Noting my tastes, my friend Stuart recently returned from England and thrust his copy of 'We' into my hand to fill one of the holes in my reading.
Yevgeny Zamyatin's short novel, written in the immediate aftermath of Russia's Bolshevik revolution, is the grandfather of all 20th-century science fiction dystopias and remains immensely readable almost 83 years after he penned it.
"A dystopia is any society considered to be undesirable, for any of a number of reasons. The term was coined as a converse to a Utopia, and is most usually used to refer to a fictional (often near-future) society where current social trends are taken to nightmarish extremes," the superb Wikipedia informs us.
The ordinary narrator of 'We' is D-503, a contented Number in the perfect OneState, whose citizens live and work their mathematically ordered 26th-century existences under the benevolent rule of the 'Benefactor', watched over by the Guardians.
Nobody has or needs names in OneState, a monumental and proud social collective living in glass and steel buildings protected from the chaos of an inhuman, natural world which lies beyond the Green Wall, constructed in the aftermath of a devastating 200 Years War.
D-503, like Zamyatin himself, is a mathematician and engineer, the builder of "the glass, the electric, the fire-breathing INTEGRAL," a spaceship due for imminent lift-off "to place the beneficial yoke of reason round the necks of the unknown beings who inhabit other planets -- still living, it may be, in the primitive state known as freedom."
This tightly written tale -- not much more than 200 pages long in Clarence Brown's 1993 translation published in Penguin Twentieth Century Classics -- is hard to read with a fresh eye when you come to it after digesting the dystopian novels and films it directly inspired or has influenced, from George Orwell's '1984' to Kurt Wimmer's 'Equilibrium' (2002; IMDb, reviewed last July).
While 'We' retains all its relevance when it comes to humanity's pursuit of happiness and as a satirical critique of planning for a perfect society, it is also, as Brown points out in an admirable and witty introduction, very much a work of its time.
"I suddenly recalled," D-503 notes in his 'Record Two', "a picture in the museum: one of the avenues they had back then, after twenty centuries -- a stunningly garish, mixed-up crush of people, wheels, animals, posters, trees, colours, birds . . . And they say it was really like that. It could have been like that. It all struck me as so unlikely, so idiotic, that I couldn't help it, I burst out laughing.
And suddenly there was an echo, laughter, from the right. I turned. Before my eyes were teeth -- white, uncommonly white, sharp teeth -- and a woman's face that I didn't know.
'I'm sorry,' she said, 'but the way you were looking at everything, it was inspired, as if you were some god out of myth on the seventh day of creation. I think you believe you created me, too -- you and nobody else. I'm very flattered.'
All this with a straight face."
D-503 gets confused from this very first encounter with I-330. D-503 is destined to become totally infatuated with I-330. D-503 is soon even going to need sick notes so he can see I-330 outside his allocated Personal Hours and her part in his Table of Sex Days.
His own brief notes for unknown readers are already becoming sick, disjointed.
And I-330 is dangerous, she teases D-503's previously dormant imagination, erupts into his dreams. I-330 is a rebel. Worse, she is not alone and she has designs on D-503 and the INTEGRAL.
While Zamyatin's Numbers are thinly developed as characters, serving mainly as vehicles for ideas, I-330 is a striking creation from a Russian naval engineer who served in Britain for two years during World War I. He must have assimilated notions of the women's liberation movement taking off in England's rigid post-Victorian society before returning to a homeland where he was supportive of the Marxist revolution.
I-330 is a courageous, free-thinking, sexually adventurous leader and breaker of barriers. She is viscerally opposed to the workings of the Benefactor, in whom it is much easier to see Lenin and notions of perfectibility through scientific socialism than the Big Brother of '1984'.
Orwell, and Aldous Huxley in 'Brave New World', were respectively writing just after (1948) and before (1931) the terrifying manifestations of a new totalitarianism and a global confrontation of ideologies in the last century's total war.
From this perspective, I found 'We' far less of a political novel than those it has inspired. Unlike some of those offspring, OneState is not evidently derived from any one nation of Zamyatin's day, but the parallels with the regulated lives many of us live in the big cities of today's "developed world" become more pertinent with each passing decade as nature is driven out of the metropolis.
Zamyatin wrote the book as no enemy of the Soviet State, though it was swiftly perceived that way and went unpublished in any faithful rendition of his original text in Russia itself until 1988, 57 years after Stalin allowed him in exile in Paris, disabused by the absence of creative outlets and the conformity of Soviet thought.
'We' is instead an entertaining, sometimes funny and seminal work of science fiction, where the core of social satire lies in a simple arithmetical challenge I-330 puts to D-503 as the tale nears its climax.
Zamyatin's biographers tell us he much admired another of the first great "sci-fi writers", H.G. Wells, whose influence is evident, and the naïf D-503 also has a little in common with Voltaire's wide-eyed Candide until he finds himself increasingly distanced from a society founded on a scientific ideal.
In our 21st-century societies, scientific thinking has to many minds dethroned traditional religious notions. Developments in medicine and nanotechnology have given a new twist to the concept of human perfectibility as a taming of the genetic "freedom" exercised in the evolution of the species to its current point.
I found 'We' a particularly stimulating read in the immediate wake of some catching up on current thinking in genetics and biology, most especially the conclusion that any further evolution of Homo sapiens -- if we avoid rendering our world uninhabitable first -- will be determined primarily by our technologies, medical science and socio-cultural achievements.
Beyond the Marxist model Zamyatin adopted, beyond the manic consumer capitalism of our day, the concepts of utopia and dystopia have assumed a new relevance, drawing on developments scarcely conceivable until they began happening in the latter half of the 20th century.
According to the cover of the British edition, one of my blogheroines, the wide-ranging writer Ursula K. Le Guin (her site), described 'We' as "the best single work of science fiction yet written". Ever wary of superlatives, I'd simply rate it among the best SF books I've yet read. If this were to be an essay of the order of Patrick Parrinder's 'Imagining the Future: Zamyatin and Wells' (Science Fiction Studies, 1973), I would digress into a similar piece contrasting 'We' with the book I lent Stuart in exchange, Le Guin's own 'The Dispossessed' (1974).
In that profoundly influential novel of ideas, much richer in character, the physicist hero Shevek declares:
"Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go and unbuild walls."
With that, he could be Zamyatin speaking.
Brown, in explaining the chequered history of 'We', its various renditions, and the need for his new translation, says that Zamyatin regarded the book -- which some might describe as a mere "novella" alongside the hefty, often multi-volume tomes of contemporary science fiction -- as his most light-hearted and most serious work.
It's a light and swift read, that's for sure. But it delivers a subtle and serious message of the kind you could be thinking about for months.
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