Skip to content

Quotes from On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters — Yevgeny Zamyatin

1884–1937 Russia

← All quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin

19 quotes

Science and art both project the world along certain coordinates. Differences in form are due only to differences in the coordinates.

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)

Realism that is not primitive, not realia but realiora, consists in displacement, distortion, curvature, non-objectivity.

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)

Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)

Realism — be it "socialist" or "bourgeois" — is unreal.

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)

A literature that is alive does not live by yesterday's clock, nor by today's but by tomorrow's.

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)

It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive.

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)

Instead of the Sermon on the Mount, under the scorching sun, to up-raised arms and sobbing people, there is drowsy prayer in a magnificent abbey.

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)

Revolution is everywhere, in everything. It is infinite. There is no final revolution, no final number.

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)

Two dead, dark stars collide with an inaudible, deafening crash and light a new star: this is revolution.

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)

The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)

Dealing with answered questions is the privilege of brains constructed like a cow's stomach, which, as we know, is built to digest cud.

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)

No revolution, no heresy is comfortable or easy. For it is a leap, it is a break in the smooth evolutionary curve, and a break is a wound, a pain.

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)

A new form is not intelligible to everyone; many find it difficult. Perhaps. The ordinary, the banal is, of course, simpler, more pleasant, more comfortable.

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)

This is the path of evolution — until a new heresy explodes the crush of dogma and all the edifices of the most enduring stone which have been raised upon it.

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)

Of course, to wound oneself is difficult, even dangerous. But for those who are alive, living today as yesterday and yesterday as today is still more difficult.

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)

Ask point blank: What is revolution?

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)

The law of revolution is red, fiery, deadly; but this death means the birth of new life, a new star. And the law of entropy is cold, ice blue, like the icy interplanetary infinities. The flame turns from red to an even, warm pink, no longer deadly, but comfortable.

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)

To literature today the plane surface of daily life is what the earth is to an airplane — a mere runway from which to take off, in order to rise aloft, from daily life to the realities of being, to philosophy, to the fantastic.

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)

The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity — but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage. We must compress into a single second what was held before in a sixty-second minute.

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Yevgeny Zamyatin (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.