We: New Edition Read online

  Orwell’s 1984 deals with the threat ripening even as he wrote (1948) within English Socialism, which he turned into “Ingsoc” for the oppressive world presided over by Big Brother. Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker,8 set in a corner of England that had been bombed back into the Stone Age by a nuclear holocaust, is what it is because, at the time Hoban was writing, an American general had said his aircraft would do precisely that to villagers in Southeast Asia: bomb them back into the Stone Age. I imagine that Hoban simply wondered what this might be like, and gave a contemporary answer, though it was set in some hideously primitive future. Novels about the distant past are also about the day in which they are composed: They are about that day’s conception of the distant past, that day’s information and delusions, and nothing else.

  In Zamyatin’s time, when the Russian Bolsheviks were consolidating the revolution they had just taken over, human perfectibility was being talked about with utterly deadpan faces by platoons of well-meaning or malicious imbeciles. Part of man’s bright future as a machine rested on the theories of an American efficiency expert named Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915). This “father of scientific management” pioneered the time-and-motion studies that transformed industrial workers into maximally efficient adjuncts of the machines they were hired to operate. He was naturally seen as something of a messiah by management, while his name was universally execrated on the shop floor. Even so powerful a figure as Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s consort in what was to become the modern world’s most ruthless managerial class, wrote in praise of Taylor’s theories. The novelist, meditating on where “Taylorism” might lead if taken to extremes, conceived of a reductio ad absurdum in which characters behave as nearly as possible as though they themselves were fail-safe pieces of hardware.

  The reason why We could not appear in Russia until 1988 was that the Soviet cultural authorities, with an instinct for heresy second only to that of the Curia itself, immediately saw it as a travesty of the regime. Zilboorg promoted this reading in the preface to his 1924 translation in New York, and the political interpretation of We has been unquestioned ever since. Its being retrospectively read in the light of such an overtly political work as Orwell’s 1984 has further institutionalized this estimate. I therefore think it is worth insisting at the very outset that the reception of Zamyatin’s fable has always been far more political than the work itself.

  The book is not even particularly Russian. There is something peculiarly apt about its having come out first in English translation, for once you remove the Russian language (and perhaps two minor characters, the babushkas who act as guardians of the Ancient House and D-503’s building), what is left is a sort of generalized human society. Part of Zamyatin’s point, surely, is that his nightmare state lacks the warm smell and taste of long human habitation, lacks any of the recognizable attributes of nationhood. Nothing is made, for instance, of the nationality of Taylor. OneState is not to be blamed on the Americans or the Bolsheviks or the industrial lords of Liverpool and Manchester. It is the fate toward which a thoughtless humanity is hurtling.

  As for the inspiration of the novel, as opposed to the text that resulted, that seems far more English than Russian. It is when one sets We in the context of the subsequent dystopias by Huxley and Orwell that one realizes, in fact, how extremely English the roots of the novel are. Among his major productions, Zamyatin’s short novel Islanders is what immediately precedes We. This obviously derives from his experiences during the two-year sojourn in the British Isles and is a parody of stuffy suburban English bourgeois life, which has already taken significant steps in the direction of OneState. Eliminate the proper names from the first paragraph of Islanders, and it sounds exactly as though it might have come from the novel We: Vicar Dooley was, of course, the well-known Dooley, the pride of Jesmond and author of the book The Testament of Compulsory Salvation. Schedules worked out according to the Testament were hung about the walls of Mr. Dooley’s library. The schedule of the hours of ingestion; the schedule of the days of repentance (twice a week); the schedule for the utilization of fresh air; the schedule for charitable undertakings; and finally, among others, there was one schedule which for reasons of delicacy had no heading and touched specifically on Mrs. Dooley. Here the Saturdays of every third week were marked.9

  This last item on Vicar Dooley’s schedule (the reminder to engage in sexual congress with his wife) recalls not only the Table of Hours in OneState, with its sanitary provisions for the Sexual Hour, but also the opening of that most English of books, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, with its methodical attention to the same family matter.

  As one might expect, the English authors are far more conscious of social class (in We there are no classes to speak of, only the Benefactor and everyone else). In fact, one of the underlying jokes is that the only one truly entitled to the pronoun “we” is the Benefactor, who makes royal use of it; the proles are merely encouraged to think that they are “we,” just as they are encouraged to think that they actually vote. Far from being “we,” they are merely “them.” This is like the underlying joke of Gogol’s masterpiece: The real “dead souls” are not those on the rosters of dead serfs but the serf-owners, the masters themselves.

  That We has even a faintly English tone to it is not due, of course, to the Englishmen who followed it but to the Englishman, H. G. Wells, who preceded Zamyatin and everyone else in the peculiar genre in which they were all working. Zamyatin knew the works of Wells intimately. He edited a series of them for publication in Russian translation, and his preface to that enterprise is one of his most acute essays.10 But if the visionary Wells gave everyone the idea, he was repaid by the usual black ingratitude. Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell all wrote savage satires of the idea of a scientific utopia.

  Like The Brothers Karamazov and many another Russian novel, We involves the conflict not so much of individuals as of the ideas they embody. The individuals share with most other characters in dystopic fiction a certain schematic thinness of development. The warring ideas, however, impose themselves with a roundness and undeniability on every page.

  There are two occasions when each idea receives its canonical statement from the mouth of each of the two real antagonists of the story, the Benefactor and 1-330.

  The Benefactor, the ancestor of Orwell’s Big Brother, is the absolute ruler of OneState. That he united traits of Vladimir Lenin and Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor was obvious to the point of surgical pain for Zamyatin’s contemporaries. He rules over a human society that is deemed to have achieved, with only negligible exceptions, absolute perfection. Men have finally become, if not actually machines, as machine-like as possible, utterly predictable and completely happy. All the messy inconvenience of freedom has been eliminated. Mere details, a final touch-up here and there, one last adjustment—these are all that remain. The Great Operation at the end (a sort of lobotomy for the removal of Man’s last imperfection, the Imagination) is the final touch. That not every Number wishes to go under the knife is understandable, but (and here one hears the authentic voice of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor) seeming cruelty can be the most genuine love of Mankind.

  The Benefactor’s opponent is 1-330, a woman so liberated that even today one can only surmise what a jolt she must have delivered to the systems of her first readers. Gorgeous by nature, she is happy to enhance her beauty by the outlawed cosmetics and perfumes obtainable only by stealth. She drinks and smokes, activities known to the Numbers of OneState only through historical study. She enjoys sex but is not above using it as a weapon for the movement. She is big-hearted enough to find shelter for her rival, O-90, who wants to go through with the crime of bearing D-503’s child. She is powerful enough to be the leader of a revolutionary underground, the Mephi. And she is courageous enough to endure the Benefactor’s worst tortures and die rather than talk. She is also the philosophical voice of Zamyatin’s favorite idea, the central thematic idea of the book.

  When, some two years after We was finis
hed, Zamyatin got around to putting this idea into essay form, he used the speech of 1-330 as an epigraph. The essay is titled “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters” (1923). The epigraph derives from Record 30, the philosophical core of the book. She stumps the mathematician and engineer D-503 by asking him to name the final number. To his objection that the number of numbers is infinite, she replies that so is the number of revolutions. There can be no final revolution. One imagines how sweetly this fell upon the ear of the Bolsheviks, whose first business, after commandeering one revolution, was to root out and destroy the slightest suspicion of a second.

  The two forces at war, like the Country and the City, the Mephi and OneState, are Energy and Entropy. Zamyatin’s essay tends to be overrated as an essay simply because it is so splendid as a commentary on his masterpiece. For all its characteristic brevity and briskness, the essay manages to drop some weighty names: Louis XIV, Euclid, Lobachevsky, Galileo, Babeuf, Darwin, Lamarck, Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Gorky, Chekhov, and others. One eloquent name is suppressed, that of Heraclitus, possibly because it was Heraclitus who, some 500 years before Christ, gave the central idea of the essay its classical expression. Nothing is final. The only reality is change.

  Zamyatin’s merit is not to have discovered this, nor to have rehabilitated an old idea by dressing it in the latest fashion of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and Einsteinian Relativity, nor to have made the highly questionable if only metaphoric leap across the boundary from physical science to human social organization. His merit was and remains to have turned the idea into an enduring fable that immediately caught the imagination of the world and gave rise to others, like 1984. We is indeed a clunky old postmodern monster, inhabited by women in headphones who look like radio Valkyries, but it has never lost its hold on the affection of readers, who have kept it constantly in print in dozens of languages ever since it appeared.

  The translation in your hands is the latest of several English versions. I shall not undertake a detailed argument for proposing a new one at this time, though the discussion of two terms, one of them major and one minor, might serve as specimen motives for my trying anew to put We into English.

  The minor term first. The inhabitants of OneState have only numbers, no names, and they all wear the same uniform, only the word “uniform,” the author tells us, has been worn down by time to “unif.” That’s what Zamyatin writes in Russian, the Cyrillic equivalents of those four letters: u-n-i-f. All previous translators known to me have opted for “unif” in their English versions.

  This struck me as wrong. I did not think an English speaker (and an English translation has no other point than to make the characters English speakers) would naturally come up with “unif” as the worn-down stump of “uniform.” So I made it “yuny,” jettisoning the f (which seemed to me especially clumsy when clustered with an s in the plural: “unifs”) and adding an initial y to make the pronunciation unmistakable.

  When I was already near the end, locked in forever to this decision, I was listening one evening to John Sterling doing the play-by-play for a Yankees game over WABC in New York. There had been a rain delay, and the field was dotted with puddles. The right fielder Jesse Barfield was racing for a high fly that was obviously going to land somewhere near the warning track when he slipped on a slick spot. “And not only did he miss the ball,” said the ever-playful John Sterling, “but he got his yuny wet!” I felt like grabbing a cab for the Bronx to throw my arms round his neck in gratitude. I had got it right: “Yuny” is the spontaneous and natural American reduction of “uniform.”

  The major term is the name of the state itself. What to do about that? The Russian name is Yedinoe Gosudarstvo. The last word, the noun, presents no problem: It means state. The meaning of the adjective clusters around the idea of singularity: one, single, united, unified, only. My predecessors have opted for United State or Single State or even The One State. All of these seem to me bad. Single State is a cliché for bachelorhood. United State is worse. The normal reader’s eye involuntarily adds an s. It strikes me as significant that Alexandra Aldridge specifically warns her readers against this.11 But even if they should heed the warning, readers might subconsciously associate Zamyatin’s nightmare state with the actual United States. This country has been the fictional locale of enough dystopias already without inviting readers to place on this continent one that was not, I think, meant to be specifically American.

  Consider again Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. There is a mythical figure, the object of a cult, called Eusa who is worshipped or execrated, who is or is not to blame for the nuclear holocaust. Only this stump of a name suggests identification with the USA, but the allusion is definitely and operatively there in the fiction.

  It is not there in Zamyatin’s We. The realm of the Benefactor is as much the UK as it is the USA, as much Germany as it is Russia. Its name ought to be neutral. I’ve called it by the ugly name OneState. The writing of this name with no space and with the capital in the middle copies a current fashion, much in vogue among the computer elite, and even more among their agents of publicity, which I hope most readers will join me in detesting. But detesting OneState is, after all, a sign of mental and spiritual health.

  Fatigued and disheartened by the uninterrupted viciousness of the campaign against him, the ever-unconventional Zamyatin simply wrote to the Benefactor, Iosif Stalin, saying that he’d done nothing to deserve death, and that for a writer to be denied every avenue to publication was the same thing as death. He therefore asked permission to go live abroad. Stalin, perhaps astonished or amused by such candor, and also no doubt on the advice of Gorky, granted the wish. Zamyatin quit his homeland forever in 1931.

  In his Paris exile, he lived mostly apart from the large Russian community and wrote very little. He was only occasionally noticed. One interview he granted to the French press amused him to the extent of provoking in reply a sort of parodic self-interview, which lay unpublished in a Columbia University archive until Zamyatin’s distinguished American biographer Alex Shane unearthed it and printed it (in Russian) in 1972.12 Zamyatin, informing an imaginary French public about the current state of Soviet letters, said that the problem uppermost was still that of the individual personality versus the collective. He had, he said, written a novel, We, that was the first to expose this problem.

  But he was reminded of the Persian rooster. “Once in the Caucasus I heard a Persian fairy tale about a rooster who had the bad habit of crowing an hour earlier than the others. This caused the owner of the rooster so much inconvenience that he chopped off his rooster’s head. We turned out to be a Persian rooster. It was still too early to raise this problem, especially in such a form. So, after the novel was published (in various foreign translations) the Soviet critics hacked me about the head rather fiercely. But I must be solidly built, for my head, as you see, is still on my shoulders.”

  Clarence Brown

  Princeton, New Jersey, 1992

  NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

  1 Shane, A. M., The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 38n.

  2 Gregory Zilboorg (1890-1959) was born in Kiev. He trained as a psychiatrist, graduating from the Psychoneurological Institute in Petrograd in 1917. Zilboorg served as a doctor in the Russian Army during World War I and took part in the February Revolution of 1917. In 1919 he emigrated to the United States, where he studied for a time at Columbia University and occupied himself with literary translation. He later practiced psychiatry.

  3 Russian Literature Triquarterly, 2(1972), 469.

  4 Zamyatin, Sochineniya [Works]. (Moscow: Kniga, 1988), 526.

  5 See Slonim’s Preface to We, trans. by G. Zilboorg. (New York: Dutton, 1959).

  6 Volya Rossii [Russia’s Will], 1(1927), 3. Quoted in Zamyatin, Sochineniya [Works]. (Moscow: Kniga, 1988), 527.

  7 In The Third Policeman (1967). This little-known and incomparably hilarious modern dystopia presents Hell
as an idyllic Irish countryside presided over by demented bicycle policemen.

  8 London: Jonathan Cape, 1980.

  9 Zamyatin, “Ostrovityane” [Islanders], in Izbrannye proizvedeniya [Selected Works]. (Sovetsky pisatel‘, 1989), 262.

  10 For a translation of this essay see A Soviet Heretic, edited and translated by Mirra Ginsburg. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

  11 The Scientific World View in Dystopia. (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), 37.

  12 “Avtointerv’yu” [Autointerview], Russian Literature Triquarterly, 2(1972), 464.

  SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

  Aldridge, Alexandra, The Scientific World View in Dystopia. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984.

  Brown, E. J., “Brave New World, 1984, and We: An Essay on Anti-Utopia.” Ardis Essay Series, 4. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1976. An earlier version appeared in American Contributions to the Fifth International Congress of Slavists, Vol. II. The Hague: Mouton, 1963.

  Collins, Christopher, Evgenii Zamiatin: An Interpretive Study. The Hague, 1973.

  Heller, Leonid (ed.), Autour de Zamiatine. Actes du colloque, Universite de Lausanne, juin 1987. Lausanne: Editions de L‘Age d’Homme. 1989.

  Jackson, Robert Louis, Dostoevskij’s Underground Man in Russian Literature. The Hague: Mouton, 1958.

  Rhodes, C. H., “Frederick Winslow Taylor’s System of Scientific Management in Zamiatin’s We,” Journal of General Education, 28 (1976), 31-42.