Evgenii Zamiatin and the literary stylization of rus'.

My doctoral thesis concerns the prose fiction of Evgenii Ivanovich Zamiatin (1884-1937), one of the most celebrated and flamboyant Russian writers of the early part of the twentieth century. It concerns an aspect of his fiction which has received little scholarly attention until now - namely the use of popular folk- religious and urban culture in his early provincial stories, ecclesiastical parodies, and the 1924 play, Blokha . The thesis consists of eight chapters. The introductory chapter discusses Zamiatin's interest in skaz and popular language, his knowledge of popular folk-ecclesiastical culture, and the development of his 'neo-realistic' writing style. The chapters which follow are devoted to individual works as examples of this stylistic phenomenon. These are followed by a concluding chapter and a bibliography, with footnotes given at the end of each individual chapter. My methodological approach is primarily expository and interpretative, relying on extra-textual sources where relevant. I analyse these stories and the play in terms of what the Formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum has defined as 'literary populism' - in other words, a stylistic phenomenon in nineteenth and twentieth century Russian literature which involved the artistic reworking of such popular materials as folk tales, magic tales, spiritual songs, epic songs, popular drama, apocrypha. Saints' Lives , popular legends and ritual celebrations. I seek to present Zamiatin as a writer with neo-populist leanings, as a traveller, ethnographer, collector of folklore, linguist and poeticiser of ordinary life in the provinces; in particular, I consider the early years of his career, his association with the neo-populist journal Zavety , his links with such writers as Aleksei Remizov and Mikhail Prishvin, and the stylistic affinity his fiction bears to the contemporary 'neo-primitivist' movement in the fine arts