We: New Edition Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  We

  RECORD 1 - Announcement The Wisest of Lines An Epic Poem

  RECORD 2 - Ballet Harmony Squared X

  RECORD 3 - Jacket Wall The Table

  RECORD 4 - Savage with Barometer Epilepsy If

  RECORD 5 - Square Rulers of the World Pleasant and Useful Function

  RECORD 6 - Accident Damned “Clear” 24 Hours

  RECORD 7 - An Eyelash Taylor Henbane and Lily of the Valley

  RECORD 8 - The Irrational Root R-13 Triangle

  RECORD 9 - Liturgy Iambs and Trochees Cast-Iron Hand

  RECORD 10 - Letter Membrane Hairy Me

  RECORD 11 - No, I Can’t ... Skip the Contents

  RECORD 12 - Limitation of Infinity Angel Reflections. on Poetry

  RECORD 13 - Fog Familiar “You” An Absolutely Inane Occurrence

  RECORD 14 - “Mine” Forbidden Cold Floor

  RECORD 15 - Bell Mirror-Like Sea My Fate to Burn Forever

  RECORD 16 - Yellow Two-Dimensional Shadow Incurable Soul

  RECORD 17 - Through Glass I Died Hallways

  RECORD 18 - Logical Labyrinth Wounds and Plaster Never Again

  RECORD 19 - Third-Order Infinitesimal A Sullen Glare Over the Parapet

  RECORD 20 - Discharge Idea Material Zero Cliff

  RECORD 21 - An Author’s Duty Swollen Ice The Most Difficult Love

  RECORD 24 - Limit of Function Easter Cross It All Out

  RECORD 25 - Descent from Heaven History’s Greatest Catastrophe End of the Known

  RECORD 26 - The World Exists A Rash 41° Centigrade

  RECORD 27 - No Contents-Can’t

  RECORD 28 - Both Women Entropy and Energy Opaque Part of the Body

  RECORD 29 - Threads on the Face Shoots Unnatural Compression

  RECORD 30 - The Final Number Galileo’s Mistake Wouldn’t It Be Better?

  RECORD 31 - The Great Operation I Have Forgiven Everything A Train Wreck

  RECORD 32 - I Do Not Believe Tractors The Human Chip

  RECORD 33 - (No Time for Contents, Last Note)

  RECORD 34 - Those on Leave A Sunny Night Radio- Valkyrie

  RECORD 35 - In a Hoop Carrot Murder

  RECORD 36 - Blank Pages The Christian God About My Mother

  RECORD 37 - Infusorian Doomsday Her Room

  RECORD 38 - (I Don’t Know What Goes Here, Maybe Just: A Cigarette Butt)

  RECORD 39 - The End

  RECORD 40 - Facts The Bell I Am Certain

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTES

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  WE

  YEVGENY IVANOVICH ZAMYATIN (1884-1937) was a naval architect by profession and a writer by nature. His favorite idea was the absolute freedom of the human personality to create, to imagine, to love, to make mistakes, and to change the world. This made him a highly inconvenient citizen of two despotisms, the tsarist and the Communist, both of which exiled him, the first for a year, the latter forever. He wrote short stories, plays, and essays, but his masterpiece is We, written in 1920-21 and soon thereafter translated into most of the languages of the world. It first appeared in Russia only in 1988. It is the archetype of the modern dystopia, or anti-utopia; a great prose poem on the fate that might befall all of us if we surrender our individual selves to some collective dream of technology and fail in the vigilance that is the price of freedom. George Orwell, the author of 1984, acknowledged his debt to Zamyatin. The other great English dystopia of our time, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, was evidently written out of the same impulse, though without direct knowledge of Zamyatin’s We.

  CLARENCE BROWN is the author of several works on the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. He is editor of The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader, which contains his translation of Zamyatin’s short story “The Cave,” and of Yury Olesha’s novel Envy.

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  This edition of We translated and introduced by

  Clarence Brown first published in Penguin Books 1993

  30 29

  Translation and introduction copyright © Clarence Brown, 1993

  All rights reserved

  We was first published in 1924 by E. P. Dutton, Inc., in the English

  language with a translation by Gregory Zilboorg. Copyright E. P.

  Dutton & Co., Inc., 1924; copyright renewed Gregory Zilboorg, 1952.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Zamyatin, Yevgeny Ivanovich, 1884-1937.

  We/ Yevgeny Zamyatin; translated and with an introduction by

  Clarence Brown.

  p. cm.—(Penguin twentieth-century classics)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-07538-8

  I. Brown, Clarence, 1929- . II. Title. III. Series.

  PG3476.Z34M.73’42-dc20 92-44187

  Set in Bembo

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  INTRODUCTION

  Zamyatin and the Persian Rooster

  We is a Russian novel that first saw the light of day in English in New York. If it were not a Russian novel, that publication history would be moderately spectacular, but under the circumstances it is merely unusual. Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, and many another twentieth-century Russian classic have all come out first on foreign soil and in a language other than Russian.

  Zamyatin writes in one place that he composed the novel We in 1920, but he was known for his habit of revising and polishing, and it seems likely that the final text was not completed until the fall of 1921.1 It was widely discussed at the time. Zamyatin read parts of it and even the entire novel before various audiences, and the publication of the book was announced on more than one occasion. It was also announced that an English translation was under way, and this translation, by Gregory Zilboorg,2 was to have the distinction of being the editio princeps. It was first published by Dutton in 1924.

  Translations into other languages followed, but it is curious to explore the trail left by Zilboorg’s pioneering work, which, though it was not in Zamyatin’s own language, nevertheless seemed to enjoy all the rights of primogeniture. Ilya Ehrenburg, that indefatigable middleman of literary commerce between Russia and the West, appears to have
been the instigator of the French translation. He wrote to Zamyatin on January 12, 1926, saying he’d gotten the manuscript from Vienna and wanted to bring it to the attention of several French publishers. “But for this the English translation is indispensable (the publishers don’t know Russian and everyone here reads English). ”3

  The French We eventually appeared as Nous autres, translated by B. Cauvet-Duhamel, in 1929. I should add that it was the publishers who needed the English version from Ehrenburg in order to make up their minds. It was not needed by Cauvet-Duhamel, who evidently worked independently and from a Russian manuscript essentially the same as Zilboorg’s. His version is by far the freest of those known to me, but that he did not depend upon Zilboorg is shown by his having correctly translated passages in which Zilboorg made mistakes. (For example: Zilboorg, p. 103: I am almost the only one in this room. Cauvet-Duhamel correctly translates: Je suis presque seul à la maison. p. 116.)

  By this time, Zamyatin was in considerable trouble at home over these foreign editions of a book that could not get permission to come out in its own country and language. He was merely one of the first of a distinguished company of Soviet writers to suffer in this way.

  What finally furnished a casus belli to his enemies at home was the publication of We in Prague. A Czech translation by Václav Koenig appeared in 1927 in the Brno newspaper Lidové noviny. Roman Jakobson, later a professor at Harvard and world famous as a literary theorist, was in Prague and had written to Zamyatin on August 16, 1926, to inform him of the forthcoming publication in Czech, and also to complain that his copy of the manuscript was very careless, though he thought the defects reparable. All the words in Latin characters had, for instance, been omitted (not uncommon, if a lazy typist on a Cyrillic keyboard will not take the trouble to pencil in Latin letters, of which there are quite a few in We). This would seem to indicate that Jakobson had in hand a Russian manuscript that differed in important ways from that used by Zilboorg. At any rate, he asked Zamyatin not for a more reliable Russian typescript but for a copy of Zilboorg’s translation, of which he had only heard: “We therefore need at least one copy of the English book. Kindly inform us who the publisher was and when it appeared.”4 The same Czech translation came out that same year in book form.

  Marc Slonim, a prolific Russian literary critic and later a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, was also in Prague in the late twenties, and he wished to bring the novel out in Russian in the important journal Volya Rossii (Russia’s will), which he edited there for the already numerous Russian émigré readership around the world. But, knowing that the publication in Russian of a Russian book on foreign soil, and in a journal opposed to the regime at home, would cause Zamyatin grief, Slonim took extraordinary steps to make it appear that his text had actually resulted from a retranslation from the Czech. This might protect Zamyatin from being charged with abetting the publication by supplying a Russian manuscript.5

  The deliberately cryptic editorial note in Volya Rossii reads: “One of the most interesting works of modern literature, E. Zamyatin’s novel We, depicting the life of people in the 26th Century, has not yet appeared ... in Russian. Wishing to acquaint readers of Volya Rossii with the novel, we have taken advantage of the fact that a Czech translation of We has been published in the paper Lidové noviny in Brno. With the editor’s gracious permission, we herewith present excerpts from the novel. For greater accuracy and approximation to the original, we have everywhere collated the Czech translation with the English, which came out in New York in 1925 [sic].”6

  To enhance his deception, Slonim took the even more extraordinary (and deplorable) step of actually rewriting parts of the Russian manuscript in his possession. Of this thoroughly corrupt text only excerpts were actually published: twenty-two chapters, not all of them complete, of the forty in Zamyatin’s novel. What use Slonim could have made of Zilboorg’s English translation is not clear, but it seems to have played some part in this troubled appearance of We. Slonim might have saved himself the trouble. Zamyatin’s detractors in the Soviet Union might have been wicked men, but they were not stupid, and no one believed that a Russian We had been reconstituted out of a Czech translation, helped along by an American translation.

  This abridged Russian version, further camouflaged by the editor’s well-meaning mutilation of Zamyatin’s text, hardly qualifies as the first appearance of We in its original language. For that long-postponed event it had to return to New York, where, twenty-eight years after its first English shadow had appeared, the genuine article was published in Zamyatin’s own Russian words: My. New York: Izdatelstvo imeni Chekhova (Chekhov Publishing House), 1952.

  That Russian text is the basis of this new English translation, and it is the one that was finally published, in 1988, on Russian soil.

  Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin was born on January 20, 1884, in the small provincial town of Lebedyan, which lay on the bank of the River Don 200 miles to the south of Moscow and which, for all its diminutive size, had a reputation thanks to Turgenev’s story of the same name. He died in exile in Paris on March 10, 1937. Memoirists recall him as an infinitely citified man, dapper to a fault, and as elegant in manner as in dress. He might have struck his fellow Russians as “English” even if he had not spent some two years building Russian icebreakers in England during the First World War and acquiring a taste for London tailoring.

  The point is that he combined in his person the two belligerents, the City and the Country, in the 200-Years War that preceded the establishment of OneState, the grimly germ-free capital of We. Lebedyan, defiantly redneck, was synonymous with a kind of rambunctious Russianism, whereas Leningrad (Petrograd when he was writing the novel there, and now St. Petersburg once again) was the least Russian and most cosmopolitan of all Russian cities. An extensive exile by the tsarist regime reacquainted him with solitary life in the remote countryside. And he spent his final years in Paris, Walter Benjamin’s “capital of the Nineteenth Century.”

  The consciousness that presides over both sides in the novel—the immaculately mechanized Numbers of OneState and the wild natural people on the other side of the Green Wall—was by no means neutral. It was all on the side of the irruption of the natural and unplanned and spontaneous (the Country) into the dead routine of OneState. But this consciousness had itself been sufficiently polished by the international urbanity and culture of St. Petersburg to lend verisimilitude and sympathy to its deputy consciousness in the novel, the first-person voice of D-503, who is nothing if not a True Believer in every aspect of the City that Zamyatin hated.

  It is perhaps better not to be too solemn about Zamyatin’s wonderfully appealing novel. Its distinction as a work of art and its importance as a political statement about several peculiarly modern dilemmas will need little defense—its having constantly found a wide international audience ever since it first came out in 1924 seems an earnest of that. And for George Orwell, author of 1984, and for certain others bent on creating their own dystopias, it appears to have been the crucial literary experience. But new readers, especially those devoted to highly sophisticated modern science fiction—the sort encapsulated in the New York Times television guide as “fast vivid sci-fi adventure about a ruthless cyborg programmed for assassination”—will scarcely be able to avoid, as an initial reaction, a sort of indulgent amusement. But Zamyatin himself called it both his most lighthearted and his most serious work, so it is okay to laugh at it so long as you remain alive to a seriousness that has not diminished over time.

  There’s a terrific Buck Rogers atmosphere to the whole thing, and I can’t help feeling that illustrations from that venerable early sci-fi strip would be the best visual counterpoint to the text. I am thinking of the scene on board the INTEGRAL during the test flight of the space probe (designed and built by D-503) when 1-330, who seems to our madly infatuated narrator to have grown a whole head taller, is described as looking, in her headphone helmet, like a winged Valkyrie. I had a strong recollection of the film of an early Bu
ck Rogers serial that my father once brought home to install on our ancient two-reel home movie projector. The animation was hilariously bad. The spaceship jerked across the screen emitting perfect little doughnuts of speed-cloud, straight out of the comic strip. The animated figures were clad in armor, of course. I recall that the breastplates jiggled so much they looked like brassieres gone berserk (my youngest brother said, “No, that is where they keep their hamsters!” and we all fell out of our chairs). Anyone who can read an evocation of erotic frenzy like Blue sparks from her, and the scent of lightning, and my trembling gets faster and faster with complete facial composure has, in my view, a problem. People walk about on the deck of the INTEGRAL during lift-off, undistracted by what Flann O’Brien’s Sgt. Pluck would no doubt call “extravagant combustions of the most far-reaching kind.”7

  Hearing that I was about to undertake a new translation of Zamyatin’s novel, a Russian friend ruefully wished me well, hoping that I might breathe new life into “that old post-modem monster.” At the time, I took “postmodern” as little more than a nod toward contemporary cant. But the more I thought of it, the more it seemed to me that We, and all similar dystopias, are among the only works that truly deserve to be called postmodern. If “modern” means what any reader in any conceivable “today” regards as up-to-date opinion and style, then every imagined distant future will be irretrievably “post” all such notions.

  But the novel as a form, whatever its ostensible setting, is always about the time in which it is written. Zamyatin’s nightmare is a nightmare of the early twenties, and it is specifically the nightmare of a Russian who has spent time in the industrial north of England and read H. G. Wells, never forgetting his native Dostoevsky nor what he could see out the window.