Everybody will have heard of Orwell’s novel 1984, published in 1949. Not many people will know Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. Zamyatin (1884-1937) was a Russian engineer and author. He wrote We probably in 1920-21. It was an implicit critique of the Soviet Union. Although the novel circulated for many years there in literary and other circles, it was not published in Russian before 1988. Its first publication in English was already in 1924.
We can be seen as the first dystopian novel, so a novel that describes a society we don’t want to live in. It had a big influence on later writers of such novels, like George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. It criticized the developments in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s and actually foresaw what would happen in this state, but I think that, just as Orwell’s 1984, it is still relevant and helps us understand what is currently happening in many countries and especially in dictatorships like Putin’s Russia. In this blog, I’ll not summarize the story of the book but I’ll focus on what is nowadays most interesting in the book, namely the way Zamyatin’s society, named the One State, is organized.
The events in the novel take place a few centuries after now. After a two hundred years lasting war the One State is the winner. It is a city state surrounded by a Green Wall, which closes the town off from the wild world, a savage world with wild animals, birds and a lush nature where man is thought to have become extinct (which is not true, as later becomes clear in the novel). Life in the One State is strictly organised according to mathematical principles. Its inhabitants don’t have names but numbers. Also buildings have numbers. The daily schedules of the inhabitants are exactly determined by the state: How late to wake up and go to work; when to take lunch (in a common restaurant at your workplace); when to make a walk outdoors; etc. Only two hours a day can be used at will. People live in apartments made of glass and so everyone, including your neighbours, can see what you are doing. There are curtains, but you must have permission to close them. You get it when you want to have sex with a partner. Then you ask for a pink ticket to meet your partner at home. You can choose your partner yourself, but the state must accept your choice; or the state pairs two people off (but a person can have more partners, for meeting a partner is only for the sex; babies are brought up by the state).
It can happen, of course, that an individual breaks the law. To keep people under control, there is a secret police force, named Bureau of Guardians. For only minor offences citizens can be arrested by the guardians and be punished. Not too serious violations can be punished with the death penalty. The execution of the death penalty is public and then the perpetrator is completely annihilated and nothing of the body remains. A citizen can also report someone to the Bureau of Guardians for breaking the law. Need I add yet that all information is state-controlled?
The head of the state is the Benefactor. He cares for the people and does what is best for them. He is elected once a year at a public meeting. Of course, there are no opposition candidates. You are just supposed to vote for him, and everybody can see that you do (or could see it if you did not). However, once it happens that many people vote against the re-election of the Benefactor. Of course, this is seen as a kind of rebellion, and “[it]t is clear to everybody that to take into consideration their votes would mean to consider as a part of a magnificent, heroic symphony the accidental cough of a sick person who happened to be in a concert hall.” (report 26 in We). These votes are simply not counted. However, this misbehaviour appears to be part of a real rebellion that is going on. The Benefactor and the Bureau of Guardians have already noticed that for some time that there is unrest in the One State. Happily, medical researchers have discovered that the imagination of human beings can be found in “a miserable little nervous knot in the lower region of the frontal lobe of the brain.” (report 31) Once it has been removed, people will become docile and will do everything the Benefactor asks them to do. Removing the imagination of all citizens of the One State will prevent future unrest, and the operation can be simply done by targeting the knot in the brain with X-rays. Therefore, everybody must be treated. And why wouldn’t you agree with being operated? In fact, imagination is a kind of illness and removing it will make you happy. For with your imagination also your desires are gone: “... Desires are tortures, are they not? It is clear therefore, that happiness is where there are no longer any desires, not a single desire any more. What an error, what an absurd prejudice it was, that formerly we would mark happiness with the sign ‘plus’! No, absolute happiness must be marked ‘minus,’—divine minus!” Happiness is where there is nothing, where there are no own thoughts. Then you behave like a machine and execute the orders of the Benefactor obediently and you feel good by doing so. Then you follow Reason.
With his novel We, Zamyatin has foreseen what would happen in Stalin’s Soviet Union, but didn’t he also foresee what happens in all dictatorships, and especially what happens now in his own country one hundred year later?
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