A Soviet heretic

INCREASE YOUR READING PLEASURE This illumination from Yevgeny Zamyatin will help you discover and read good literature that brims your heart and soul with pleasure. It shoots its rays into the dark recesses of the human heart, into the dark energy of cosmic space and into the very heart of primordial energy itself. The introduction by Alex Shane lets you know right at the outset that you will be cozying up to a mind that has conquered Mount Everest and from that vantage is reporting on shadows and shifting brilliancies, sunrise, sunset, the flaming arc passing over our lives and the dark crevices of our souls. The editor's preface notes that Yevgeny Zamyatin . . . "is a consummate craftsman, he was enormously concerned with the problems of craft. But he also is a thoroughly `engaged' writer, equally involved with the problem of the artist in society--a problem, as he saw it, both political and philosophic. He had an extraordinary sense of time, of the constant flow and flux of history. And it was perhaps his refusal to accept the absolute--as well as the romantic humanist values he refused to abandon--that brought him into sharpest conflict with the absolutist." The book proper begins with three Autobiographies: the first written in 1922, the second 1924 and the third in 1929. The first two are pale pencil sketches of less then two pages each. In the first autobiography Yevgeny writes "And so you insist on my autobiography. But you will have to content yourself with a purely external view, with perhaps a fleeting glance into darkened windows: I rarely invite anyone to come inside. And from the outside you will not see much. The third autobiography, a large detailed painting containing many narrative brushstrokes makes one eager to continue reading to better understand the way Yevgeny saw the world, especially Russia and the arresting affect it had on its artists. Yevgeny saw that some artists became propagandists; others became dull craftsmen not wanting to rock the boat. And then there were a few, who like Yevgeny, wrote imaginative, independent, boisterous pieces that went of like a bomb shooting shrapnel into the bureaucracy; their writings led to the gulags or exile. The book has five sections. The first section contains the three autobiographies previously mentioned and the remaining four sections contain the essays. The second section, The State of Russian Literature, contains fifteen essays, each highly instructive and as beautifully written as a novel by Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. Illustrative is the essay, On Synthetism which developed new ways to view literature. In this essay Yevgeny boldly starts out: "+, --, -- -- These are the three schools in art, and there are no others. Affirmation, negation, and synthesis--the negation of negation. The syllogism is closed, the circle is completed." This precise statement was written by a successful engineer who supervised building ships for Russia and various technical insti