Yevgeny Zamyatin’s science-fiction dystopia, curtly titled We (1920-21), bears its mark on the development of the genre as contemporary readers have come to know it. Anyone who has read or even heard of Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952), Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962) will recognize a conjoining link between Zamyatin’s fledgling and these later examples of a well-constituted literary premise. What distinguishes this work from its subsequent follow-ups is the grittiness of the author’s representational style. By employing the logistics of his scientific background (i.e., Zamyatin was an accomplished naval engineer), the author creates the sometime too-mathematically proper rhetoric of his main protagonist, the novel’s narrator D-503.
In a world far removed from the reality of the 1920s (or so it seems), amidst the glass-walled antiseptic environment of The One State, D-503 diligently records his thoughts and observations in a diary format, executing a mathematician’s poem so to speak, that is to (hopefully upon its completion) become part of the cargo on board the Integral, a space vessel that he, D-503, has designed to help spread the happiness of The One State among the savage inhabitants of other planets, other worlds. Zamyatin uses D-503’s observations and later on personal experiences to dismantle the moral failings behind the unfaltering rendition of The One State’s totalitarian government.
As we become engaging witnesses to this system’s grim logic, we also partake on another, more subtle point of the plot’s distribution. Namely, there are no individuals in The One State, there are no personal names; there are only assigned numbers. Men units are assigned a consonant signifier (e.g., D-503, R-13, S-), whereas female counterparts are given a vowel sign (e.g., O-90, E-330). From a mathematical perspective, this premise of justifying the existence of a government that has literally reduced its citizens to numerical constituents is unquestioningly wrong, implying a moral error as well. Zamyatin’s narrator, and to an extent his fictional counterpart, does not comment on this obvious failing on the part of the perfect society that he inhabits. This conscious choice resonates more powerfully than any other literary device that Zamyatin incorporates in his narrative, such as situational and/or attitudinal irony. The author allows his readers to understand the mathematical as well as moral fallacy of this premise through the conflicting nature of the main protagonist and his coming to terms with his awakened subconscious.
As D-503’s character lives out his internal conflict, reflected even in his mirror image, we come to grasp the full meaning of Zamyatin’s powerful criticism of any ideology (systematically distributed or not) that displaces human diversity and individuality in the name of uniformity and conformity, reducing our freedoms (even that of loose facial hair) by turning our humanity into a cipher-esque ensemble mechanism. In lieu of this, we also have to comment on the novel’s relentless ambiguity, perhaps, a direct result of the author’s cryptic style as well as an effect of the novel’s piercingly crude theme. Taking into consideration the odyssey of the novel’s publishing history in Zamyatin’s native Russia, then the We-esque Soviet Union, Zamyatin’s artistic attempt at exposing the fallacy behind any repressive system, even a fictional one, is a chillingly prophetic warning against any form of human disempowerment, especially one including the rationality and logic behind the old adage “for the majority’s benefit”. Whether of not we decide to admire the somewhat incongruous stream of thought as attributed to the main protagonist’s self-discovery, or dismiss the author’s style for its inconsistency and unrefined appeal, Zamyatin’s We continuously reminds us of our humanity and what it can all amount to.
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