Zamyatin, by Boris Kustodiev. 1923

Yevgeny Zamyatin. Drawing by Boris Kustodiev. 1923

 

We is the grand­fa­ther of Sci-​​Fi and per­haps the first dystopian novel. Zamyatin fin­ished it in 1921 and quickly ran afoul of the Soviet author­i­ties. He was always run­ning afoul of the author­i­ties. In this case, it was because he sat­i­rized the very same sys­tem that would repress any book about that sys­tem. Implicit and explicit in the book was the fact that it would be sup­pressed by its subject.

Set in the dis­tant future, it’s the story of D-​​503, a math­e­mati­cian and builder of the Integral, the One State’s first star­ship. D-​​503, like all the cit­i­zens of the One State, has also been tasked with cre­at­ing works to fill that starship.

He reads the announce­ment at the begin­ning of his journal .…

All those who are able are required to cre­ate trea­tises, epics, man­i­festos, odes, or any other com­po­si­tion address­ing the beauty and majesty of the One State.

The novel takes the form of his con­tri­bu­tion, a diary. But it becomes appar­ent, as the novel pro­gresses, that the rea­son for the request in the first place is not just about pro­pa­ganda. The mass writ­ings are also a sub­tle form, a far more per­sonal form, of eaves­drop­ping. The cit­i­zens of this world live in glass houses, and can only draw the blinds when they have their req­ui­si­tioned time for sex. At all other times, their lives are an open book, with the Guardians being the chief watch­ers. But their thoughts are still poten­tially their own, and these thoughts are cov­eted by the Guardians, who do the bid­ding of the Benefactor.

It is a highly struc­tured, mech­a­nized world. Taylorized. But there are forces seek­ing to dis­rupt that order, that rigid, unbend­ing struc­ture, and they appear to D-​​503 in the form of a woman, I-​​330. She rocks his world, and their rela­tion­ship dri­ves the novel for­ward into mys­tery and revelation.

Zamyatin’s prose (trans­lated beau­ti­fully by Natasha Randall in 2006) is unlike any­thing I’ve ever read. Elliptical, dart­ing, spare, it is charged with math­e­mat­i­cal ions and sur­real equa­tions. It is the lan­guage of a sci­en­tist, engi­neer, or math­e­mati­cian, who has poe­t­ized those knowl­edge fields, rearranged them for new con­sump­tion. Zamyatin has his pro­tag­o­nist describe fel­low ciphers (cit­i­zens of the One State) as geo­met­ric shapes, as cubist dreams. And his lan­guage of descrip­tion grows bolder, more poetic as the book moves along, as if he gains con­fi­dence, becomes more dar­ing, the longer he spends with I-​​330 — though he has his doubts and moments of panic.

As if in answer to the power of I-​​330 and her under­ground move­ment, the One State is push­ing for all cit­i­zens to have the Operation. Scientists have located the phys­i­cal place in the brain for the imag­i­na­tion, and the Benefactor wants that removed. From every­one. In that soci­ety, hap­pi­ness is in direct con­flict with the imag­i­na­tion, and so it must be expunged. Happiness, bliss­ful, igno­rant hap­pi­ness, is the sum total of all that is good and holy. In a cou­ple of scenes that might have come right out of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the ciphers are marched into the machine that removes the imag­i­na­tion, and march back out com­pletely changed. The first mem­bers of lobotomy-​​ville.

On the other side of those walls, of that soci­ety made of glass, is a world few from the One State ever see. A world of Nature, where free men and women roam in the wild. That world encroaches on the One State more and more as the book pro­ceeds, and plays a huge role in the dénouement …

 

Will talk a bit more about We in my next blog entry, my own con­tri­bu­tion for the star­ship. Primarily to add George Orwell’s take on this rev­o­lu­tion­ary novel …

 

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