over, as this present is, by a stagnating slime, which stifles life in its tight, hard mould.[1]
'Byt' stands for fixity, routine, convention and the boredom of the daily grind. It corresponds closely to the sense of the Symbolists—discussed earlier—of being condemned by time. A good example is provided by Blok's famous poem:
The night, the street, the street-lamp, the chemist's shop
The meaningless dim light.
For a quarter century you could live like this—
And nothing would change. No way out.
You die—and start again from the beginning,
Everything repeated as before:
The night, the icy ripples on the canal,
The street, the Chemist's shop and the lamp.[2]
Zamyatin uses the term "entropy" from physics to cover very much the same idea. Entropy is the opposite of revolution; the two are eternally in conflict:
Two dead, dark stars collide with an inaudible, deafening crash and light a new star: this is revolution. A molecule breaks away from its orbit and, bursting into a neighbouring atomic universe, gives birth to a new chemical element: this is revolution. Lobachevsky cracks the walls of the millenia-old Euclidean world with a single book, opening a path to innumerable non—Euclidean spaces: this is revolution...
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. The sun ages into a planet, convenient for highways, stores, beds, prostitutes, prisons: this is the law...
When the flaming, seething sphere (in science, religion, social life, art) cools, the fiery magma becomes coated with dogma—a rigid, ossified, motionless crust.[3]
