The 20th century produced fictional dystopias out of reality, yet well-known – like George Orwell’s. Nineteen Eighty-Four – from liberal democracies. Everything, however, owes a lot to the novel from one of the real dystopias, Weby Yevgeny Zamyatin of the Soviet Union.
Born in 1887, Zamyatin became a Bolshevik while a student, was arrested during the 1905 revolution, was twice exiled from St Petersburg, and tried to “slander the Russian officials” with his military satire. His hopes that the revolution of 1917 would bring artistic freedom were soon disappointed: The revolution did not free the artists, instead they now had to create art to work for the revolution. In 1921, he wrote:
Much has been said by many about the imperfection of the universe…its remarkable lack of monism: water and fire, mountains and valleys, saints and sinners. What perfect simplicity, what joy, unconcealed by any imagination, would be there [God] from the beginning he created the water of one fire, if he had saved the first man from the evil state of freedom! …We are undoubtedly living in a cosmic age – the age of the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. And naturally we won’t do it again [His] error. There will be no more polyphony or dissonances. There will only be one great, monumental, all-encompassing harmony.
In Wewritten in 1920-1921, Zamyatin explored this fear.
It is set in One State in the distant future, where, its protagonist, D-503, writes:
Every morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the same hour and at the same time, we – millions of us – wake up as one. At the same time, with the cooperation of millions, we start work; and with one voice of a million heads we will finish it. And, united in one million-handed body, at the same moment, appointed by the Table, we raise our spoons to our mouths. At the same moment, chosen by the Table, we raise our spoons to our mouths. In the same moment, we go out to walk, go to the hall, go to the hall to do Taylor’s exercises, sleep…
The “right” shades of the bottom:
…offered on sex days only. At all other times we live behind our transparent walls that seem to be woven with a sparkling air – we are always visible, always bathed in light. We can’t hide anything from each other. Besides, this makes the difficult and commendable work of the guards much easier. Because who knows what could happen otherwise? Perhaps it was those very strange, invisible ancient dwellings that gave rise to their cage mentality. “My home (sic!) is my castle.” What a sight!
Indeed, D-503 is horrified by “those times when people still live in a free, that is, unorganized, brutal environment.” In the early days of the Soviet Union, Zamyatin saw the socialist utopia of Edward Bellamy emerge Looking Back: 2000-1887 being seen and hated.
Like Adam – or Winston Smith – D-503 is lured into a doomed rebellion. “Those two, in paradise, are given a choice,” he was told, “joy without freedom, or freedom without joy.” Zamyatin assumes that the system works by itself, that is it can be ensure happiness. History would prove him wrong, these plans did not bring happiness or freedom. When Orwell was told by a supporter of Soviet oppression that “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” he replied, “Where’s the omelet?”
We it was refused publication, first appeared in English in 1924, and a Writers’ Union reading in 1923 led to an attack by Zamyatin’s fellow writers. During the 1920s the regime sponsored by the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers criticized him for being “incompatible with revolution” and “slandering and slandering” revolutionary beliefs. He was “frightened” again. Fighting his doomed rebellion, Zamyatin wrote of his fellow writers in 1926: “The Revolution does not need dogs that “sit” waiting for something to be given or because they are afraid of the whip. Anyway, that’s what it got. The flowering of Russian literature that began with Pushkin ended, at least for those writers living in Russia. Exhausted, Zamyatin left the Soviet Union in 1931, and went to Paris where he died in 1937.
In 1962, Isaac Asimov wrote that American science fiction had seen three phases: “advanced,” “technological complexity,” and “dominant social science” while Soviet science fiction remained in the second phase. “The Soviet people are told, and they may believe, that they are building a new society bound, by the sheer appeal of its superior performance, to be the dominant society in the world,” he wrote. “Then, it would be almost unpatriotic for a Soviet writer to suggest that other societies were possible in the future, or even to look closely at the present one.” Asimov was absolutely wrong. We is a third stage novel, one of the greatest of the century.
John Phelan is an Economist at the Center of the American Experiment.
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