This was a thousand times more cruel than if she had worn nothing. She was in a light, saffron-yellow dress of the ancient model.
Man is forgotten, for the sake of the sabbath. Wars, imperialist and civil, have turned man into material for warfare, into a number, a cipher. We have lived through the epoch of suppression of the masses we are living in an epoch of suppression of the individual in the name of the masses tomorrow will bring the liberation of the individual - in the name of man. We march in the name of tomorrow's free man - the royal man. Yesterday, there was a tsar, and there were slaves today there is no tsar, but the slaves remain tomorrow there will be only tsars."Tomorrow" (1919), as translated in A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1970) edited and translated by Mirra Ginsberg.Yesterday, the thesis today, the antithesis, and tomorrow, the synthesis. This is the constant dialectic path which in a grandiose parabola sweeps the world into infinity. Today denies yesterday, but is a denial of denial tomorrow. Our symbol of faith is heresy: tomorrow is an inevitable heresy of today, which has turned into a pillar of salt, and to yesterday, which has scattered to dust. The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. He who has found his ideal today is, like Lot's wife, already turned to a pillar of salt, has already sunk into the earth and does not move ahead. Cruel, because it condemns to eternal dissatisfaction those who already today see the distant peaks of tomorrow wise, because eternal dissatisfaction is the only pledge of eternal movement forward, eternal creation.
Today is doomed to die - because yesterday died, and because tomorrow will be born. And grandsons invariably love and hate the fathers the fathers invariably hate and love the grandfathers. They are generations, they are grandfathers, fathers, and grandsons. Today, yesterday, and tomorrow are equally near to one another, and equally far. Every today is at the same time both a cradle and a shroud: a shroud for yesterday, a cradle for tomorrow.Mirra Ginsberg (London: Quartet Books, 1991). True literature can exist only when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics.Not sleeping at night is a criminal offense. Quotes What if the thin crust under our feet should turn into glass and we should suddenly see. 1.2 On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923).
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