Zamyatin's We: A Look at Early Dystopian Literature

The book opens with a public call for “tracts, odes, manifestos, poems, or other works extolling the beauty and the grandeur of the One State (2).” This quintessential society has constructed a spacecraft designed to transport the glorious news of the One State to inhabitants of other planets. With the book acting as his journal, D-503, the builder of the Integral, prepares to launch messages out to other worlds, while his own suffers a total metamorphosis. His theorizing and musing succeeds in adequately describing the One State, and its effect on individualism, freedom, and happiness.

As the title suggests, the One State has virtually destroyed individualism. Collectivism extends beyond the economic structure to control thoughts and culture. Zamyatin succeeds in warning of a society in which the individual is lost to the community. He also suggests that ideological extremism must not be used as a way of allowing society to deny morality and humanity. Considered a satirist of early Soviet thought, Zamyatin is also successful in warning of the inevitable association between the automation of the individual and a communal authoritarian state, such as the One State, where no person is considered “one,” but rather, “one of.”

Another recurring theme in We is the idea that the population has traded the archaic notion of freedom for that of measured, controllable happiness. “Freedom and crime are linked indivisibly,” D-503 explains to his intergalactic audience. “The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom (35).” This notion of sacrificing liberty for order is a throwback to the words of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s 1879 novel, The Brothers Karamazov, where the Inquisitor holds a conversation with Jesus on the nature of sacrificing the freedom to choose between good and evil in an attempt to promote mankind’s contentment.

-503 is built on the principles of mathematics and logic, and on the idea that everything can be reasonably justified by a scientific formula or a mathematic equation. The citizens’ preoccupation with rationality has even succeeded in objectifying such unexplainable aspects of human nature as love by describing them using the simple rules of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Even

Some topics in this essay:
Green Wall, Russian Revolution, Soviet Zamyatin, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Benefactor’s Machine, Brave World, Karamazov Inquisitor, Wall D-503, Day Unanimity, Benefactor Guardians, green wall,