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We - Yevgeny Zamyatin
We - Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Zamyatin wrote WE in 1920, well before Orwell, Huxley et al began their dystopian efforts. In Zamyatin's vision of the twenty-sixth century, individuals are only known by numbers. They live in glass houses which enables the "Guardians" to supervise them more easily. Living completely regimented lives, people's usual recreation is to march in fours to the anthem of the Single State, the vast governmental entity that controls every aspect of their life from the food they eat, to the clothes they wear, to the amount of time they have for sex. The Single State is ruled over by a personage known as The Benefactor, who is annually re-elected by the entire population, the vote being always unanimous. The guiding principle of the State is that happiness and freedom are incompatible. In the Garden of Eden man was happy, but in his folly he demanded freedom and was driven out into the wilderness. Now the Single State has restored his happiness by removing his freedom.
While WE was the inspiration for 1984 and superior to Brave New World, it is, more specifically, the most passionate and colorful of the three novels. Zamyatin was not merely a political ideologue but a vigorous heretic as concerned with the momentum of evolution and revolution in the Arts as in the political arena. He was renowned for his heresy, which took him from early devotion to Bolshevism through various imprisonments for ideological rebellion to an uncomfortable relationship with the Soviet State. He became a thorn in the side of Soviet literary doctrine.
Zamyatin's dystopia is written as the diary of the state mathematician, named D-503, and chronicles his mental breakdown as he falls in love with I-330, a female revolutionary bent on destroying the Single State. Poor D-503 descends into utter bewilderment as his atavistic urges consume him; he discovers feelings that defy the rational, the collective, the mathematical, the logical and the foundations of Single State doctrine, otherwise known as love, jealousy, anger and fear.
Though WE was not written as commentary on Stalin's regime it was written in the year of Lenin's death it is a sort of fantastical, literary manifesto of Zamyatin's belief that the status quo should always be challenged, that energy should be generated in defiance of entropy.