Russian and English literary traditions and the poetics of comic elements in the “English” stories of Evgeny Zamyatin

The paper aims to show how the Russian and English literary traditions influenced the way of creating satirical and ironic text by analyzing the poetics of the comic elements in the stories “Ostrovityane” (The Islanders) and “Lovets chelovekov” (The Fisher of Men) by Evgeny Zamyatin. The analysis has revealed the dystopian text in world literature to be closely related to humor, with this relation being particularly apparent in the English stories of Evgeny Zamyatin, the latter having interconnections with the literature of nonsense. It is for this reason that a dystopian text, representing an anti-genre (with humor, irony, and parody in the foreground), can be considered a reaction to a utopian one, or it can be regarded as a unique phenomenon, not restricted to the negation of the utopian tradition. The latter case highlights the problems of human nature, the propensity to move along a spiral trajectory, according to which forward movement occurs not without destroying the old foundations and returning to something even more ancient, forgotten. This movement is seen to be infinite, there being no way to stop at one point and create something perfect, unchanging and finite. The problem of the humor in Zamyatin’s work has an obvious research perspective. Future research is expected to extend knowledge of early 20th-century Russian-English literary connections and develop an understanding of the English literature influence (in particular, nonsense) on the mature work of the Russian writer and the formation of a dystopia of the 20th century as a genre.

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