We (review)

Amazing, the extent to which criminal instincts persist in human nature. I use the word “criminal” deliberately. Freedom and crime are linked as indivisibly as . . . well, as the motion of the aero and its speed: when its speed equals zero, it does not move; when man’s freedom equals zero, he commits no crimes. That is clear. The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.

• Title: We
• Author: Yevgeny Zamyatin (Ginsburg, trans.)
• Genre: Dystopian Science Fiction/Satire
• Year: 1921, 1952

Welcome to the One State, where every day follows a timetable, and everyone lives in a literal glass house. The moral mathematics of the collective prevails here, gloriously manifested in the daily communal marches and mandatorially attended public executions, and no one is ever ‘one,’ but always ‘one of.’ Here, within the city of the One State, the messiness of nature is held at bay beyond the Green Wall, and the messiness of human nature has been largely taken care of, too. But the One State isn’t quite perfect yet, it hasn’t reached that ideal future unchanging state of absolute and permanent unfreedom — but the unanimously (and very publicly) elected Benefactor and his Guardians are certainly working hard to get there. The good news is they’re about to spread the revolution to the stars, as the Integral, the One State’s first starship, is almost ready to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly remake them in the One State’s uncompromising image. Welcome to the world of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We . . . be sure to check your ‘I’ at the door.

Zamyatin was one of a number of writers that was a supporter of the Russian Revolution but later fell out with Soviet authorities, eventually exiled from his home to join a long list of illustrious Russian dissidents abroad. We, written in 1921 though refused publication in Russia, was one of the primary reasons for his condemnation at the hands of the Soviet Union’s culture watchdogs (who attacked Zamyatin’s work for its ‘inconsonance with the revolution’), and it’s easy to see why as you read it. We is a prophetic condemnation of the mechanistic mediocrity of the looming Stalinist era, and a loud proclamation of Zamyatin’s refusal to subjugate his art to the dictates of the state. In the world of We, art serves only a propagandistic purpose, and Zamyatin himself was pressured to conform to these standards. He refused, and was lucky to be granted permission to emigrate in the early thirties. Translations of We continued to circulate in manuscript form and in journals in Europe and the United States until it was finally published in Russian, in book form, in 1952 — by a dissident press in New York. In his former home, Zamyatin’s name and work was erased.

From the tragedy of Zamyatin we turn to the tragedy of his creation, D-503, mathematician and designer of the Integral, the narrator of We, who sets his thoughts and experiences down for the benefit of those people of other worlds for whom the perfection of the One State has not yet arrived. People much like his distant ancestors, chaotic groups of individuals with their private property and competing motivations and barely-governed lives. 503 begins by praising the One State on the eve of its great triumph, the launching of the Integral, but it soon becomes apparent that beneath his veneer of conformity and enthusiasm 503, indeed many of the citizens of the One State, has not lost the irrational traits of humanity, merely concealed them. Indeed, in even daring to write his personal story, 503 is engaging in something at odds with the governing spirit of his society, and when he gushes with admiration for the One State’s great achievement in building a starship, is he not really praising himself? From the start, 503 is asserting himself as an individual, an outlook that soon leads him deeper into heresy.

Some of We will seem familiar to fans of Orwell’s 1984, and Orwell himself acknowledged the inspiration. But while 1984 is bleak and unironic, We is more of a dark satire along the lines of Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange or Golding’s The Lord of the Flies. But in both books the spark or revolution — and of damnation — is supplied by an unconventional woman. Like Winston Smith, 503 encounters a a young women for whom his attraction cannot be suppressed, and both of these protagonists start by hating the object of their desire, as if they know she contains the seeds of their undoing. But while Orwell’s Julia is more or less an equal player with Smith, Zamyatin’s I-330 utterly dominates 503, leading him further and further from the heterodoxy of the One State. 330 is, in fact, a part of something much larger (and stranger!), and 503’s flailing attempts to hold onto his old self while plummeting head first into a new world of 330’s designing is what fuels the engines of introspection that give us the real glimpse of the absurdities of the One State.

503 shows us the One State in all its banality even as he praises it, praises its unfreedom, its immortal poetry such as the tragic He Who Was Late to Work or the ever-practical Stanzas on Sexual Hygiene, its shallow conventionality and its uniformed, choreographed nincompoopery. Even as he rejects these things, becomes an ‘I,’ flees his responsibilities and obsesses possessively over a woman with ‘atavistic’ tendencies, 503 yearns for them and is ever a part of them, and is suitably shaken when a doctor gives him the troubling news that he has developed a soul, an incurable condition. 503, the mathematician, who recounts his horror upon first encountering the irrational equation of the square root of negative one, grows more irrational as the book progresses until he dares a monumental act of open defiance — the results of which I leave to the reader to find out.

In this state that wishes to function as a machine — indeed the only food fed its people is a petroleum product — 503 becomes human, with all the attendant miseries and joys that entails. He is a heretic, he seems doomed from the start, and he is weak and amoral. Like many of the characters of modern Russian literature, his soul is sick, he is conflicted almost to the point of frenzy. But he is human, in spite of everything, and his ugly birth in the midst of suffocating oppression is a kind of triumph. Zamyatin praised the heretic in his own philosophy of art, saying that the outsider, the visionary, and the rebel — those who worked outside the ossification of established norms and were thus free to make mistakes — were the only worthwhile figures in the arts. Zamyatin was certainly one of them, boldly refusing to compromise his voice in the face of tyrannical pressure — and this was no game played by comfortable intellectuals, this was a man saying ‘no’ in the land of the Gulag and the cheka.

Toward the end of We, 503 and 330 discuss the One State and it permanent revolution and promise of a future utopian stasis, a frozen society. 503 often speaks and reasons in mathematical terms, and 330 seizes upon an allegory he can understand. She asks him to name for her the final number. When he replies that the question is preposterous, that infinity forbids that there ever could be a final number, 330 continues: “Then how can there be a final revolution? There can be no final one; revolutions are infinite. The final one is for children: children are frightened by infinity, and it’s important that children sleep peacefully at night…” No truer science fiction concept than that, the utter inevitability of change; 330 — and Zamyatin — tell us that whatever social ‘laws’ of revolution or historical change that might be theorized or enacted pale before the real laws of cosmic impermanence, and of human nature.

We is an overlooked classic, a must read book to put alongside George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, from a writer who felt firsthand the dangerous crush of dystopian conformity and lived to warn us all about it.

• We at Amazon
• George Orwell’s 1946 Review of We