Zamyatin’s Alatyr.

I’m back to reading Zamyatin’s early novellas, and have come to the last of the pre-revolutionary ones, the 1915 Алатырь (Alatyr′). It doesn’t seem to have been translated or much talked about, but it’s interesting in several respects; it’s a sort of magic-realist account of a provincial town built “on the very spot where countless mushrooms once sat in a circle around the Alatyr stone” (На том самом месте, где раньше грибы несчетно сидели кругом алатыря-камня). I’ll provide the description given by Alexander Voronsky in his 1922 article on Zamyatin (in Krasnaia nov’ No. 6) as translated by Paul Mitchell (in Russian Literature Triquarterly No. 2 [1972], 153-175), which begins by quoting the passage following that first sentence: Among those inhabitants—needless to say it was inherited from mushrooms—there came to exist a downright unrestrainable fecundity. They baptized children wholesale, by the dozens. There remained only one street passing through: a decree came out forbidding…