Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/4

xiv Here is a book written by an artist who lived and still lives in Russia, and whose intimate love for Russia and her suffering is so great that he finds it impossible to leave Russia even in these days of stress and sorrow. But his book may not appear in the country where it was written. It is a great tragedy—this spiritual loneliness of the artist who cannot speak to his own people. In bringing out this book in English, the author tries to address himself to the world without having the opportunity of being heard by his own people. This situation, however, is to a great extent symbolic of the spiritual mission of Zamiatin, for no matter what the language in which he writes originally, and no matter how typically national his artistic perception and intuition, he is essentially universal, and his vision transcends the boundaries of a purely national art. Moreover, is it not true that the more genuinely national a man's art, and the more sincerely national his personality, the more universal he becomes? Abraham Lincoln is much more than just an American national figure, and I doubt if the appeal of Lincoln’s personality would be so universal if he were not so typically American. It would be difficult to find personalities more national than Tolstoi or Dostoevsky, and this is perhaps the reason why they stand out as two of the most universal minds with a universal appeal that the nineteenth century has given us.

Zamiatin is not so great as the men referred to above, but despite his youth, he has already proved to have that quality of greatness that characterizes a personality with a universal appeal.

We is, as Zamiatin himself calls it, the most jocular and the most earnest thing he has written thus far. It is a novel that puts before every thoughtful reader with great poignance and earnestness the most difficult problem that exists today in the civilized world—the problem of the preservation of the independent, original, creative personality. Our civilization depends upon the energetic movement of great masses of people. Wars, revolutions, general strikes—all