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THE FILM ABROAD
A SOVIET WRITER TAKES TO CINEMA
ALEXANDER WERTH
One of the latest Russian recruits to Western cinematography is Eugene Zamiatin, the brilliant novelist and playwright, whose mind is perhaps a little too ironical for the land of FiveYear enthusiasms. During the War he was in England building icebreakers for the Russian navy, and then, when the Revolution broke out, he returned to Russia to become one of the leading literary lights of the new regime. His output is small in quantity, but high in quality, and his super-concise prose, which is not so much narrative as a series of visual flashes, had many followers and imitators, both in the literary and in the cinematic field. But Zamiatin never quite adapted himself to Soviet conditions. There was a preciosity in his style which was a trifle "aesthetic"; his qua'nt theatrical fantasias of mujik humour were too indolent for the shock-brigade mind; some of his stories had too much of the human, and not enough of the collective interest; and when he wrote a fantasia with the tactk tiile "We" — a vision of the world's sublimely mechanical future — the Soviet critics thought that he had better be funny about something else, and the book was published in America.
Zamiatin is a good and loyal Soviet citizen, but with a touch of rebellious individualism; and about eighteen months ago he turned up in Paris to renew his long-standing acquaintance with the "rotten West." He seemed to like it, and has not gone back to Russia yet. But unlike Ehrenburg, who is in his element at Montparnasse, he has given up writing books until he goes back to Russia, and spends his time producing plays and writing articles and
narios. His comedy, " The Flea," which is still going strong at the Moscow Art Theatre (where it was first produced in 1926), and which is an ingenious attempt to reconstruct Russian popular comedy, with a touch of commedia delV arte, will be produced in Paris after an initial run at Brussels. It may go to London afterwards. As for articles, he writes for Barbusse's " Monde," " Europe," and other papers of more or less Bolshevik or drawing-room Bolshevik tendencies. He gave me lunch at his little furnished flat at Auteuil the other day. Holy Russia! Borsh, kasha, minced ''cutlets, " black
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