'a temporary wall of high voltage waves'; its bells are one giant Bell (Kolokol), which is the name given a torture chamber. Into it is led a mysterious person with sharp white teeth and dark eyes, a final satanic metamorphosis of the missing Madonna into the sensuous 'unknown lady' of the silver age. As she is placed under 'the Bell' she stares out at D-503 rather like the Queen of Spades in Pushkin's story and Chaikovsky's opera and the Demon of Vrubel's painting. However, for D-503, from whom the soul has now been removed, she is a creature from another world. He turns instead to look on 'the Numbers who have betrayed reason' as they enter into the purgatory of the Gas Chamber, which will reintegrate them in preparation for 'the ascent up the stairs to the machine of the Well-Doer.'
This new heaven was a hell to Zamiatin, for whom Christian imagery was primarily a device for heightening man's sense of the grotesque. Thus, in the comatose aftermath of the Civil War, the author of We turns away from Christian symbols to those of the primordial, pre-Christian world in an effort to depict the unprecedented events that had just taken place. Pil'niak wrote an apostrophe to 'damp mother earth'; and in 1924, the year when Leonov presented a collection of dinosaur fossils consumed by fire as the symbol of the end of the old order, Zamiatin
