just as there is no highest number, there can be no final revolution. Unsurprisingly, the Soviet Government refused to allow the publication of We. In his 1921 essay I Am Afraid, Zamyatin began by criticizing the poets who unconditionally sang the praises of the new Soviet Government. Zamyatin compared them with the Court Poets under the House of Romanov and under the French House of Bourbon. Zamyatin further criticized "these nimble authors" for knowing "when to sing hail to the Tsar, and when to the Hammer and Sickle". Zamyatin then wrote: "True literature can exist only when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics." Zamyatin continued by pointing out that writers in the new Soviet Union were forbidden to criticize and satirise, in the vein of Jonathan Swift and Anatole France, the foibles and failings of the new society. Zamyatin added that, while many compared Russia after the October Revolution to the Athenian democracy at its inception, the Athenian government and people did not fear the satirical stage-plays of Aristophanes, in which everyone was mocked and criticized. Zamyatin concluded by pointing out that if the Party did not rid itself of "this new Catholicism, which is every bit as fearful of every heretical word as the old one", then the only future possible for Russian literature was "in the past." In Zamyatin's 1923 essay, The New Russian Prose, he wrote: "In art, the surest way to destroy is to canonize one given form and one philosophy: that which is canonized dies of obesity, of entropy." In his 1923 essay, On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters, Zamyatin wrote: "The law of revolution is red, fiery, deadly; but this death means the birth of a 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. And if the planet is to be kindled into youth again, it must be set on fire, it must be thrown off the smooth highway of evolution: this is the law. The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow (in the Book of Genesis days are equal to years, ages). But someone