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with Hettie are severely reprobated. And, one may be allowed to observe,
if the propagation of right ideas can do any good then the propagation
of wrong ideas must do harm. All the ideas Mr. Wells has put forward
on political and social topics cannot be right.
His defence might be that the good done by right ideas is greater
than all the harm wrong ideas can ever do. It is perhaps at any rate a
tolerable defence that he is a man of many ideas. His impatience, his
restlessness, and his haste carry him incessantly round the modern world
and nothing that is topical is alien to him: there is no subject which
may not inspire him to demand of the thinking public that it should
stop and think about it. Even where he causes repulsion, as his glib
and facile assertions often do, that is of itself a stimulus to thought.
257
79. Evgenii Zamyatin, Wells s revolutionary
fairy-tales
1922
Herbert Wells (Petersburg, 1922), translated by Lesley Milne.
Evgenii Zamyatin (1884 1937), author of plays, stories and the
anti-Utopian novel We (1920 1). Trained as a marine architect,
Zamyatin was an ex-Bolshevik who had a crucial influence on
the immediately post-revolutionary generation of Russian writers.
His outspoken individualism later brought him into disgrace, and
he left the Soviet Union with Stalin s permission in 1931 and died
in Paris. Herbert Wells, Zamyatin s most extended critical essay,
grew out of his editorial work on Wells translations from 1918
onwards. He relates the English writer s work to his beliefs about
revolution, modernity and the heretical role of the artist and,
by implication, to his hopes for a new Soviet literature. The present
translation follows the first edition, published as a pamphlet by
Epoka in 1922, with some omissions which are indicated in the
text. A revised version appeared as the introduction to Wells s
collected works (Leningrad, 1924). Zamyatin s 1922 pamphlet also
contains another, more pedestrian essay ( Wells s Genealogy )
situating Wells s work in the traditions of science fiction and of
socio-fantastic fiction.
I
The laciest, most ethereal Gothic cathedrals are built none the less of
stone; and the most fabulous, most absurd fairy-tales of any country
are composed none the less of the earth, trees and beasts of that country.
In the fairy-tales of the forest there is the wood goblin, shaggy and gnarled
as a pine tree, with a laugh originating in the forest echo; in the tales
of the steppe there is the magic white camel, flying like sand whipped
up by the wind; in the tales of the polar regions there are the whale-
258
THE CRITICAL HERITAGE
shaman and the white bear with the body of mammoth bone.* But imagine
a country where the only fertile soil is asphalt; and on this soil, thick
forests of factory chimneys; and herds of beasts of one breed only
motor-cars; and no spring fragrance apart from petrol fumes. This stone,
asphalt, iron, petroleum, mechanical country is called twentieth-century
London, and naturally it had to produce its own iron, motorized goblins,
its own mechanical, chemical fairy-tales. There are such urban fairy-
tales: they are told by Herbert Wells. They are his fantastic novels.
Today s huge, feverishly rushing city, full of roars, rumbles, buzzes,
propellors, wires, wheels and advertisements is omnipresent in Wells.
The modern city, with its uncrowned king mechanism, either as explicit
or implicit function enters unfailingly into each of Wells s fantastic
novels, into the equation of any of Wells s myths, and these myths, as
will be seen, are nothing more nor less than logical equations.
With the mechanism, the machine this is where Wells began. Even
his first novel, The Time Machine, is a present-day urban myth of the
flying carpet, and the fictitious tribes of the Morlocks and the Eloi are,
of course, the two hostile classes of today s city, extrapolated and taken
in their typical characteristics to the point of the grotesque. A Story
of the Days to Come : this is the modern city shown through a monstrously
exaggerating, ironic telescope; here everything rushes past with fairy-
tale swiftness machines, machines, machines, aeroplanes, turbine wheels,
deafening loudspeakers, flashing advertisements. The Sleeper Awakes:
again aeroplanes, wires, searchlights, armies of workers, corporations.
The War in the Air: aeroplanes once more, droves of aeroplanes, balloons,
herds of dreadnoughts. The War of the Worlds: London, London crowds,
and that most representative urban goblin, bred on the asphalt, the Martian;
a steel, hinged mechanical goblin with a mechanical siren so that he
can whoop and howl as befits every goblin conscientious in the execution
of his duties. In The World Set Free: an urban variant of the folk-tale
of the magic grass, only the magic grass is found not in a clearing on
midsummer night, but in a chemical laboratory, and is called atomic
energy. In The Invisible Man, again chemistry: a present-day, urban,
chemical cap of darkness. Even where Wells seems for a moment
to betray himself and takes you out of the city into the forest, into
the fields or onto a farm, you are assailed by the hum of machines
and the smell of chemical reactions. In The First Men in the
Moon you find yourself on a lonely farm in Kent, but it turns out
*
These are the first of several references to Russian fairy-tales.
259
H.G.WELLS
that dynamos occupied the cellar, and there was a gasometer in the
garden. And similarly, the isolated cottage in The Food of the Gods
turns out to be an institute of experimental physiology. No matter how
much Wells wanted to get away from the asphalt, it is on the asphalt
that he is to be found, among machines, in the laboratory. The modern
city, chemico-mechanical, entangled in wires this is Wells s ground, and
on this loom every thread of his work is woven, with all its fanciful
and at first sight contradictory patterns.
The motifs of Wells s fairy-tales are in essence the same as those of
all other fairy-tales; in him you will find the cap of darkness, the flying
carpet, the magic grass, and the magic tablecloth, dragons, giants, gnomes,
mermaids and cannibals. But the difference between his tales and our
Russian ones, say, is as great as the difference between the psychology
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