Review: WE, Yevgeny Zamyatin

WE/Yevgeny Zamyatin. New translation by Bela Shayevich. Introduction by Margaret Atwood (New York: HarperCollins, 2020 [1920-]).

I’ve just read a masterpiece. It’s not the usual kind. None of the poignant philosophy of Tolstoy. None of the deep psychological mining of Dostoevsky. None of the flippant sarcasm of, say, Tom Wolfe or Vonnegut. These are all my heroes. Now there’s a new one.

Dystopic. Technological. Soul-less mega-state. Regimented. A society based on reason alone, denying the rest of the human soul, the quirks, the laughter, the yearnings and dreaming. Each citizen of the One State is a number—our hero is D-503. He lives in a cubicle with a bed, a desk, a chair. He walks do work on the greatest weapon ever conceived, The Integer. All surfaces are glassy, and transparent. Life holds no secrets, no mysteries. They eat cubes for food. They are allotted sex with pink tickets allowing entry to another’s room for one hour. The blinds on the walls are lowered during sex. Otherwise all is visible. Who needs drones or bugs when all walls are transparent?

Children evidently are raised in batches and nurtured by the state. No parents. Otherwise everything is regimented and a familiar modernist extension of modern life—all wear uniforms, all march in fours, arm-in-arm, as the national anthem is played every evening. Friendships are fleeting, found only in the off-minute or quick glance. At larger audiences the Benefactor appears, but only as a ritual figure. He does not teach. People fly on aeros. The work is paramount. In his unit D-503 is The Builder, the designer and architect of The Integral. In his unit The builder e is accorded respect and given preference over others.

Zamyatin managed to imagine a totalitarian world before everyone. It is soul-less state with empty rituals and mindless actions. Instead of glass and steel or plastics he imagines everything made of glass, something believable and perfectly modern. He foresees a 200-year war that kills the Ancient Regime. The One State survives in a wall-ed off city surrounded by the wild, the green, the unknown.

D-503 is involved in a triangular relationship with his friend F, a poet, and O, who sleeps with them both. Then a mysterious woman, I-330, interjects herself into his life. He is affected fully—maybe in love, maybe not, but his soul is disturbed and springs to life. He begins to keep a log, the book. He thinks only of her. He tries to ignore his work, O, everything. He descends into delirium.

It is before long obvious to the reader that I-330 is part of a revolutionary group, as are many others, and he is sucked into their orbit. He visits the green jungle beyond the wall. He is recruited into a plot to steal the Integral and give it to the rebels so they can destroy the One State. We think, in our wisdom, that each revolution is doomed to recreate the same repressive violence as the last. He is but a pawn.

It takes him most of the book to figure this out. At the end his brain is modified to kill his soul. And he watches as other rebels are tortured in the Bell, then readied for death in the Benefactor’s Machine. Only I-330 does not give in to the torture and maintains her strength of will. Something about her image reminds him of something. But he does not recognize her. Has the rebellion failed? We are not told. The struggle continues. 

Written in 1923, WE is famous as the first book to have been banned by the new Soviet State. It was smuggled overseas and published in the US But most of us have little knowledge of the book. It certainly has little of the iconic status of 1984 or Brave New World. The parallels with 1984 are numerous, from the romantic pairing to the One State and its constant wartime propaganda. It must have deeply impressed Orwell, who reviewed it in 1946. Certainly D-503 lacks the emotional depth of Winston Smith. Nevertheless they are cousins—anonymous pawns who somehow retain the ability for retrospection. They are universal cyphers of modernity. It is simply incredible that Zamyatin had the imagination to sketch so much of our world. Then again, perhaps it has not changed as much as we’d like to think.