Ahead of the forthcoming film, I take a fresh look at this seminal science fiction anti-utopia – and the new relevance it has since gained.
I am a man and not a number.
Yet, my life is overuled by passcodes, passport numbers and national insurance numbers. I have sold my privacy to vast tech empires who decide what I want through algorithms. With me I carry a device which allows all my movements to be monitored…And whilst .I am not obliged to wear a uniform, I choose to dress in more or less the same way as everyone else….
This year marks the century after Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin’s novel WE was completed. No coincidence is it that the cultural event of this year is to be the big screen adaptation of this challenging fantasia. The timing, in terms of world events could not have been more auspicious.
WE was written when Zamyatin, a ship architect by trade living in St Petersburg, was 37. It received its first main publication in English in New York however in 1924 – the same year that Kafka’s The Trial also came out.
My own introduction to the book came back in the Eighties when I was discussing Nineteen Eighty Four with a doped up undergraduate. He informed me that Orwell had, like, stolen all his ideas from some Russian geezer.
This half-truth forms most people’s first brush with WE. If they then go on to read the novel itself they do so only to make comparisons with Orwell’s classic – or perhaps with Huxley’s Brave New World.
Orwells’s debt to Zamyatin is a matter of record: Orwell reviewed the novel in Tribune (4th January, 1946). Huxley has never acknowledged the same influence, but Orwell (in that piece) felt it existed.
In any case, whilst it is by no means true to call WE `the first dystopian novel` it is, for sure, one that laid down the blueprint for many which came to follow. (My version, the Vintage imprint, is introduced by Will Self. This well-read bibliophile admits to not having read the novel before he did so to review it, and he read it on the Hebridean island where Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty Four).
Zamyatin penned much else in different genres. If he is only known for WE then this is because is is this work that prompted the just installed Bolshevik apparatchiks to enusure that it never saw print in the Soviet Union. Zamyatin’s response – to get it printed on foreign soil -set the trend for many dissident scribes that followed him.
It is time to excavate this novel from all of its associations with better known writings and also from its political backstory and try and encounter it afresh.
Everything is awesome.
We are in the far future. The One State, presided over by the ever watchful Great Benefactor, is the only collection of humans to have survived the Two Hundred Year’s War which has shattered urban society. They now live protected from individual freedom in a city composed of glass buildings. Around this is a `Green Wall` which quarantines them from the savagery of the natural world. Their daily activities are circumscribed by a Taylorist style `Table of Hours`. They have been assigned numbers instead of names and all wear a uniform.
WE established the archetype of the quintessential industrial-technocratic anti-utopia.[pinterest.com]A spaceship engineer called D-503 keeps a journal and it is these first person present tense reflections that make up this novel. He is helping to build the Integral – a spaccraft that has the purpose of exporting the values of this society to other worlds. The narrator is foursquare behind this:
`Indeed is there a place where happiness is wiser, more cloudless than this miracle world?…nothing is happier than digits living according to the well-constructed, eternal laws of the multiplication table` (p-59).
However he comes to obsess over an unusual young woman (serial dating is encouraged by a voucher system which would put Tinder to shame). It turns out that she is an opponent of the regime. His attraction to her has distinct sadomasochistic overtones:
`And suddenly she burst out laughing. I could see this laughter with my eyes: the ringing, sever, stubbornly supple (like a whip), crooked line of this laughter`. (p-27)
D503’s inner struggle between his conventional loyalty to the One State and primal lust for this woman – I-330- drives the narrative to its tragic foregone conclusion.
The premise, then has since become so embedded that you will have encountered it in popular film culture in such films as Metropolis (1927), Sleeper (1973), Rollerball (1975), Demolition Man (1993) and Equilibrium (2002), to name but a few.
Russian S.F from the Twenties.
WE comprises a novel that belongs to the Nineteen Twenties just as surely as, say, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. It is drenched with all the concerns of that decade: new machineries, female emancipation, modernism and a sense of despair at the future of humanity.
Also WE is far more of a generic science-fiction story than Orwell’s much more down-to-earth and more topical extraction of it.
It also must not be forgotten that is a part of Russian literature. It contains echoes of Dostoevsky here and there, as well as references to Pushkin. The polished style partakes of the avant garde ferment which enriched Russia at that time. (In fact, it is this latter aspect of the novel – its difficult prose – which has done much to discourage people from giving WE more attention).
More than an anti-Soviet diatribe.
It seems simplistic to view this Twenty Sixth Century world as being a comment on the Soviet Union. Yes, some aspects of `Stalinism` were anticipated with accuracy by Zamyatin: the use of Secret Police as spies (`The Guardians`) and The Day of One Vote, for example. Much else is more about technocracy than State Socialism, however.
Like Bulgakov, Zamyatin was labouring under the long shadow cast by H.G.Wells, with his antiseptic messianism. The society of One State, a kind of Rationalist Utilitarian one, resembles Gene Roddenberry’s Vulcans as much as anything:
`Take two trays of a weighing scale: you put a grain on one, and on the other put a ton. On one side the `I` and on the other is the `we`, the One state…Assuming that `I` has the same `rights` compared to the State is exactly the same thing as assuming that a grain can counterbalance a tone` (p-102).
Then against the psychology of this totalitarianism Zamyatin juxtaposes a primitive sexual infatuation – in its way just as deranged.
New resonances.
I have read WE about four times during the last decade, and in different translations. Clarence Brown (1993) then Mira Ginsburg(1983) and now the London based American Natasha Randall ((2006) Her variant seems to work best for me, although I would be hard pressed to explain why.
Getting past the Expressionist style of narration we find a novel that delivers a science fictional kick. There is a death ray that turns people to liquid, a Bell Jar used as a torture device,diaphanous listening gadgets lining the streets, robot tutors and a space craft that gets given a test flight.
On top of all that the world of WE has never seemes less implausible. Post-Covid, Zoom and so on have become all pervasive – with the result that we all indeed live in glass compartments, in effect, and the police have been granted unpresedented powers to direct people’s private lives.
Anticipations.
So I really hope that Hamlet Dulyan’s cinema adaptation will be more on the edgy side than precious. That is to say that it should not treat the tale as some sort of signed and sealed `period piece`, still less some kind of retrospective on the Soviet years.
I hope that the director has not been too `highbrow` has remembered that WE functions above all as a science-fiction yarn. Furthermore he needs to have brought out the eroticism of it all,
We shall see.
All translations are from: Zamyatin, Yevgeny WE. Translated by Natasha Randall. (London: Vintage, 2007).
The lead image is from: atomsand archetypes.wordpress.com