![]() ![]() Above these dreams and nightmares hovered the confrontation between the Grand Inquisitor and the Silent Christ, their unresolved conflict, and the awareness that dystopia stalks utopia. ![]() ![]() But dystopias were produced by utopians who dreaded the prospect of success, with Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell supplying us their imperishable accounts. Utopias before the 18th century were edenic dreamlands and good times impossible to achieve thereafter they became realistic possibilities, “premature truths” as Lamartine remarked, or coinciding with Progress, as Oscar Wilde wittily observed. The Russian Revolution was set in the midst of maximal utopian creativity and dystopian despair during that exalted and hideous phase of human history from the 1870s to the 1940s. ![]()
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