Spotlight on We (1924) by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Rich Paul Cooper and Claire Carly-Miles
We: A Short Introduction
Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (written in 1920-21 and first published as an English translation in 1924) is among the first SF state dystopias. Even though the text was not published within the USSR until the 1980s, it had a profound effect outside the borders of mother Russia. George Orwell read it; so did Alduous Huxley. In this way, even if We is not the first science fiction dystopia, it certainly served as a pace setter for the genre.
Like Orwell, Zamyatin had an ambivalent relationship with communism. Before the Bolshevik revolution (1917-1923), Zamyatin considered himself to be a Bolshevik. The pre-revolutionary period was one of great fervor, during which different millenarian, apocalyptic, and revolutionary groups rose up. But once the Bolsheviks seized the revolution, it began to take on a specific character. They believed that mankind could be tuned and perfected with the precision of machinery. For example, Alexei Gastev led the Central Institute of Labor, where he performed experiments in Taylorism, the “scientific” management of the employees invented by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Following this theory, people could be made into cogs in one great machine. Even the most cursory reading of We will reveal how this Soviet Taylorism affected Zamyatin’s aesthetic vision for the text; the United State has united all in perfect mathematical harmony, every piece in its place.
Two stylistic difficulties arise when reading We. The first is heavily allegorical and symbolic. Nothing means what it means on the surface; everything is a coded reference to something else. The text is also written from a radically estranged perspective. It is not written with contemporary sensibilities in mind but rather with future sensibilities. D-503 is not merely some contemporary person placed into a future world; no, his beliefs, his thought patterns, his writing style, all of these are deeply determined by the mechanistic society from which he comes. In this sense, We is a masterpiece of science fiction, one that takes seriously the maxim that “Landscape is character.”[1] When reading the text, be aware that you wade through a dense sea of symbols filtered through a future perspective from a world radically different from your own.
These stylistic difficulties are perhaps related to the socio-political circumstances during which the novel was written. During the Bolshevik revolution, life in the urban centers of Russia deteriorated quickly. Those who could flee the cities left. Yet there remained, amid the revolutionary battles, poets and artists who could not flee, such as the futurist painter Lyubova Popova. Zamyatin believed that the artist embodied the vanguard of the revolution; as you can see, the censorship of the artist would seem to him a betrayal of revolutionary ideals. Like Zamyatin, D-503 is an artist, too. We is D-503’s work of art, and while some of the conclusions he reaches might seem absurd, it is important to recall the layers of symbolism, censorship, and satire that occlude Zamyatin’s true object, the mechanized total state.
We: Reading Closely and Annotating Passages
First, read We in its entirety, noting anything that you find interesting or that perhaps may be significant. Then, in this section, you will be provided with a series of passages from the novel. At the end of each section, you will find questions that will test your knowledge of the concepts in the previous section by applying them interpretatively. It goes without saying that there is a subjective nature to interpretation, which is why the concepts from the previous sections will serve as referent and guide. Basically, they’ll keep us on the same page, on the same line of thought.
A metaphor we find useful here is that of the lens. Imagine you have a blue piece of opaque glass and a yellow sheet of paper. If you pass that piece of glass over the paper, for the duration of that moment the paper will appear to be green. It is not green, but we have altered the viewer’s perceptions. In this metaphor, our concepts are the piece of glass. The text is the yellow piece of paper. By the end, the questions and exercises will guide you to a focused, deeper perception of the text.
The first step is understanding, so let’s cover a few questions to make sure you’ve grasped some of the basic features of the text.
Reading Closely
- Identify and describe the characters.
- What is significant about the United State’s naming system?
- Identify instruments of surveillance that enforce the ideology/collective identity of the United State.
- Select words and phrases whose meanings you define in one way and discuss how they are defined differently in We. For example, D-503 mentions all of the following concepts: love, sex, pregnancy, friendship, machines, freedom, happiness, and race (among many others). How does he understand these concepts and how does that contrast with how we might understand them?
- Discuss the use of color in the novel. How does it function? What might be important to note about colors as they are used here?
- How is age represented in the novel? Be sure to support your points with specific quotations from the text.
Passage 1
“The philosophy of the cranes, presses, and pumps is finished and clear like a circle. But is your philosophy less circular? The beauty of a mechanism lies in its immutable, precise rhythm, like that of a pendulum. But have you not become as precise as a pendulum, you who are brought up on the system of Taylor?
“Yes, but there is one difference:
“MECHANISMS HAVE NO FANCY
“Did you ever notice a pump cylinder during its work show upon its face a wide, distant, sensuously-dreaming smile? Did you ever hear cranes restlessly toss about and sigh at night, during the hours designed for rest?
“NO!
“Yet on your faces (you may well blush with shame!), the Guardians have seen more and more frequently those smiles and they have heard your sighs. And (you should hide your eyes for shame!) the historians of the United State all tendered their resignations so as to be relieved from having to record such shameful occurrences.
“It is not your fault; you are ill. And the name of your illness is
“FANCY
“It is a worm that gnaws black wrinkles on one’s forehead. It is a fever that drives one to run farther and farther, albeit ‘farther’ may begin where happiness ends. It is the last barricade on our road to happiness.
“Rejoice! This Barricade Has Been Blasted at Last! The Road is Open!
“The latest discovery of our State science is that there is a centre for fancy,—a miserable little nervous knot in the lower region of the frontal lobe of the brain. A triple treatment of this knot with X-rays will cure you of fancy—
“Forever!
Annotating Passages: Passage #1
- Who is speaking in this passage? How does this perspective repeat itself throughout the novel?
- What types of metaphors does this passage rely on? From what areas of life are they drawn? List the metaphors out and search for patterns.
- Activity: This passage mentions “Taylor” numerous times in his narrative. Research Taylorism and explain the significance. What is the relationship of Taylorism to Fordism? How did both influence Soviet civic planning?
- What is the final obstacle to human happiness according to this passage? How will they treat it? How does this foreshadow the end of the novel?
- Activity: This passage uses the word fancy. Can you find the word used in the Russian original? How else can it be translated? What significance does the word “fancy” have? Tip: Samuel Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria might be a good place to start your research.
Passage 2
I hardly could bear to look at them, when in an hour or so I was to throw them out with my own hands, to cast them out from the cozy figures of our Tables of Hours, forever to tear them away from the mother’s breast of the United State. They reminded me of the tragic figures of “The Three Forgiven Ones”—a story known to all of our school-children. It tells about three Numbers, who by way of experiment were exempted for a whole month from any work. “Go wherever you will, do what you will,” they were told*. The unhappy three wandered the whole time about the place of their usual work and gazed within with hungry eyes. They would stop on the plazas and for hours busy themselves repeating the motions which they were used to making during certain hours of the day; it became a bodily necessity for them to do so. They would saw and plane the air; with unseen sledge-hammers they would bang upon unseen stakes. Finally, on the tenth day they could bear it no longer; they took one another by the hand, entered the river, and to the accompaniment of the March they waded deeper and deeper until the water forever ended their sufferings.
* It happened long ago, in the third century A. T. (After the Tables).
Annotating Passages: Passage #2
- At what point in the story does this occur? To whom does D-503 refer in the first sentence?
- In this selection, D-503 relates a parable, or a moral tale that demonstrates correct action. What parables can you recall? How is D-503’s parable similar to some religious parables? How is it different?
- How does this parable render the landscape into a character? What sort of people would find this story a profound moral lesson? Can you write your own parable for a strange, alien civilization?
- In our own society, we sanitized children’s stories. Why would this society not shy away from a discussion of suicide? What can you learn about opinions toward suicide during this period in Russia and Europe?
- Why do the numbers repeat the bodily actions of the machinery even when they do not have to? What actions do they imitate? Do you see any patterns or symbolism?
- A.T. alludes to A.D. (Anno Domini—literally, Year of the Lord). How are the tables god-like to these people? What is the highest good to people who worship a Table of Hours?
Passage 3
“If your silence is intended to mean that you agree with me, then let us talk as adults do after the children have gone to bed; let us talk to the logical end. I ask: what was it that man from his diaper age dreamed of, tormented himself for, prayed for? He longed for that day when someone would tell him what happiness is and then would chain him to it. What else are we doing now? The ancient dream about a paradise…. Remember: there in paradise they know no desires any more, no pity, no love; there they are all—blessed. An operation has been performed upon their centre of fancy; that is why they are blessed, angels, servants of God…. And now, at the very moment when we have caught up with that dream, when we hold it like this”: (He clenched his hand so, that if he had held a stone in it sap would have run out!) “At the moment when all that was left for us was to adorn our prize and distribute it amongst all in equal pieces, at that very moment you, you….”
Annotating Passages: Passage #3
- Who is speaking in this passage? At what point in the narrative does this conversation occur?
- What does it mean to be chained to happiness? Can you think of any ways in which this oxymoron might apply to your real life? How are you chained to happiness? The Armenian philosopher Slavoj ŽiŽek says we live under an “injunction to enjoy.” How are we ordered to enjoy, commanded to be happy?
- What is the ancient dream of paradise? How has that ancient dream been re-interpreted by the speaker?
- What characteristics make a person “blessed” according to the speaker? If such a person is blessed, who are the damned? What makes them so?
- How do you read the tension between the pronoun “us” and “you” in the final line? What makes an individual part of the collective “We”? What, following the experiences of D-503 and I-330, distinguishes the “you” from the collective?
Questions for Further Study
- Identify real-life historical articulations/paradigms that have used the kinds of pervasive surveillance techniques portrayed in We.
- Activity: Take a look at this description of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~djp3/classes/2012_09_INF241/papers/PANOPTICON.pdf Also read Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, in particular Part III: Discipline, Section 3: Panopticism. How do you think the idea of the panopticon is at work in We? What is it meant to accomplish? Does it achieve this without complication or is there more to consider than might at first meet the eye (pun intended. . .)?
- How can the novel be read as a critique of many different societies? Be sure to provide specific examples to support your points.
- Activity: Watch the film Metropolis (1927). Consider how it compares to We. What common themes emerge? Why might these be significant in the 1920s? How might they still apply to our life and society today? Identify at least two specific examples from the movie and pair them with at least two specific examples from the novel.
- Activity: Read Sigmund Freud’s “The Uncanny” (https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_Uncanny.pdf). Is the concept of something being unheimlich at work in We? If so, how? Be sure to support your points with specific quotations from both texts.
Attribution: Carly-Miles, Claire and R. Paul Cooper. “Spotlight on We (1924) by Yevgeny Zamyatin.” In Marvels and Wonders: Reading, Researching, and Writing about SF/F. 1st Edition. Edited by R. Paul Cooper, Claire Carly-Miles, Kalani Pattison, Jeremy Brett, Melissa McCoul, and James Francis, Jr. College Station: Texas A&M University, 2022. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
- See Chapter 2 ↵
A story, often religious, that teaches a moral.
