The mad Russian

Years before "1984," Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote "We" -- a dystopian nightmare that remains eerily relevant even as Huxley and Orwell seem almost quaint.

By Priya Jain

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Sept. 1, 2006 | "True literature," wrote the Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin, "can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics." In that case, Zamyatin was a truly mad heretic. The father of the dystopian novel, Zamyatin is widely recognized as the first writer to take H.G. Wells' science-fiction vision and turn it on its head. If the novel, with its low-tech paper-and-ink delivery system, is rebellion against scientific progress, the dystopian novel has to be the greatest act of rebellion in existence. Technology is about making us more efficient and happier; the dystopian novel is about making us realize how important, and deeply human, it is to be lazy and unhappy.

Zamyatin wrote his masterpiece "We" in 1920-21 as a satire of the tyrannical bent institutionalized Bolshevism was taking -- years before the worst features of the Soviet system truly became apparent. "We" served as the inspiration for George Orwell's "1984," and although Aldous Huxley swore he'd never read "We," his "Brave New World" bears a resemblance to it. ("We" also probably influenced Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451," Ayn Rand's "Anthem," and Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Dispossessed.") And yet Zamyatin's name is rarely mentioned when discussing dystopian literature outside of the classroom. Orwell and Huxley regularly top best-book lists; "Big Brother," "newspeak" and "soma" are a part of our lexicon, but invoking terms from "We" brings up blank looks.

Hopefully, Natasha Randall's new translation will earn Zamyatin the readers he sorely deserves. "We" is one of the few dystopian novels to invoke a nightmarish atmosphere that hasn't aged. (Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" is another, though it's still very young by comparison.) Now that we know that the biggest utopian ideas of the 20th century -- communism, fascism, the perfectibility of mankind through technology -- were not only insane but also destined to fail, the classics of the genre can seem a little outdated. "1984," with its crumbling, post-blitzkrieg London, invokes a fear of rampant communism that is no longer a part of our lives. "Brave New World's" child hatchery and whizzing airplanes call to mind "Gattaca" more than a foreseeable future; Huxley's character names -- Lenina, Bernard Marx -- are quaintly mid-century. That doesn't mean we should discount these novels; they are a part of our literary history. On the other hand, because there is nothing era-specific about "We's" landscape, Zamyatin's imagined future still feels sadly, scarily possible.

As the novel opens, it's the 26th century A.D., and the Earth is under the power of the government of the dictator known as the Benefactor. A Two-Hundred-Years War has killed all but .02 percent of the world's population, giving rise to the One State, which was partly created out of the need to ensure that there could be no more revolutions. The One State has discovered the equation for "mathematically infallible happiness," which mostly consists of eliminating ego and desire. People no longer have names but numbers, and they're taught to think of themselves not as individuals, but as parts of a whole, a unified "we." They are referred to as "ciphers." (A quibble with Randall's Modern Library translation: In the 1993 Penguin Classics edition, "ciphers" are "Numbers," and "the One State" is the compactly futuristic "OneState." It may be that Randall's choices are closer to the original Russian, but they're much less evocative.)

In this mechanically minded future, a Table of Hours dictates every movement of the day; the ciphers get up, eat breakfast, and go to work in constant synchronicity. Their heads are shaved, and they wear matching unifs (uniforms) and gold badges on their chests announcing their numbers. There's also a Table of Sex Days that ensures each cipher gets exactly as much sex as he or she needs. Thanks to the "Lex sexualis" claiming "Each cipher has the right to any other cipher as sexual product," finding a partner is no longer a problem.

Without individuality, privacy ceases to be an issue. The city of the One State is surrounded by a Green Wall, made of glass, and within the wall, everything too is made of transparent glass -- buildings, sidewalks, beds and chairs. (Only on Sex Days do the ciphers get to lower the blinds in their own rooms.) Even the space shuttle that the One State is set to launch -- in the hopes of conquering whatever unknown societies exist on other planets -- is made of glass. "We" takes the form of a diary started by the builder of that shuttle, a mathematician called D-503. When the Benefactor urges the ciphers to write something dealing with "the beauty and the grandeur of the One State" to send up in the shuttle -- in the hopes that words, before arms, will convince the extraterrestrials to willingly subjugate themselves to the One States' "beneficial yoke of reason" -- D-503 decides to record his daily life, so that those living "in the savage state of freedom" will see how wonderful un-freedom really is.

D-503 is cheerfully aware that life in the One State might sound absurd. Comparing his diary entries to a 20th century novelist needing to explain the word "jacket," he writes, "I am certain that the barbarian, looking at a 'jacket' would think: 'What's this for? Just more to carry on my back.' I have a feeling that you will think exactly the same thing when I tell you that none of us, since the Two-Hundred-Year War, has been beyond the Green Wall." But he soldiers on nonetheless: "I will just attempt to record what I see, what I think -- or more exactly, what we think," he writes, and he stays true to that goal even when his "I" begins to deviate from the "we."

Next page: Zamyatin fled to Paris, where the lack of conflict seemed to disagree with him