We. Yevgeny Zamyatin

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СКАЧАТЬ who meet certain physical specifications are allowed to have children: eugenics was considered ‘progressive’ at this time.

      As in Jack London’s 1908 novel, The Iron Heel – a dystopia hoping for a utopian future – and also in Orwell’s 1984, the driving forces of dissent in WE are female. D-503, the male protagonist, begins as a dedicated member of the One State, preparing to send a rocket into the universe with the aim of sharing the One State’s recipe for perfect happiness with worlds unknown. Dystopian characters are prone to journal-writing, and D-503 intends his journal for the universe. But soon the plot thickens, and so does D’s prose. Has he been dipping into Edgar Allan Poe in his more lurid moments? Or the German Gothic Romantics? Or Baudelaire? Possibly. Or his author has.

      The cause of this emotional disruption is sex. If only D could stick to his scheduled sexual appointments and his pink tickets! But he cannot. Enter I-330, an angular, individualistic secret bohemian and alcohol-drinking dissident who seduces him in a hidden love nest and leads him to question the One State. She is in sharp contrast to O-90, a round, compliant woman who’s forbidden to have children because she’s too short, and who is D’s registered pink-ticket sexual partner. O can stand for a circle – completion and fullness – or for an empty zero, and Zamyatin chooses both. At first we think O-90 is a nullity, but when she becomes pregnant despite the official veto, she surprises us.

      Much has been written about the difference between I-cultures and We-cultures. In an I-culture such as the United States, individuality and personal choice are almost a religion. No accident there: America was initiated by Puritans, and in Protestantism it’s the individual soul vis-à-vis God that’s important, not membership in a universal Church. Puritans were big journal-writers, recording every spiritual blip and bleep: you have to believe in the high value of your soul to do that. ‘Find your voice’ is a mantra in North American writing schools, and that means your unique voice. ‘Free speech’ is taken to mean you can say anything you like.

      In We-cultures, on the contrary, why do you need that kind of voice? It’s belonging to a group that’s valued: one should act in the interests of social harmony. ‘Free speech’ means you can say anything you like, but what you like will naturally be constrained by the effects it may have on others, and who will decide that? The ‘we’ will. But when does a ‘we’ become a mob? Is D’s description of everyone going for a walk in unified lockstep a dream or a nightmare? When does the so-harmonious, so-unified ‘we’ become a Nazi rally? This is the cultural crossfire we are caught in today.

      Any human being is surely both: an I, special, discrete; and a We, part of a family, a country, a culture. In the best of worlds, the We – the group – values the I for its uniqueness, and the I knows itself through its relationships with others. If the balance is understood and respected – or so we fondly believe – there need not be a conflict.

      But the One State has upset the balance: it has tried to obliterate the I, which nonetheless stubbornly persists. Hence poor D-503’s torments. D’s arguments with himself are Zamyatin’s arguments with the emerging conformity and voice-stifling of the early U.S.S.R. What was happening to the bright vision held out by the utopias of the nineteenth century, and indeed by Communism itself? What had gone so wrong?

      When Orwell wrote 1984, Stalin’s purges and liquidations had already happened, Hitler had come and gone, the extent to which a person could be reduced and distorted by torture was known, so his vision is much darker than Zamyatin’s. Zamyatin’s two heroines are staunch, like Jack London’s, whereas Orwell’s Julia capitulates and betrays almost immediately. Zamyatin’s character S-4711 is a secret service operative, but his number gives away his alter ego. 4711 is the name of a cologne that originated in the German city of Cologne, which in the year 1288 staged a successful democratic revolt against Church and State authorities, and became a Free Imperial City. Yes, S-4711 is actually a dissident, bent on revolt. Whereas in 1984, O’Brien pretends to be a dissident, but is actually a member of the State police.

      Zamyatin holds out the possibility of escape: beyond the Wall is a natural world where there are free ‘barbarian’ human beings, covered with – could it be fur? For Orwell, no one in the world of 1984 can leave that world, though he does permit a distant future in which this society no longer exists.

      WE was written at a particular moment in history – the moment when the utopia promised by Communism was fading into dystopia; when, in the name of making everyone happy, heretics would be accused of thoughtcrime, disagreement with an autocrat would be equated with disloyalty to the Revolution, show trials would proliferate, and liquidation would become the order of the day. How could Zamyatin have seen the future so clearly? He didn’t, of course. He saw the present, and what was already lurking in its shadows.

      ‘Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,’ says Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. ‘But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.’ WE was a warning to its own place and time – one that was not heeded because it was not heard: the ‘diligent and reliable officials’ took care of that. The courses were not departed from. Millions and millions died.

      Is it also a warning to us, in our time? If it is, what sort of warning? Are we listening?

      LOG 1

      BRIEF:

      Announcement. The Wisest Line. An Epic.

      I am simply copying down the announcement that appeared in today’s One State Gazette word for word:

      IN 120 DAYS, CONSTRUCTION OF THE INTEGRAL WILL BE COMPLETE. THE GLORIOUS, HISTORIC HOUR WHEN THE FIRST-EVER INTEGRAL WILL BLAST OFF INTO OUTER SPACE IS NIGH. SOME THOUSAND YEARS AGO, YOUR HERO ANCESTORS VICTORIOUSLY SUBJUGATED ALL OF EARTH TO THE ONE STATE. YOUR CONQUEST WILL BE EVEN GREATER, FOR YOU WILL INTEGRATE THE INFINITE EQUATION OF THE UNIVERSE WITH THE ELECTRIC, FIRE-BREATHING POWER OF OUR GLASS INTEGRAL. YOU WILL ENCOUNTER UNFAMILIAR BEINGS ON ALIEN PLANETS WHO MAY YET LIVE IN SAVAGE STATES OF FREEDOM, AND YOU WILL SUBJUGATE THEM TO THE BENEFICENT YOKE OF REASON. IF THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND THAT WHAT WE BRING THEM IS MATHEMATICALLY INFALLIBLE HAPPINESS, WE WILL BE IMPELLED TO FORCE THEM TO BE HAPPY. BUT WE WILL TRY WORDS BEFORE RESORTING TO WEAPONS.

      IN THE NAME OF THE BENEFACTOR, LET IT BE KNOWN TO EVERY NUMBER OF THE ONE STATE:

      ALL THOSE CAPABLE OF DOING SO ARE HEREBY REQUIRED TO PRODUCE TREATISES, EPIC POEMS, MANIFESTOS, ODES OR ANY AND ALL OTHER WRITINGS CELEBRATING THE BEAUTY AND MAGNIFICENCE OF THE ONE STATE.

      THESE WILL BE THE INTEGRAL’S FIRST CARGO.

      ALL HAIL THE ONE STATE, ALL HAIL THE NUMBERS, ALL HAIL THE BENEFACTOR!

      I write this and feel: my cheeks are burning. Yes: to integrating the profound equation of the Universe. Yes: to uncurving the coil of savagery, towards the asymptote, along the tangent – setting it straight: for the line of the One State is straight. Ours is the supreme, divine, exact and wise straight line – the wisest of all lines . . .

      I am D-503, Builder of the INTEGRAL. Just one of the One State’s mathematicians. Accustomed to numbers, it is beyond the powers of my pen to fabricate the music of assonance and rhyme. I will simply try to record what I see and think – or, more precisely, what we think (yes, we – and in fact, WE will be the title of my contribution). But if these texts are to be derived from our life, from the mathematically perfected life of the One State, won’t they, in spite of me, be, of themselves, an epic poem? Yes: I believe СКАЧАТЬ