What's There, Beyond that? Dostoevsky and Zamiatin

Abstract

Unlike many of his contemporaries, old and young, Zamiatin mentioned Dostoevsky relatively rarely even in his remarkable essays, literary manifestos, and lectures. By all accounts, Zamiatin's attitude toward the work of this writer, who has often been called the prophet of the Russian Revolution, was restrained and even, lacking emotional and symbolic emphases (D. Merezhkovskii, Viach. Ivanov, and others), any raging esthetic or psychological rejection (I. Bunin), or any intense, inevitably subjective contentiousness (P. Florenskii, and later V. Shalamov in The Fourth Vologda [Chetvertaia Vologda] and Kolyma Tales [Kolymskie rasskazy]).