The critique of technocracy in early Soviet literature: The responses of Zamyatin and Mayakovsky

Abstract

One of the most vital themes in post Symbolist Russian literature was the suspicion of technology. After the revolution of 1917, the Bolshevik leadership clearly formulated the goal of transforming the Soviet Union on the model of Western industrial society and en? couraged a literature which would supply the appropriate political myths. In this context the poets of the Smithy most closely approached that ideal role which Stalin would define as "engineer of the human soul": they chose their name to signify the forging of a new, proletar? ian art and dutifully produced tributes to the present and future Utopia. On the other hand, many artists recoiled from the idolatry of the machine and from the notion of the artist as engineer-propagandist. An important heritage lay in the works of Symbolists such as Blok (1880-1921) and Belyi (1880-1934), who ex? pressed a mystical sensibility that was re? formulated in the 1920s. Both of these major figures denied that material progress could ef? fect a genuine transformation of human life and developed concepts of revolution as apocalyptic spiritual regeneration. As a move? ment, Symbolism had run its course by 1910 ? after experiencing inner division and coming under attack by younger writers who would witness and respond to the Bolsheviks' found? ing of a technocratic state. With almost no ex? ception, the prominent artists of this younger generation disavowed the mystical tendencies of Symbolism, but many of them expressed the sense that real forces of revolution were being betrayed as society underwent a managerial, technological transformation. Writers such as Zamyatin, Olesha, Khlebnikov and Pilnyak all perceived the emergence of a technocratic consciousness [ 1 ] which would define a whole series of social and economic relationships and which would tend to subordinate men to the dictates of the machine in a search for rational? ity and efficiency. In reaction to the assump? tion that quantitative increase in technology would create Utopia, these artists speculated about the loss of human capacities which would ensue as the state acquired power to intrude into the moral and psychic life of the individual. Mayakovsky also participated in these tendencies, but his perception of technol? ogy as a social religion was highly charged with ambiguities. His response was thus fundamental? ly different from that of Zamyatin, who was one of the earliest prophets of the inhumanity of an advanced industrial society [2]. However, a comparison of these writers sheds light upon their shared experience as Russian modernists and delineates two compelling and distinctive contributions to a continuing debate about the existence of the individual in technocratic society. Zamyatin can be defined essentially as a nine? teenth-century romantic in modernist guise. He developed his personality as a man of letters in a stormy period of manifesto-writing and defini? tively expressed the bohemian, avant-garde spirit in his essay "On Literature, Revolution and Entropy" [3]. In contemplating art, science, society and the psychic life of the in? dividual, he identified a dialectic through which new syntheses constantly arise out of the clash between the old and the new, the traditional Susan Layton is Assistant Professor in the Department of German and Slavic Studies at Tulane University, New Orleans.