We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Table of Contents
Title Page
Foreword
INTRODUCTION THEM
RECORD ONE - KEYWORDS: A Declaration. The Wisest of Lines. An Epic.
RECORD TWO - KEYWORDS: Ballet. Quadratic Harmony. X.
RECORD THREE - KEYWORDS: A Jacket. The Wall. The Table of Hours.
RECORD FOUR - KEYWORDS: The Barbarian and the Barometer. Epilepsy. If Only …
RECORD FIVE - KEYWORDS: A Quadrilateral. The Masters of the World. A Pleasantly Useful Function.
RECORD SIX - KEYWORDS: An Incident. That Damned “Clear.” Twenty-Four Hours.
RECORD SEVEN - KEYWORDS: An Eyelash. Taylor. Henbane and Lily of the Valley.
RECORD EIGHT - KEYWORDS: The Irrational Root. R-13. A Triangle.
RECORD NINE - KEYWORDS: A Liturgy. Iambs and Trochees. The Cast-Iron Hand.
RECORD TEN - KEYWORDS: A Letter. A Membrane. My Shagginess.
RECORD ELEVEN - KEYWORDS: No, I Can’t—Let This Record Be Without Keywords.
RECORD TWELVE - KEYWORDS: The Delimiting of Infinity. An Angel. Reflections on Poetry.
RECORD THIRTEEN - KEYWORDS: A Fog. You. A Completely Ridiculous Incident.
RECORD FOURTEEN - KEYWORDS: “Mine.” The Forbidden. A Cold Floor.
RECORD FIFTEEN - KEYWORDS: The Bell Jar. The Mirrored Sea. I Will Burn Forever.
RECORD SIXTEEN - KEYWORDS: Yellow. A Two-Dimensional Shadow. An Incurable Soul.
RECORD SEVENTEEN - KEYWORDS: Through the Glass. I Died. Corridors.
RECORD EIGHTEEN - KEYWORDS: Logical Jungles. Wounds and Plaster. Never Again.
RECORD NINETEEN - KEYWORDS: Infinitely Small of the Third Order. From Underneath Eyebrows. Over the Parapet.
RECORD TWENTY - KEYWORDS: A Discharge. The Material of an Idea. The Cli f of Zero.
RECORD TWENTY-ONE - KEYWORDS: The Duty of the Author. The Ice Swells. The Most Difficult Love.
RECORD TWENTY-TWO - KEYWORDS: A Frozen Wave. Everything Is Perfecting. I Am a Microbe.
RECORD TWENTY-THREE - KEYWORDS: Flowers. The Dissolution of a Crystal. If Only.
RECORD TWENTY-FOUR - KEYWORDS: The Limits of a Function. Easter. Everything Crossed Out.
RECORD TWENTY-FIVE - KEYWORDS: Descent from the Skies. The Greatest Catastrophe in History. An End to the Known.
RECORD TWENTY-SIX - KEYWORDS: The World Exists. A Rash. 105 Degrees.
RECORD TWENTY-SEVEN - KEYWORDS: No Keywords of Any Kind Are Possible.
RECORD TWENTY-EIGHT - KEYWORDS: Both of Them. Entropy and Energy. The Opaque Part of the Body.
RECORD TWENTY-NINE - KEYWORDS: Threads on a Face. Sprouts. Antinatural Compression.
RECORD THIRTY - KEYWORDS: The Final Number. Galileo’s Mistake. Wouldn’t It Be Better?
RECORD THIRTY-ONE - KEYWORDS: The Great Operation. I Forgave Everything. The Crashing of Trains.
RECORD THIRTY-TWO - KEYWORDS: I Don’t Believe. Tractors. A Human Sliver.
RECORD THIRTY-THREE - KEYWORDS: (No Keywords. In Haste. The Last.)
RECORD THIRTY-FOUR - KEYWORDS: The Released. A Sunny Night. Radio Valkyrie.
RECORD THIRTY-FIVE - KEYWORDS: Banded. A Carrot. A Killing.
RECORD THIRTY-SIX - KEYWORDS: Empty Pages. The Christian God. About My Mother.
RECORD THIRTY-SEVEN - KEYWORDS: Infusoria. Doomsday. Her Room.
RECORD THIRTY-EIGHT - KEYWORDS: (I Don’t Know. Maybe the Keywords Are Simply: A Thrown-Away Cigarette.)
RECORD THIRTY-NINE - KEYWORDS: The End.
RECORD FORTY - KEYWORDS: Facts. The Bell Jar. I Am Certain.
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Copyright Page
FOREWORD
MADMEN, HERMITS, HERETICS, DREAMERS, REBELS, AND SKEPTICS
Bruce Sterling
Yevgeny Zamyatin has a sound claim to the invention of the science fiction dystopia. This book, Zamyatin’s only novel, barely saw publication during his tragically shortened lifetime. The Russian text spread by hand-typed samizdat manuscripts in the St. Petersburg literary circles and through tattered, covert copies of a single émigré publication in Prague.
An English translation existed well before any full Russian version saw print. George Orwell, author of 1984, managed to find and read it. Orwell thought that Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, had probably read it. Written with radical invention, deliberate verbal obscurity and cunning political intent, We is a rather hard book to read or to translate. Traditionally, it’s a hard book even to find.
Zamyatin’s many friends and disciples considered him a mannered overseas sophisticate with advanced and dangerous ideas. He’d been exiled in Finland. He had built ships in distant Britain. In person he came across as a dapper, tweedy naval engineer. Russians nicknamed him “the Englishman.” He managed the translations from English for a Russian publishing house, where he carefully studied the socialist H. G. Wells.
Nevertheless, We is a book that could only have come from Russia, or, rather, from the unique time and space that was revolutionary Petrograd. It’s a science fiction novel set centuries in the future, but this story will spring to life if you can imagine it dressed in full, period regalia, with violently agitated Russian Constructivist costumes and a spacey, ethereal Theremin soundtrack.
Zamyatin was a revolutionary writer by nature, so this scrambling, visionary text isn’t much of a novel. We takes the form of a diary by a future engineer-turned-writer (a Zamyatin stand-in, basically). Our hero, in an unwise attempt to please the authorities, writes a personal confession. He is the chief designer of a mighty spaceship. His literary boasting is meant to aid his regime’s schemes to invade other planets and brainwash their inhabitants.
Nobody living in this regime seems to believe in its surreal and brutal totalitarian tenets. So, our hero’s confident self-psychoanalysis soon goes awry. He’s a government drone with serious woman-troubles (much like Winston Smith, the hero of 1984). Once he is able to confide the overheated contents of his heart and soul to paper, our narrator, D-503, goes straight off the rails. D-503 turns out to be quite a dedicated diarist. His burning urge to literary expression is enough to wreck his career, alienate his best friend, and drive his steady girlfriend to madness.
As Zamyatin had put it in an earlier theoretical essay, “I Am Afraid”: “True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.” So this book is a kind of negative bildungsroman: it’s about a diligent and trustworthy functionary who shirks his work, fools the cops, dumps a woman who loves him and wants his baby, has a wild affair with a decadent revolutionary, and even helps to hijack a spaceship, all for the sake of belles lettres.
After completing We in late 1920 or early 1921, Zamyatin showed the manuscript to a few friends but was denied publishing permission. When it did appear in print, thanks to the mischievous Czechs, and well out of reach of the Soviet secret police, a predictable hell broke loose. How predictable? For Zamyatin, trouble was very predictable.
Zamyatin was first arrested in 1905, at the age of twenty-one, as a Bolshevik student activist. He was beaten up by Tsarist cops, kept in solitary for months, and exiled to the provinces. This exemplary punishment merely fertilized his eccentricities. Zamyatin was able to sneak back from Finland into St. Petersburg in disguise, where he obtained an engineering degree while squatting in the city illegally. In 1911, the cops rediscovered Zamyatin. This time he was sent into Russian internal exile, where he whiled away the time composing satires. In 1914 one of these satires, “In the Backwoods,” was published. This time, not just Zamyatin but also his publisher faced arrest. The entire print run of the magazine was also rounded up, and Zamyatin’s book was put before a judge, but he somehow avoided
Zamyatin then was sent to England to supervise the construction of Russian icebreakers, where, as a brief change of pace, he satirized the British. However, life without Mother Russia never seemed to agree with him. He quickly returned to Russia between the revolutions of 1917, where, as a noted former troublemaker, he was given a literary job by Maxim Gorky. This period was the high point of Zamyatin’s life and career, though Soviet Revolutionary Petrograd was no Miami Beach. There, in 1922, he published a Poe-like horror tale called “The Cave,” about miserable post-revolutionary Russians simply trying to stay fed and unfrozen in their wintry, unlit apartments.
Zamyatin was arrested by the new Soviet authorities in both 1919 and 1922. When not writing fantastic fiction, hiding it, and/or trying to publish it, Zamyatin spent much time and energy writing about writing. As a participant in early Soviet “NeoRealism” and the guru of the “Serapion Brothers” clique, he was eager to create a tough-minded, sparse, revolutionary futurist-fantasy literature, one that wasn’t mushy, hazy, bourgeois, and Symbolist, but “written with 90-proof ink.” Zamyatin believed that the future could be out-guessed by out-guessing the next revolution. How? The seeds of revolutions were already visible as the rantings of today’s heretics. They could also be found in arcane areas of intellectual exploration that had not yet been popularized and acculturated.
Thus the genuinely weird sensibility of D-503, the hero and narrator of We. We is one of the first attempts to write about the future through the consciousness of someone born there and living there. Our hero’s unique, personal Newspeak is a colorful tossed salad of the wildest avant-gardism of the 1920s: Einstein, curved space and the fourth dimension, Marxist dialectic, Freud, free love, math, engineering, aviation, and rocketry. It’s a syncretic, wildly imaginative text that combs the world’s library of innovation, science, and dissent, in order to address the one topic it can never directly confront: the cruel descent of the Bolshevik rebellion into frozen dogma and totalitarian stasis.
A passionately literary work, We is (almost) entirely devoid of literary referents. Our hero’s metaphors are scientific and mathematical, to the extent that even women’s faces are described as geometric vectors or mathematical symbols. In this rigid world of supposed efficiency and utopian perfection, our hero’s maddened thoughts are splintered, multi-planar, almost Dadaist. Often, when right on the brink of some revelatory higher sense, his sentences simply …
These Zamyatin word-games, this attempt to be futuristic and think futuristically rather than merely describing futurity from the perspective of the present day, was Zamyatin’s literary breakthrough. This book reads like nothing else on earth before or since. He was entirely grounded in the time and space of Petrograd, yet he managed to take flight.
Yevgeny Zamyatin is orbiting in a literary space all his own with this one. It is a work without real ancestry, and its descendants have rarely matched its visionary daring.
The term “science fiction” was not yet invented when Zamyatin composed this prescient text. It is nevertheless extremely sciencefictional. It has whole sets of sci-fi themes and conceits that were entirely fresh when Zamyatin created them: hermetically sealed cities, synthetic food, unisex suits, Metropolis-like crowds of drones marching through cyclopean apartment blocks, whizzing, roaring trips in giant spaceships, mind control through brain surgery… . They’re clichés now, of course: but they were only reduced to clichés through decades of effort by lesser artists.
The book was fiercely attacked by Stalinist party-line critics. Zamyatin’s works were removed from Soviet libraries and he was forbidden to publish. In 1931, Zamyatin and his wife were allowed by Stalin to emigrate to Paris. He continued to consider himself a Soviet writer, always hoping to return whenever the Regime would allow him to write. Some Russian literary émigrés were able to thrive in Paris, but Zamyatin wasn’t one of them. Unable to finish a historical novel, he wasted away in silence and poverty, and he died on March 10, 1937.
There’s little doubt that he had foreseen and expected this fate. Like his hero, he even seemed to somehow relish his own immolation: “The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow… . But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.”
BRUCE STERLING, author, journalist, editor, and critic, was born in Texas in 1954. Best known for his science fiction novels, he also writes design criticism, travel journalism, and a weblog. He is currently living in Belgrade.
INTRODUCTION THEM
Natasha Randall
We is a novel of revolution. It is the sum of the utopian enthusiasms, which gestated in the nineteenth century and were delivered in the early twentieth. But change was afoot in 1920, the year the novel was written: these Russian enthusiasms were entering a sort of singular Bolshevik utopian rigor mortis. By 1923, Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote:
It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.1
The “greens” (peasants), the “blacks” (anarchists), and the Whites were being reduced to ashes while the only remaining ideology was forging the idea that man could be made mechanical. Zamyatin, an engineer, quantified this moment in his anti-utopia, fast-forwarding the cogs and wheels of early Soviet society ad absurdum. There is not one detail of life in the One State that doesn’t illustrate a given theory or discovery of his day.
The Bolshevik Revolution was buoyed by an enormous “utopian propensity” in the Russian population. The country had been poised for apocalypse at the turn of the century, and though their anticipations went unrealized, they were eager for a new world nonetheless. Some sought the creation of a universal language for all mankind. Others promoted the idea of geanthropism, the emancipation of women. Yet others upheld pedism, the liberation of children. And the Anarcho-Biocosmists made plans for a social revolution in outer space. There were versions of machinism, primitive reticence, antiverbalism, nudism, social militarism, revolutionary sublimation, and suicidalism.2 All these ideas were being incarnadined by 1920.
That year, Trotsky was disciplining Russian society into a militarized labor force. Pastoral Russia had risen to its newfound volya (free will) but was now struggling against this new yoke. The Bolsheviks were building the new Soviet Man, who would outpace his human peers. The peasantry would bond into the strongest proletariat amalgam. The stuff of daily life was churned through the time and motion studies of the American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor. Russia was electrified—literally—and the darkest corners of the old life were irradiated with industrial ideas. The year 1920 was perched at the dawn of film, radio, and the automobile. It was also the year that the word robot came into being (originating in the Russian and Czech word rabotat’, which means “to work”). The Bolsheviks with their militaristic, urban-centric, industrial aggression were conquering all of Russia.
Meanwhile, Petrograd of 1920 was being reconstructed from the remnants of St. Petersburg after a ruinously long involvement in World War I and further shortages were caused by the civil war efforts. The privileged classes, known as “former people” (byvshie lyudi), had piled their suitcases and furniture onto carts and abandoned their comfortable apartments to the proletariat. Mansions were divided into cramped communal apartments and palaces had been expropriated for government purposes. The city was rife with starvation. Garbage flowed down the Moika and Fontanka canals. Winters were cruel—people wore coats and hats indoors, and firewood was so scarce that Petrograders burned furniture, pianos, and books to get through. According to historian Richard Stites, the population of Petrograd fell from 1,217,000 to 722,000 during the years of War Communism between 1918 and 1921. 3
But, in all this, the arts were
The proletarian poet Alexei Gastev, described by Nikolai Aseev as the “Ovid of engineers, miners and metalworkers,” was the most active advocate of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s ideas about men and machines. Gastev was the head of the Central Institute of Labor, founded in 1920. 5 Any reader of We will recognize Gastev’s experiments with Soviet workers as the basic material for the One State. Besides, Zamyatin’s title is borrowed from the Proletkult, whose writers had composed poems and plays with the title “We” before Zamyatin’s own work emerged.6 In his cultural history of Russia, Natasha’s Dance, Orlando Figes describes Gastev’s research excellently:
Hundreds of identically dressed trainees would be marched in columns to their benches, and orders would be given out by buzzes from machines. The workers were trained to hammer correctly, for instance by holding a hammer attached to and moved by a special machine, so that they internalized its mechanical rhythm. The same process was repeated for chiseling, filing and other basic skills. Gastev’s aim, by his own admission, was to turn the worker into a sort of ‘human robot’… Gastev envisaged a utopia where ‘people’ would be replaced by ‘proletarian units’ identified by ciphers such as ‘A,B,C, or 325, 075, 0, and so on.’ These automatons would be like machines, ‘incapable of individual thought’, and would simply obey their controller. A ‘mechanized collectivism’ would ‘take the place of the individual personality in the psychology of the proletariat’. There would no longer be a need for emotions, and the human soul would no longer be measured ‘by a shout or a smile but by a pressure gauge or a speedometer’.7