“We”, by Yevgeny Zamyatin
We shall now analyze a novel of fiction. A novel about a totalitarian State, where only one way of thinking and acting is admitted: unconditional support of the State. A society whose members are under constant surveillance, both by the state and by the population itself — plus an omnipresent and omnipotent entity watching over all. A life in which a simple misstep, an unexpected action or even a mere thought can awaken suspicion, and turn an individual into an enemy of society — a criminal to be punished. Any manifestation of creativity is transgressive — unless it serves to exalt the state. The story of a man placed in conflict with himself by a woman who shows him the pleasurable — and forbidden — side of a monotonous, ultra-regulated existence. We could fit this description onto the consecrated 1984, by George Orwell. Yet, curiously, this description also fits perfectly a book written 23 years before the Orwellian novel. This book was written by a Russian named Yevgeny Zamyatin, and its title, equally brief, is “We”. We will now go deep enough into the Russian novel to awaken the curiosity of its future readers, up to a limit that does not deprive them of the pleasure of reading and discovery.
The 26th century. After the 200 Years’ War, survived by the diminutive parcel of two tenths of humanity, the remnants isolated themselves from the world by building an immense wall, which physically delimits the domains of the most perfect form of human organization known until then — the One State. In this state, all buildings, including the wall, are made of glass. Transparency, clarity and collectivity are key concepts of the One State. Thus the numbers — as the inhabitants of the vitreous civilization are called — live in glass apartments, walk on glass streets, work in glass offices. This structure is very convenient to the interests of the One State, for it turns the population into its own greatest watchman. Of course there is an official apparatus of surveillance and repression — the Guardians — ready to denounce any sign of dissidence, subjecting the guilty to the executing machine of the Benefactor, the mysterious and imposing leader who watches over all, and governs the One State with cold, mathematical love.
Any sign of individuality is condemned by the society of the numbers. Notions like “mine” or “yours” are simply absurd — this applies to partners, possessions and even names — those who would be the citizens of our society are the numbers of the One State. Thus, the name, or number, of the narrator-protagonist is D-503. This number holds a privileged function — he is the builder of the Integral, a kind of spaceship whose function is to carry the mathematical philosophy of the One State to remote regions — and eras. D-503 keeps a journal, where he confides reflections and impressions of his life as a number. And it is in this journal that the literary merits of Zamyatin reside.
D-503, far from being an obtuse mathematician, reveals himself to hold good doses of a dreamer and a philosopher. The first entries of the journal are clearly meant to explain the workings of the One State, such as the Table of Hours and the Lex Sexualis. Let us pause a brief instant on the surface analysis of these two mechanisms. In the Table of Hours, each number’s time is gridded and divided so that his life is mathematically integrated into the gears of the One State: the hour to sleep, to wake, to eat, to work, and so forth. There are, however, the personal hours — two hours a day destined for each number’s private activities (considered by D-503 an imperfection to be corrected). The Lex Sexualis has something more curious about it: the One State recognizes the human need for sex, and knows that people with repressed instincts represent potentially revolted and unhappy human beings — a suitable combination for the emergence of an insurgent or dissident (George Orwell would explore this state relationship with sex in his 1984, though with a dark, pessimistic approach). The solution to this case is interesting: each number’s sexual hormones are measured in the laboratory, determining the intensity of their sexual needs. According to the degree of sexual desire, a weekly quota of sexual relations is established, and pink coupons are distributed according to the number of sex days. The number must then choose one (or more than one) number to their liking, and register to them, thereby determining that they will have sexual relations at the hours set for it. Using the pink coupons, they gain the right to lower the blinds of their apartments for one hour — the only moment a number is entitled to privacy.
D-503 fulfills his duties as a number with pride, and a good part of his writings is devoted to exalting the state machine. However, certain events throw his certainties into crisis, and the first of them is the encounter with a woman who exerts a strange attraction over him, but also causes him a certain hatred and revulsion (and any lovestruck pre-teen of our days knows well what that is). And it is in one of the first visual contacts with this woman, whose number is I-330, that one of the most inspired passages of Zamyatin’s narrative resides. In yet another of the One State’s public demonstrations, a new symphony-composing machine was being presented to the population (Orwell liked this machine very much). In opposition to the music mathematically composed by the new invention, a piano is placed on stage. Out of a box emerges the mysterious woman, wearing a dress of bygone times, and begins to play on the old instrument a composition from past centuries. The great mass of numbers begins to guffaw — to laugh at the illogical absurdity that is the music of the ancients. But D-503 is not laughing — he is completely absorbed, deeply touched by something that fits no equation, that cannot be submitted to the cold logic of the multiplication table:
“Yes, epilepsy, a sickness of the spirit, pain… Slow, pleasurable pain, a bite — we wish it deeper still, more painful still. Then, slowly, the sun. Not ours, not that bluish, crystalline, uniform light filtering through the glass bricks. No — a devastating, wild sun, reducing everything to almost nothing…”
And here begins D-503’s personal hell. More and more entangled with the enigmatic woman, he begins to doubt his convictions and to suspect that his perfect State is built atop an enormous void. It is from these questionings that Zamyatin extracts what is most philosophical in the mind of his novel’s protagonist. In his journal entries, D-503 always divides into topics the subjects he will discuss. However, on the day following his first intimate encounter with I-330, from which he emerges extremely confused and disturbed — and renewed, nonetheless — the topic is the following: “No, I can’t. Just write. Without a plan“. A paragraph from the same day:
“I stand before the mirror. And for the first time in my life — yes, for the first time — I see myself clearly, sharply, consciously. I see myself astonished, as a certain ‘him’. Here I am — he: eyebrows drawn black in a straight line; and between them, like a scar, a vertical crease (I don’t know if it was there before). Steel-blue eyes, shadowed by the dark circles of a sleepless night. And there, behind that steel… it turns out I never knew what was there. And from ‘there’ (this ‘there’ is at once here and infinitely far), from ‘there’ I look at myself — at him — and I know: this one with the straight eyebrows is a stranger, alien to me, someone I am meeting for the first time in my life. And I, the real I, am not him.”
We will end here the incursions into the linear trajectory of Zamyatin’s novel, judging them sufficient to trace a general panorama that awakens interest in reading it — considering it an unnecessary expenditure of time and effort to follow D-503’s trajectory to the end. That will be done when we compare D-503 with Winston Smith, We with 1984. For now, let us pause to observe the more general aspects of We and get to know a little better the work and the author that directly influenced well-known fiction novels of the following decades, such as the already mentioned novel by Orwell and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
The principal virtue of We in relation to the fiction books that followed it is the ample room granted to reveries and poetic incursions, as we tried to demonstrate in the previous quotations. If we take this novel as merely a work of science fiction of a fantastic bent, we will find various gaps and exaggerations that would testify against the work’s verisimilitude and coherence. It is at this moment that we must take into consideration biographical aspects of Zamyatin, which will lead us to greater clarity regarding the function performed by this novel. Ezra Pound tells us that the bad critic is identified when he begins to speak of the author and not of the work — perhaps fearing we might associate the image of an astute critic and inspired poet with that of a somewhat cantankerous gentleman who sympathized with the fascists and spent some time locked in a cage. Baudelaire, in turn, in his essay on Edgar Allan Poe, tells us the opposite, and goes so far as to describe the physical features of the famous American writer. We will now link arms with Pound on one side and Baudelaire on the other, trying to keep only to the biographical details that contribute to a better understanding of Zamyatin’s work.
With his writings, Zamyatin managed to displease authorities of every stripe and color. Persecuted both by the tsarists and, later, by the socialists, he faced extreme difficulties in publishing several of his works in his native land. He was also exiled from Russia, and did not perish at Stalin’s hands thanks to the intervention of influential friends. We must be contextualized as an acid and somewhat prophetic satire of what the Russian Revolution was becoming. Zamyatin captured certain tendencies with extreme lucidity and, raising them to an almost prophetic degree, arrived at the format assumed by the One State. Using some analogies, we can better understand the origin of certain images in the novel, as well as excuse apparent exaggerations.
For example, the symphony-composing machine, and the duty of poets and writers toward the State. Zamyatin was constantly accused of disservice to revolutionary interests, and watched various fellow writers succumb to socialist interests, turning literary works into red exaltations. He probably drew on this fact when conceiving the symphony-composing machine — writers, poets and other artists as one great machine for making works with absolute coldness and impersonality. The first entry of D-503’s journal contains a quotation from the One State Gazette that is a more explicit critique in this direction:
“All those who have the capacity must compose tracts, odes, manifestos, poems and other texts exalting the beauty and grandeur of the One State.”
Something that sounds contradictory and exaggerated is the feeding of the numbers, which consists of a food synthesized from petroleum. Given the rate at which it is currently consumed, and the economic value it has attained, we will hardly have petroleum five centuries from now, much less used as food. But it is possible, and preferable, in this case, to consider Zamyatin’s elevated sense of irony and understand that he was criticizing the all-important position petroleum was to reach, and the value given today to the black substance — so important that we might one day come to eat it. Indeed, petroleum became the epicenter of wars and economic crises — the health of the world economy is perhaps more dependent on petroleum than on food.
A remarkable maneuver by Zamyatin guarantees the survival of “We” as a work of science fiction. Anthony Burgess tells us, in his 1985, that:
“It is always foolish to write a work of fiction about a future that its readers will soon be able to check for themselves. Let us say I limit myself to dramatizing certain tendencies.”
Such is also Zamyatin’s method, which does not consist merely in pushing humanity six centuries past the twentieth, listing the most probable characteristics of a distant future — he also risks a prediction of philosophical foundation. The society of the numbers holds as its great reference Taylor — the idealizer of Scientific Management (or Taylorism), which consists basically in the division and specialization of work functions, brilliantly illustrated by Charles Chaplin in the famous film Modern Times. This constitutes a “hit”, if we take the fiction as prophecy — and ever since its implementation it has been easily verifiable that the same principle enjoys growing acceptance in various areas of human knowledge. Aldous Huxley takes up this “prophecy” again in his Brave New World — where Ford is practically God. Let us turn to one more inspired passage from D-503’s journal:
“That Taylor was without doubt the greatest genius of antiquity. True, his thought did not reach far enough to extrapolate his method to the whole of life, to every step, to the twenty-four hours of the day. He was not able to integrate his system of one hour into twenty-four hours. Still, how could they write whole libraries about the likes of Kant, and barely take notice of Taylor — a prophet who managed to see ten centuries ahead?”
Beyond the philosophical foundation, the One State also has something religious about it — and here one must recall Zamyatin’s stance toward any kind of authority. Christians are mentioned as the imperfect predecessors of the numbers, and D-503 himself is a kind of religious ascetic; his devotion to the Benefactor and to the One State is unrestricted. He refers to the Guardians as the personification of the guardian angels the ancients spoke of, and even feels good when he notices a Guardian shadowing him from behind. His journal is the way he found to expiate his faults, with the commitment to conceal nothing. This “nothing”, in D-503’s case, means his temptations, the dreams, the reveries, the delight he felt on hearing the music of the piano — any kind of feeling that fits no mathematical equation. Imagination is D-503’s principal enemy: ironically, something he possesses in abundance. From these conflicts, from his troubled relationship with the enigmatic I-330, from his imagination, will arise the sickness the doctors call a soul — “it is incurable“. It is from this sickness that the interferences of the unexpected can arise in a monotonous existence, whose laws are as exact as the multiplication table.
A critical text will never replace its object of study. In this case, what one hopes is to shed light on We and awaken the curiosity of possible readers. This work, compared with the books directly inspired by it, is practically unknown. Zamyatin faced this problem in life — in the 1920s, when We was written, it was much easier to find its English-language translations than the original Russian text, such was the persecution he suffered in his native land. At a later moment, we will compare We to the Orwellian 1984, and we will perceive clearly with what intensity this book influenced the cacotopian novels of the following decades. For now, let the present text serve as a small alert to readers and a modest tribute to Zamyatin, for a text that has not yet obtained the recognition it is owed.