/View.info/ Dystopia is a very young literary genre. And he was born exactly a century ago, in 1920, when the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote the novel “We”. Later, other famous dystopias appeared: “Cauldron” (1930) by Andrey Platonov, “Brave New World” (1932) by Alton Huxley, “War of the Salamanders” (1936) by Karel Čapek, “Animal Farm” ( 1945) and “1984” (1948) George Orwell, “Fahrenheit 451” (1953) by Ray Bradbury, etc.
In my opinion as a reader, all literary works can be divided into two parts. The first – those who morally grow old, like wine, which eventually turns into vinegar. The second – those that become more relevant over time. Relatively speaking, the former are 99%, the latter 1%. So, Zamyatin’s novel “We” refers specifically to the second category.
Zamyatin’s novel could not be published at home. The authorities see in the work a hidden criticism of the existing system. The novel We was eventually published in New York in English in 1925, and then in Czech (1927) and French (1929). In Russian, the full text of the novel was published for the first time in 1952 in the American publishing house “Chekhov” (in New York), and in Russia – only in 1988.
The novel shows the events of the distant future – approximately XXXII century. The novel is 40 entries in the diary of the main character – a mathematician and engineer, one of the main creators of the spaceship INTEGRAL. From his notes we learn that in the 20th century the Great Bicentennial War began in the world. As a result, “only 0.2% of the world’s population survives. But then – cleansed of the dirt of a thousand years – how radiant the face of the earth becomes. But then those 0.2% taste bliss in the port of the United State (ED)”. The main boss of ED is a character named the Benefactor. The main institutes of the ED are the Guardians Bureau (police and special services) and the Medical Bureau (which monitors citizens’ physical health and their mental and mental state).
The unified state may seem to the modern man a dictatorship, before which all revolutionary experiments pale. From the perspective of the leaders and ordinary citizens of the Unified State, however, it is a highly organized society with strict discipline and order. Here everyone lives like ants in an anthill or bees in a hive. Just as an ant cannot live outside the anthill, so the ED citizen cannot be outside the collective. The main dogma of every citizen of the United State is:
“I” – from the devil, “We” – from God. “
Hence the name of the novel – “We”. ED is an example of a model of a totalitarian state in which a small chief rules an obedient herd, and each member of that herd feels happy, feeling grateful to his superiors. The unified state, from the point of view of its superiors, although totalitarian, is not cruel. It is also humane. Because its main goal is the happiness of all citizens. It successfully satisfies the two basic needs of the citizen – food and sex. All foodstuffs are made from petroleum, and the citizens of ED have only read about bread in ancient books. Sexual needs are satisfied through state-controlled contacts of representatives of different sexes, and contacts should not lead to the formation of such an archaic institution as the family and to the accidental birth of children. An individual man should not belong to an individual woman and vice versa. They must belong to the “We” society. Likewise, children born with the permission of the authorities must belong to the United State. The satisfaction of basic needs must be in excess, because with excess the corresponding desires disappear or become insignificant. Isn’t that happiness? One of the heroines concludes: “After all, desires are painful, aren’t they? It is clear that happiness is when there are no more desires, there is not one…”
However, some citizens, in addition to the basic needs, also have some strange needs and desires, not physiological at all. So that there are no unnecessary needs and desires, it is necessary to “edit” the person, to remove from him the excess that prevents him from living. For example, conscience, feelings, fantasy. In the ED, there is a medical desk that helps the citizens get rid of the vestiges of the wild ancestors. So, in the ED, the Great Operation to extract the fantasy center from the human brain takes place.
The protagonist of the novel, being a mathematician, perfectly understands how to achieve maximum happiness. He defines happiness as a fraction in which bliss is in the numerator and envy in the denominator. To maximize happiness in ED, one must minimize envy. And the easiest way to minimize it is to make everyone exactly the same, equal. In all senses – material, social and even physiological. The Medical Bureau works to ensure that everyone is the same, using genetics to do so by regulating the birth process.
The unified state functions flawlessly. Ancient people believed that they also had their own countries. But is it possible to talk about them as states if crises, disturbances, civil wars, revolutions occur periodically? This is a parody of the state! And ED works like a perfect mechanism. Another name for ED is “the machine.” The operation of the machine is ensured with the help of the Clock Scroll – a clear schedule of the life of each member of the EG and the entire anthill as a whole. The main character never ceases to be amazed at the wild nature of the ancient people: they lived as they wanted, the state regulation of life was extremely primitive.
True, the protagonist admits that even the perfect machine has minor flaws: “Fortunately, only occasionally. Fortunately, these are only small breakdowns of the details: they are easy to fix without stopping the eternal, great progress of the whole machine. And to throw out the defective bolt – we have the skilful, heavy hand of the Benefactor, we have the experienced eye of the guardians…” “The skillful, heavy hand of the Benefactor sometimes presses the button of the Benefactor’s Machine” – a special technical means of punishment. All that remains of the executed man is a puddle of distilled water. Those that are very different from ED standards are discarded.
So far, science has not yet been able to achieve a complete unification of the members of the ED. But strong deviations from the “arithmetic mean” are not allowed. In the notes of the main character, we read: “We are the happiest arithmetic mean … “Everywhere is uniformity – everyone wears the same uniform, everyone cleanly shaves their head (which sometimes makes it difficult to understand who this man or woman is). The living conditions for all members of the anthill are also the same. So, all apartments are exactly the same with their glass walls and ascetic set of furniture. All members of the ED anthill are stripped of their names, instead assigned numbers. The main character (who keeps records) is designated as D-503. His main friends also have codes: O-90 and I-330. In the novel, a person is called a number. The vowel or consonant at the beginning of the number indicates the female or male gender.
In the United States, the development of technology is at an incredibly high level. And so, the creation of the spaceship INTEGRAL ends. He will go on a journey to the most distant planets. Citizens use airplanes to move around the territory of the Unified State. Numbers have cordless phones. In schools, children learn from robots. Music is written by machines. Food is a product of petroleum distillation (each ant is given the same rate in the form of several cubes of such “food”). Technology allows people to control themselves. In particular, citizens are monitored via hidden microphones. The Medical Bureau has in its arsenal the latest technologies for the diagnosis and correction of the mental state of numbers. Note that all these technical qualities of “civilization” were absent or exotic at the time Zamyatin wrote the novel. Taylorism, as the main character admits, is one of the few sciences that the One State has borrowed from the wild ancestors. But, it seems, the ancients did not appreciate this science very well: “… how could they write whole libraries about some Kant there – and barely notice Taylor – this prophet who was able to look ten centuries ahead”. However, the main character then condescendingly says that Taylor did not use his system to its full capacity: “Yes, this Taylor was undoubtedly the most brilliant of the ancients. True, he did not think to spread his method throughout his life, at every step, around the clock – he fails to integrate his system from midnight to 24 hours”.
The main character praises mathematics and numbers in the One State: “The multiplication table is wiser, more absolute than the ancient God: it never – you see, never – errs. And there are none happier than numbers who live according to the harmonious eternal laws of the multiplication table. No hesitation, no mistake. The truth is one, and the true path is one. And that truth is two times two, and that true time is four. And wouldn’t it be absurd if these happy, perfectly multiplied couples began to think about some freedom, that is, clearly – about a mistake? ” And the fact that the citizens of the United State have long been deprived of names, replacing them with numbers, seems right for the main character. The main character is used to everything that falls into his field of vision, personalized according to the formulas he knows, “digitalized”. When he first meets his girlfriend I-330, he finds himself unable to “digitize” her. “But I don’t know – there’s some weird annoying X in my eyes or eyebrows and I just can’t get it, give it a digital expression. ” The full ability of digital perception of the surrounding world returns to him only after he undergoes the Great Operation, which removes the remnants of the soul. D-503 again becomes a full member of the anthill, a biorobot.
The authorities of Soviet Russia banned the publication of the novel “We”, seeing in it a caricature of the Bolshevik regime. Someone in the image of the Benefactor sees Lenin; after a decade, many began to think that Stalin was the benefactor. Vladimir Mayakovsky immediately understood that he was the caricature of the State Poet P-13.
But George Orwell, in his review of the novel We (1946), noted that Zamyatin “did not even think of choosing the Soviet regime as the main target of his satire.” Some readers and critics believe that to a greater extent the novel reflects the realities of England at the time. After all, Zamyatin spent a lot of time in Misty Albion, he got closely acquainted with the life of English workers (he came to England in the shipyards as an engineer from Russia, on whose orders he built ships). In 1917, Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote the story “The Islanders” – about the British. It already shows some contours of the future novel “We”. The hero of the story, Vicar Dyula, compiled the book “The Covenant of Forcible Salvation”, which became the prototype for the Scrolls of Hours from the novel “We”. The British saw themselves in this story and forbade its publication.
A few years after the publication of the first edition of the novel in the United States and in 1925, Zamyatin noted: “The Americans, who wrote a lot about the edition of my novel in New York a few years ago, did not unreasonably see the criticism of Henry Ford in it.”
In a word, the novel turned out to be universal. Even then, a hundred years ago, every country could see in the novel something familiar and unpleasant for itself. And Yevgeny Zamyatin himself says about the novel “We”: “Myopic reviewers see no more than a political pamphlet. This, of course, is not true: this novel is a signal of the danger that threatens man, humanity from the hypertrophied power of machines and the power of the state – no matter which “(interview with the French historian Georges Leffert in April 1932).
I repeat once again: the novel “We” belongs to that category of works of art that become more and more relevant over the years. Many of Zamyatin’s contemporaries attribute this novel as a caricature or grotesque, believing that the writer’s infinitely distant future serves only as a cover for the disgusting present (Soviet, English, American or some others). However, now it seems to me that the novel is more universal, it can be called an allegory, a parable. For what? About the degradation of man and humanity. The only question is: will the next generation appreciate this work? Or, like the main character of the novel D-503, condescendingly and arrogantly assume that the novel “We” is the fruit of the wild people of ancient times?
Translation: V. Sergeev
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