Zamyatin's 'We'

A failed video becomes an essay.

I am going to tell you about We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.¹

I had originally planned for this to be a video on YouTube. I filmed it two or three times. But I could never get the video to be exactly what I wanted — and this book has proved to be so interesting and impactful that I didn’t want to release a subpar video. So, I am turning to this newsletter. What you’ll see below is an adapted version of the script.

The book itself

NB: This is a quick summary of the book. If you are sensitive to spoilers, you may want to skip this.

Zamyatin’s We is a far-future dystopian novel. Set several centuries in the future, it tells the story of D-503, a scientist and designer of a ship called the INTEGRAL. D-503 is a citizen (or, as the book calls them, a number) of the One State. This is a totalitarian regime that has enclosed itself in a kind of glass, protecting the citizens from the nature outside of the walls.

It is important to keep in mind that We is primarily a work of satire, and Zamyatin’s target is two-fold: industrial automation and the totalitarian tendencies of government. We see the absurdity in a few ways. The people of the One State live by a time table, which they nearly worship; they eat petroleum-based food; D-503 is ashamed of his hairy hands, which he likens to a primate; they hold an annual vote to support the Benefactor, the ruler of the One State, and the vote is always unanimous; the dominant metaphors for life (and the perfection of life) are mathematical.

D-503 eventually meets a woman, I-330. She seduces him — in a strange, poetic way that is so brilliant that it justifies reading the book — and eventually convinces him to be a part of a rebellion. This is a group that wants freedom, individuality, and expression. They know that this will come at a cost, and they think it is a fair trade. And they have allies outside of the glass dome of the One State: human beings that D-503 can only see as savages.

The book becomes a struggle for freedom at a societal level, but it is primarily told through the struggles of D-503, which he writes in a daily log. He is conflicted; he doesn’t know what he wants. He sees the appeal of this freedom. He’s intoxicated by it. But the order and uniformity of the One State is all he’s ever known. 

The problem, as the book puts it, is that D-503 has realized that he has a soul. And this incompatible with the perfect uniformity of the One State.

There are multiple stages of the struggle, but all of it is for naught, at least for D-503. He and the other citizens are eventually forced to undergo an operation that permanently removes their imagination. Their humanity is fully stripped from them.

We end the book on a devastating note. As the One State retaliates against the rebels, rebuilding civilization, D-503 writes:

And, I hope, we will win. Moreover, I’m certain: we will win. For reason must win in the end.

Influence

Even if you’ve never picked up a copy of We, you might be thinking that this sounds familiar. And that’s because this book is highly similar to George Orwell’s 1984. There are so many parallels that it would be impossible to list them all, but here are a few obvious ones:

1. The One State and Eurasia.

2. The Benefactor and Big Brother.

3. A mysterious woman who inspires the protagonist to revolt.

4. A conclusion where the protagonist is rendered unable to think his former thoughts.

But you might also think that the book sounds a lot like Huxley’s Brave New World. Both books envision a technologically-superior totalitarian government that governs through medical and societal coercion rather than brutality. Both books involve savage outsider characters that can see the horrors of this way of life. 

If you think a bit further, you may see parallels to Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Vonnegut’s Player Piano as well. We has shaped dystopian literature — though I believe that the primary source of influence is through Orwell.

Orwell reviewed the book in 1946, years after Zamyatin had died. He claims that Huxley must have been influenced by the book, though Huxley denied this. Orwell himself seems to have taken We as the model for 1984. The differences are interesting: Orwell is less humorous, 1984’s plot is better structured, and Orwell seemed to lack the primitivist sympathies of Zamyatin.² But still, you see the influence of We on Orwell.

Few writers have shaped Western political imagination and rhetoric more than George Orwell. 1984 and Animal Farm are quoted and referenced by left, right, and center. The essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ is a triumph of rhetorical analysis.³

What I find so remarkable about We is that it is so influential and yet it is so often overlooked. I had not heard of this book until YouTube commenters suggested I read it. My local bookshop, which is a very good store with a very good collection, had one or two copies. (I believe they had nine copies of 1984 on the shelves.)

I think that we can say that We has both benefitted from Orwell and suffered from him. My best explanation for why We did not become a widely-heralded classic in the English-speaking world is simply that, if you’ve already read 1984 and you live in a political environment where everyone, both left and right, quotes Orwell, We can feel redundant. Most won’t feel that they need to read it.

Of course, we can also blame the Soviet Union. Zamyatin’s book was never published in Russian in his lifetime due to Soviet censorship. Despite being a Bolshevik before the Revolution, Zamyatin became a skeptic and a critic of the Soviet regime when he saw the same sort of brutality that had been enacted under the Tsar. Some of these criticisms have been captured in a collection of Zamyatin’s essays, A Soviet Heretic.⁴

Because the book was never published in Russian while Zamyatin was alive, it didn’t have a chance to be appreciated by those in the best position to appreciate its message. Thus, Zamyatin’s book in part suffers because it never had a chance to be incorporated into a national narrative about literature.

There is a letter from Zamyatin to Josef Stalin in that collection of essays linked above. In that letter, Zamyatin asks to be exiled. And when he gives his reasons for doing so, he is remarkably honest. He wanted to be exiled so that he could continue to be a writer. 

Every writer, ultimately, wants to be read. But maybe even more so, a writer wants to truly affect people, maybe even to change the world. I believe that Zamyatin is not read enough. But because he influenced Orwell, and because of the influence Orwell’s novel has had, he did change the world. The language of politics, at least in the West, is just as much Zamyatin’s creation as it is Orwell’s.

Zamyatin’s novel, ultimately, is about the incompatibility of the human spirit with automation and authoritarianism. The spirit wants to be free, to be expressive, to be an individual. Surely there are excesses of all of these things — but a world in which these are eliminated is not a world fit for the human spirit. While D-503 is made to believe in the One State again, we could speculate that those outside of the walls might try again to break them down. And maybe then they would win.

You can imagine Zamyatin writing the final words of We. He is unsure if the work can be published. He might already suspect that he will be denounced by the Writer’s Union. He might start thinking about life in exile. He might think that all of his writing is for naught — he is destined to lose this struggle. And it must have seemed to him that he did lose. Stalin granted his request, and Zamyatin was exiled to Paris, where he died in poverty. His only consolation was that he was able to continue to be a writer.

But then Orwell finds the book, writes his own, and changes the way the West thinks about politics. Without Zamyatin, that would not have happened. Without Zamyatin, there would be no 1984.

Zamyatin won.

1. That is an Amazon affiliate link, meaning I earn a small commission from any purchases. I highly recommend you buy this edition; it includes George Orwell’s review of We and an out-of-print essay by Le Guin that is highly worth reading.

2. In Orwell’s review of We, he mentions that Brave New World’s plot is superior to We’s. He also mentions Zamyatin’s primitivism. It seems he tried to fix what he found lacking in We as he composed his own masterpiece.

3. I used to begin ethics classes by teaching it, to impress upon my students the value of clarity.

4. This is a link to a PDF on Internet Archive.