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20 February 1884—10 March 1937

Humanistic Heretic

Ideals inspire humans to transcend the here and now and struggle for a better future. Without them, we become frozen in the present, unable to envision alternatives to the here and now. But ideals can become deadly if they harden into dogma. Then, instead of liberating the spirit, they kill it. Instead of leading us to an open-ended future, they imprison us in the present.

The Russian novelist and essayist Yevgeny Zamyatin knew firsthand that dogmatized ideals can be made to justify violence and oppression. The son of a Russian Orthodox priest, he threw his lot in with the Bolsheviks while still in his teens. During his twenties, while studying naval engineering, he was arrested and exiled by the Tsarist government several times. When the 1917 revolution overthrew the Romanov dynasty, Zamyatin rejoiced that an era of oppression and violence had ended.

But he soon discovered that the old system of oppression was replaced by a new one. The very communitarian ideals that had led him to become a Bolshevik were soon exploited by Lenin and his lieutenants to suppress freedom of thought and action. In the name of Soviet solidarity, books were censured and authors silenced; life became increasingly regimented; private hopes and ambitions took backseats to collectivist goals; religion was persecuted and repressed; and surveillance became a way of life.

Zamyatin, who turned from engineering to writing, protested against what he called the “entropy of thought” cultivated by totalitarianism. In his essays he warned against embracing dead ideals that freeze the human spirit and transform people into facsimiles of “Lot’s wife, already turned into a pillar of salt, already sunk into the earth.” In his most famous novel, We, he describes a closed society encased within high and impenetrable walls in which personal names have given way to numbers, each moment of the day is strictly regimented and monitored, and creative thought is discouraged and severely punished whenever it crops up. Zamyatin’s chilling portrait of what can happen when ideals go entropic inspired later novels such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984.

As an alternative to the dead ideals of totalitarianism, Zamyatin recommends what he calls “heresy.” “The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Their symbol of faith is heresy.” The heretic, the individual who insists on thinking for him or herself even to the point of risking persecution and death, is “the only remedy against the entropy of thought.” In calling for heresy, Zamyatin, who eventually fled the Soviet Union to die in poverty in France, advocated a form of nonviolent resistance to oppressive structures that deny individuals their humanity.