Abstract

In 1923, Russian naval engineer Yevgeny Zamyatin published an essay which antagonized the Soviet government, an annoyance that increased greatly when Zamyatin's dystopian novel We, a satire on the Russian Revolution never yet published in the Soviet Union, appeared in Russian in Prague. The 1923 essay is titled lion Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters. In it, Zamyatin argues against complacency in government and art and for a continuing revolution, for a continual changing of forms and for a continuous receptivity to new ideas, however distasteful. I think that Thomas Pynchon was aware of Zamyatin's essay when he wrote his own story "Entropy" in 1958-59, but I must create a Kekulean chain to establish the connection.

How to Cite:

Hays, P. L., (1985) “Pynchon's "Entropy": A Russian Connection”, Pynchon Notes 16, 78-82. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/pn.378