Volume 8, Number 11 · June 15, 1967
The Literature of Nightmare
By Helen Muchnic
The Dragon
by Yevgeny Zamyatin, translated by Mirra Ginsburg
Random House, 291 pp., $5.95
Fierce and Gentle Warriors
by Mikhail Sholokhov, translated by Miriam Morton
Doubleday, 109 pp., $3.95
One Man's Destiny
by Mikhail Sholokhov, translated by H.C. Stevens
Knopf, 271 pp., $4.95
Babi Yar
by Anatoly Kuznetsov, translated by Jacob Guralsky
Dial, 399 pp., $5.95
It was with reference to Zamyatin that Trotsky in 1923, in his Literature and Revolution, coined the term 'inner émigré' to define an attitude and a quality of writing which he resented, a scornful aloofness to the Revolution, a spiritual isolation that seemed to him willful and snobbish. He was only partly right; Zamyatin was indeed aloof, but neither snobbish nor indifferent. He sensed how things were going; wrote We, that famous satire on totalitarianism which inspired Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World, but which has never been published in Russia; and presently, finding his position in the USSR untenable—suddenly deprived of his various editorial positions, unable to publish his stories, his play taken off the boards—changed from inner to outward émigré, and ended his days in Paris, in 1937.
Review, 2902 words
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