turned from the future depicted in We to suggestions of the primordial past in his famous story 'The Cave.' His eerie picture of man's reversion to stone-age conditions during the Civil War begins with a verbless vignette:
Glaciers, mammoths, wastelands. Nocturnal, black rocks somehow like houses; in the rocks-caves.133
Within the caves, men forage around in search of food and fuel, furtively hiding from 'the icy roar of some super-mammothish mammoth' which 'roamed at night among the rocks where ages ago Petersburg had stood.' In one of the caves, amidst such symbolic artifacts as an axe and a copy of Scriabin's Opus 74, a cultured hero sits half-hypnotized by 'the greedy
View of Russian Liberalism
PLATE XX
'new men' during the reign of Alexander II viewed the rising power of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie is reflected in the masthead (Plate XX) of the satirical journal Iskra ('The Spark'). This short-lived journal, by borrowing from the radical press of England and France the weapon of political caricature, paved the way for future Soviet propagandists. The masthead depicted here was first introduced early in 1861.
The coiling serpent is labeled 'disrespect for law, for the rights of personality and property . . . self-assumed power and fist-justice . . .' The human parade moves from money through gambling, alcohol, and 'speculators' to a scene that shows a mounted, villainous 'monopoly' triumphant over a cringing and obese caricature of Justice, whose scales show money far outweighing 'truth.' At the far right emerge the final fruits of the depraved system: the cannon-bearing zealots of the new post-Crimean chauvinism, a woman trumpeting 'publicity,' and a man pushing the locomotive that was spreading the new industrial order throughout the empire. It seems appropriate that Lenin later chose the same title, Iskra (derived in both cases from earlier usage by the Decembrists), for the seminal weekly publication of revolutionary Bolshevism, which he founded in 1900.
PLATE XXII
PLATE XXI
imperial periuu is weu miuirutci* uy iuuH.r»v›. ^ ~j namic Suprematism' (Plate XXI): a typical product of the revolutionary style of non-objective art which he conceived in 1913, proclaimed in a manifesto of 1915, and exemplified in a variety of such paintings during the period of war and revolution.
The cultural richness and stylistic variety of this age was obliterated by the canonization under Stalin of 'socialist realism,' a two-dimensional poster art devoted largely to the glorification of socialist construction and, increasingly, Great Russian historical successes.
There were, however, more imaginative efforts to portray the ideal of the new proletarian culture; and Malevich (unlike most of the best experimental artists from the pre-revolutionary era) stayed on in the U.S.S.R. until his death in 1935, seeking to introduce the leaven of art into the dough of a new mass culture. The sturdy but faceless form of his simple, semi-abstract 'Woman with a Rake (Plate XXII) offers a cleaner artistic statement of the idealized 'heroine of socialist labor' than official Soviet art, and a secular icon to replace the semi-abstract religious image of a woman with child with which the illustrations for this book (and in many ways the story of Russian culture) begin. It is perhaps a fitting, final irony that the Byzantine Vladimir 'Mother of God' is still on public view in the Tret'ia-kov Gallery in Moscow, whereas this thoroughly contemporary Russian painting of a working woman is consigned to the reserve collection of the same museum.
cave-god: a cast-iron stove.' In a weird sequence of scenes, the Christian symbols he mentions initially fade away and he becomes in effect a stone age man-robbing his neighbor and burning all available written work in order to feed his new God. At the end of the story
. . . everything is one gigantic, silent cave. Narrow endless passageways… dark, ice-encrusted rocks; and in the rocks are deep holes glowing crimson; there, in the holes by the fire are people squatting . . . and heard by no one, . . . over the boulders, over the caves, over the squatting people comes the huge, measured tread of some super-mammothish mammoth.
In his 'On Literature, Revolution and Entropy,' written in 1923, Zamiatin made explicit his opposition to the 'measured tread of the mammoth' that was taking over Russia:
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
