I realised some time ago that I need freedom in all aspects of my life, that without it I become surly and depressed. My commitment fears; my intense, relentless fantasies about escape; my interest in creative subjects or activities; even the animals I admire [foxes, wolves, hares]: it all comes back to the same thing. Moreover, when I think back to my schooldays or any job I have had I’m immediately struck by how resistant I am to authority, so that if anyone tries to tell me what to do, or if it is demanded that I behave like everyone else, I immediately [childishly, perhaps] rebel. For example, whenever I was set a task in class, specifically in English or Art or Philosophy, subjects that I associated with a lack of rules, I would disregard it and do my own thing. Most of the time my teachers and lecturers accepted my work, welcomed it even, but there were occasions when I clearly pissed them off. I remember one time we were asked to write a story, and I made a suggestion about what I wanted to do, and this was rejected. And so I wrote something about murder and sodomy instead, and ended up getting dragged in front of the headmaster.In this way, I am the opposite of D-503, the narrator of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s influential dystopian novel We, at least in the beginning anyway. When we meet D-503 he is a happy and productive drone, a mathematician [of course!] and engineer who is helping to build the Integral, which is a sort of space-rocket that is part of a plan to bring the One State’s ‘mathematically infallible happiness’ to other planets and civilisations [by force if necessary!]. Everything in the One State is regulated, is by appointment. You wake up, go to work, have your leisure time, etc when you are told to, at the prescribed hour; indeed, there is a Table of Hours, in which the greater part of your life is mapped out.In Zamyatin’s future world, the focus is not on the I, but on the we. The One State is like a machine, and while people do have a defined function or role within it, it is the machine that takes precedence. Individuality is a threat to the perfect running of the machine, because individuals, with their own unique hopes and dreams and desires, are unpredictable. However, as noted, D-503 is not only happy to accept the prevailing conditions, the restricted or unfree mode of living, but is, in fact, convinced of its rightness and logicality. He also frequently scoffs at the Ancients [i.e. us] whose lives were defined by chaos, at one point dismissing our love of clouds, which for him spoil the perfect sterile blue of the sky.[From a series of images based on Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We by Eda Akaltun]Bearing all this in mind, one can see why We is often thought to be a comment upon, a critique of, Communism, or at least a warning or prediction of what Communism might lead to. Communism, on the most basic level, advocates a classless society, whereby everyone has the same status, and what is produced by the collective or community is shared equally or according to one’s needs. Therefore, We, and specifically the One State, where everyone dresses the same, has a number for a name, etc, could be considered to be a Communist state taken to its logical conclusion. Yet, for me, the One State utopia ought not to be compared to a specific political movement. If it is the model for anything it is a number of dictatorial regimes, most of which are/were not Communistic [although there is, of course, something of a connection between Communism and tyranny]. The inhabitants of the One State are dictated to by a supreme leader called the Benefactor, who cannot be voted out of power; and those who rebel, or do not do as they are told, are publicly liquidated. Yet, even this interpretation is unsatisfactory, because there is no sense that the people, the cyphers or drones, are being exploited or generally mistreated.Perhaps the most interesting interpretation of what is going on in We is that it is a kind of retelling of the Adam and Eve story. The heart of that story is the question of whether it is better to live free and have the potential to be unhappy, or to have no free will but guaranteed happiness [i.e. to never feel pain etc], and this is also what Zamyatin asks you to consider. In the beginning of the book, D-503 [Adam] is living in a state of blissful ignorance. He then meets I-330 [Eve], and together they taste the forbidden fruit of freedom by doing things that are against the rules. In doing so, they cause trouble in Paradise [the One State] and piss off God [the Benefactor]. Was D-503 better off not knowing 1-330? Was he happier having never experienced obsession, jealousy, rage etc? Possibly, but I’m personally an advocate of letting your soul get a little dirty from time to time.However, I must confess that if all that was all the novel had to offer, if it was simply a political or religious allegory or satire, I might not have made it to the end. I’m on record regarding my dissatisfaction with satire and allegory, and I don’t want to go over that again, except to say that, for me, satirical or allegorical dystopian novels are often not nearly as inventive, clever or funny as they think they are. So, for example, when we are told that D-503 finds it odd that the results of our [the Ancients] elections aren’t known beforehand like theirs are, where there is only one candidate [the Benefactor], I might smile slightly to myself, and think ‘yeah, I see what you’ve done there,’ but I’m hardly knocked out by how profound this observation is. Moreover, for a book that is credited with such foresight and prescience, We also suffers from feeling rather dated or too familiar, mostly owing to the writers [Orwell, Huxley etc] who were heavily influenced by the Russian’s work and used it for the basis of their own.“You are afraid of it because it is stronger than you; you hate it because you are afraid of it; you love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved.”What I did find engaging, and what, for me, ensures that We is still worth reading, that it will always be worth reading, is the prose style and what Zamyatin had to say about love. When we meet D-503 he is involved in a pseudo-relationship with O-90, a rather chubby and cheery non-entity. D-503 doesn’t love her, but, rather, there is a kind of mindless acceptance of the situation, as though it is a duty fulfilled. Yet when D-503 meets I-330 his world [literally] changes. Crucially, I-330 is different to O-90; O-90 is comfortable, safe, obliging. I-330, on the other hand, is mysterious and maddening. Throughout the text there are frequent references to lips and mouths, and it is telling that O-90’s is described as ‘inviting’ D-503’s words, while’s I-330’s contains sharp teeth.So, while we may be dealing with future worlds and all that, D-503’s initial situation is the age-old human predicament of being caught between two women, of having a nice but dull girlfriend, but feeling drawn to someone more challenging. Ah, yes, we’ve all been there D. Yet just when you think that We is going to be a sci-fi Age of Innocence, it actually morphs into something else altogether, something more unsettling and, well, ultimately unhinged. As is often the case with these threesomes, D casts aside the safe-option, and goes all in with the woman who is clearly going to be hard work. It was possible that one would lose sympathy for D at this stage, that one would see him as callous or selfish, but that is not the case. In fact, the process of D falling in love for the first time happens to be really quite moving. First love is, of course, invariably a bitch. I’m sure you can remember yours as well as I can remember mine. The confusion, the despair…feeling as though something has entered you, and not being sure whether it is wonderful or toxic. One minute you were absolutely carefree, and now suddenly you feel plagued, discomforted. Zamyatin describes this disturbance of one’s equilibrium as like having a fine eyelash in your eye. I was really very taken with that.As a consequence of being in love, D starts to act rashly, to make poor decisions, to lie. He is, in fact, prepared to do whatever it takes to please I-300 and get close to her, even if it means participating in the destruction of the One State he admires so much. Sounds familiar, right? Oh, of course, our love-lives do not, as a rule, have serious socio-political consequences, but what Zamyatin seems to be suggesting is that love is a dangerous business, and I happen to agree with him on that point. Love is chaos, it is illogicality, it is, well, yeah, it is freedom. Great, isn’t it? When one considers all this one comes to realise that the title of the book has a significance beyond the political, that it refers to a couple, a relationship. We, us, me and my true love.“Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world; I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one.”There is so much more that I want to say about D and I, about how one can interpret their relationship, about how even though I-300 just isn’t, y’know, as into it as he is, what matters is that he took a chance, that he opened himself up to the possibility of heartache, and how, for me, that is life at its best, that is what freedom truly is, but I am conscious of how long this review is already. I do, however, before I finish, want to briefly touch upon how intense a reading experience, and how unrelentingly psychological, We is, because I wasn’t prepared for that at all. One must remember that D is a man in crisis, a man who totally buys into the One State idea, and so as he follows I, as he rebels against it, one witnesses the entire fabric of his existence coming apart; this is a man, a mind, crumbling before your eyes. At times it is torturous to read in a way that only Dostoevsky’s work can match.I haven’t yet said a great deal about the prose style, and I ought to to, because it is fantastic. I have never been accomplished at maths. My mind just isn’t wired that way. I knew enough to pass my GCSE, but I’ve always found numbers, equations, formulas, strangely alien and alienating, cold and restrictive. It is entirely apt then that We is strewn with mathematical references, language and symbols. Indeed, D-503 often uses mathematical imagery to describe people and things, which may sound gimmicky but is actually incredibly impressive. Less successful is the plot, which is episodic, repetitive, and never really goes anywhere, but I can forgive all that when the sentences are so beautiful, so idiosyncratic. More than anything, We reads like a delirious poem, a love poem for I-330, and for you too, you flawed but sometimes marvellous creatures.
When the creators of badass shit like ‘Logan’s Run’ and “1984” are eager to cite your output as significant and influential, you’ve got the goods. With “We”, Zamyatin earns those lofty credentials, and also wins the endearing faith from its readers. tWith the 200-Years War in the remote past, a post-apocalyptic society known as OneState rises amidst the aftermath by embracing the tenets of efficiency expert Frederick Taylor and crafts a futuristic paradise, a new world built around the sensibilities of timetables, predictability, and homogeneity. Surely, many people would call this bravest of new worlds a dystopia; populated by soulless automatons, blindly herded and corralled for fear of the infallible wrath of their authoritarian overseer, The Benefactor. Human emotion on the cusp of obliteration, man emulating his own machines, you slavishly labor for ‘work units’ instead of cash on the barrelhead, privacy and individuality concepts undreamt: and one thinks, “there can’t really be yet another book out there about the ultimate totalitarian state which emerges from near-extinctive global catastrophe in the distant future, can there be?” I could try a re-assurance tactic, by stating that Penguin (the publisher themselves, of this edition) claims this is the grand-daddy of them all, the progenitor of all the righteous stories in a similar vein to follow, but, seeing as I haven’t read every damn book in the world, I can’t really validate this claim. What I can say is this: don’t think of this as the worse thing that can happen to people/society/yo mamma, quit thinking of this genre as ‘dystopia’, most of it is simple and desperately needed social progress. I could be sold into moving here in about two minutes; “breeding is strictly regulated, children are reared by the state like livestock, you can register to fornicate with anyone of your choosing, poverty doesn’t exist, and silly and irrational ideas like free-thought and belief have been cast aside” says ID-10-T, the real estate agent. I briefly consider that I’ll never again have to think about crap like car insurance, calling my folks, making ends meet so I can feed my vicious pumas something besides Sam’s Choice Kitty Chomp, or f#cking ironing. No, instead I can give up the fruits of the imagination (which includes rubbish like the movie Gigli, The Bell Jar, the Bible) to voyeuristically get my groove on from any partner from a communal p@ssy pool and spend my time around a populous possessing uncharacteristic common sense and rational social planning. And the price of admission, laboring for a rancorous socially-manifested monstrosity called The Benefactor. Christ, I’ve settled for far less at every job I’ve ever had. That’s probably why I like this genre of story; but alas, someone always has to go and fuck it up.tIn this Russian account from the 1920s, that person is I-330, a complete bitch and miscreant. She belongs to an underground organization with the single goal of undermining the benevolent designs of The Benefactor, and this group has to strike while the anvil is hot, as OneState is undertaking a mission of extraordinary magnitude; to spread their wisdom into space on the space-rocket-thing INTEGRAL!! Holy f#cking shit!! Heaven forbid! That’s right, the plan that OneState has to get their message out there is to load up a space vessel with their history, governing laws, and recommendations for sensible living…and let the cosmos beware. In order to prevent The Benefactor from spreading his poisonous dogma into the reaches of space, this renegade group is going to need an inside man, a saboteur of unbelievable station: D-503, a firm believer in the inherent righteousness of his society, and the Dude-In-Charge of all operations involving the INTEGRAL. tThe question is, how does the resistance movement sway an acolyte of this society’s greatness to join their ranks? The answer is simple, with the same thing that tempted Herod to deliver John the Baptist’s head on a platter, the same thing that’s been used to lure men to unspeakable ends since the dawn of time: P@ssy. For anyone who doesn’t believe me, go back to your silly scriptures and realize that Cain was icing Abel for one reason alone: to improve the p@ssy quotient. This shit is true, I’m not clever enough to make that up. So, I-330’s allure is infecting our main man, D-503, and he’s slowly succumbing to her antisocial whims; he’s skipping work, checking out vestiges of the past, and writing a journal (you’d think OneState would be a little less sloppy in matters of security, especially when it concerns the Dude-In-Charge overseeing their latest technological advancement). Is D-503 willing to go the last step, to help bring upon the demise of the society that’s previously seemed so rational and sensible? Is he ever going to actually get to tap I-330’s ass or is she just going to string him along endlessly? Is he going to get busted for his burgeoning involvement with the resistance and get some fatal face time with the Benefactor? How about you read the fucking book.
What do You think about We (1993)?
One can see echoes of this story in other greats of dystopian SF such as Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 and, of course, the great 1984. Written in the early 1920's it hadn't taken Zamyatin long to realise the logical consequences of the ideological reasoning behind his country's recent revolution. And this is precisely what is explored here, several hundred years in the future after the successful elimination of all opposition.What would a society be like that had eliminated all notion of the individual, freedom and independent thought? Is the pinnacle of civilization one that has extended rational analysis to every aspect of social and human conduct? Is the superior society one that has more smoothly combined its individuals into a cohesive, integrated whole?These questions and more are explored through the eyes of the protagonist, one of the system's most ardent adherents. We see his resolve weaken and break down as he becomes infatuated with a woman who will do anything to bring down the regime and everything it stands for. The protagonist, because of his job, becomes embroiled in events that culminate in an attempt to overthrow the regime but he never really knows what's going on, seems more driven by is obsession than a reversal of his way of thinking.The narrative is driven by a sharp, jagged imagery and fluid prose. Through this we get a sense of his perception of events and his isolation from those around him. A possible side effect of the prose is that I also felt, as the reader, dislocated from the events in the story, sometimes finding it hard to tell what was going on.A classic, well worth reading in its own right and not just for its legacy.
—Simon
Transport yourself to OneState. Imagine a city, sealed off from the world by a Green Wall, inhabited by Numbers (each person is assigned a number rather than a name), all with their daily schedules planned out to the minute by a benevolent government. They live in transparent houses and wear identical uniforms and keep their heads shaved. The Benefactor has freed them from the bonds of freedom and bestowed upon them the blessings of homogeneity and collectivization.We's main virtue is its ability to place the reader into a mindset wherein basic human liberties seem absurd. Near its beginning, D-503 reflects upon the fact that many years ago, his ancestors had days where they could choose to do whatever they wanted—they could eat what they wanted, wake up when they wanted, have sex with whomever and whenever they wanted—and he laughs over the ridiculousness of it all. "It’s so funny, so improbable, that now I’ve written it I’m afraid that you, my unknown readers, will think I’m making wicked jokes. You might suddenly think I’m making fun of you and keeping a straight face while I tell you the most absolute nonsense." What we call freedom, he calls the condition of animals. A detestable and meaningless state of being.To the inhabitants of OneState, the most formidable quality is unpredictability. For something to break out of the realm of the ordinary, to rebel against the steady flow of life...[...]apparently even we haven’t yet finished the process of hardening and crystallizing life. The ideal is still a long way off. The ideal (this is clear) is that state of affairs where nothing ever happens anymore, but with us ... Here, just have a look at this: Today I read in the State Gazette that two days from now there will be a Justice Gala in Cube Square. So that means that once again some Number has interfered with the progress of the great State Machine, again something unforeseen, unaccounted for in advance, has gone ahead and happened.Every now and then, even in the most evolved and civilized OneState, revolution breaks out. There are those who do not and will never accept the utilitarian worldview, that what is best for the whole is best for each of its constituent parts.But how can anyone argue against such strict logic? Who would want to reconnect the realm of humanity back into the environment of nature and originality and beasts?? O, mighty, divinely delimited wisdom of walls, boundaries! It is perhaps the most magnificent of all inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he built the first wall. Man ceased to be a wild man only when we built the Green Wall, only when, by means of that Wall, we isolated our perfect machine world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and animals...Who would want to break down that wall?
—Christopher
It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never knew about them simply because this "once in a thousand years" has come only today?Blissfully, drunkenly, I walked down the stairs to the number on duty, and all around me, wherever my eyes fell, thousand-year-old buds were bursting into bloom. Everything bloomed-- armchairs, shoes, golden badges, electric bulbs, someone’s dark, shaggy eyes, the faceted columns of the banisters, a handkerchief someone dropped on the stairs, the table of the number on duty, and the delicately brown, speckled cheeks of U over the table. Everything was extraordinary, new, delicate, rosy, moist.U took the pink coupon, and above her head, through the glass wall, the moon, pale blue, fragrant, swayed from an unseen branch. I pointed triumphantly at the moon and said, "The moon-- you understand?"
—Ben Loory
