Authors

Discussion

The development of literary modernism ran in parallel to what Jeremy Gray has labelled a “modernist transformation” in mathematics from 1890-1930 (Gray, 2008). From the rise of non-Euclidean geometries such as Lobachevsky’s, to the confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity in 1919, some of the most notable impacts of these new scientific ideas concerned our understanding of space and time, which is often reflected in the literature, art, and culture of the early 20^th century. Whilst the relationship between modernist mathematics and literature has received scholarly attention (for example, Nina Engelhardt’s Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics, 2018), there is still much to be explored.

This paper investigates the relationship between literary and mathematical modernisms in Yevgeny Zamiatin’s My (1921-1922) and Veniamin Kaverin’s lesser-known Bochka (1923) through an exploration of the mathematical context they were written in. Firstly, I will compare the use of mathematical concepts in My and Bochka, such as the platonic solids, imaginary numbers, and calculus. Secondly, I will argue that in both texts, mathematical ideas extend beyond symbols on the page, into the structures of these stories, and the ‘shape’ of the relationships between characters. In particular, I will discuss the influence of the ideas of Lobachevsky and Einstein, arguing that modernist mathematics’ reimagining of time and space is reflected in both works.