On Two Diary Forms of the Anti-Soviet Novel: E. Zamyatin’s utopia “We” and E.E. Cummings’ travelogue “EIMI”

Abstract

The article juxtaposes two experimental prose writings of the early Soviet time: E. Zamyatin's dystopia We and E.E. Cummings' Soviet travelogue-cum-novel EIMI, “I AM”. Both texts contain caustic satire of the early Soviet society. In the first, far better known Zamyatin's novel, the narration unfolds in the dystopian genre, depicting an imaginary world of the future “One State”. By contrast, the less studied Cummings' epic portrays the Stalinist totalitarian state on the basis of the author's documentary evidence of visiting Soviet Russia in 1931. At that, both texts are created in the form of a diary – Zamyatin's narrator's notes, in the first case, and American visitor's travel notes, in the second. The novel We appears as the first specimen of dystopia as a literary genre, whereas Cummings' avant-garde travelogue is modeled as quasi-fictional, which, too, represents a new hybrid genre. Both analyzed anti-Soviet writings employ the techniques of the psychological “stream of consciousness”, which allows to consider them as modernist narratives of different subgenres (dystopia, on the one hand, and non-fictional or quasi-fictional travelogue, on the other).