Aug. 21, 2006
BOOK REVIEW: Zamyatin’s ‘We’ in New Translation Shows How This Russian Novel
influenced ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, ‘Brave New World,’ Other Dystopian Works
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic
Hinton, WV (HNN) – Decades before George Orwell’s dystopian novel “Nineteen
Eighty-Four ‘ was published in 1949, and almost a decade before Aldous
Huxley’s 1932 sci-fi novel “Brave New World,” there appeared in
revolutionary Russia a novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin called “We” that
influenced both of them.
“Appeared” is used advisedly, as the Soviet authorities of 1922 refused
publication and Zamyatin’s look at a future world was distributed in
samizdat manuscript form, as well as in the form of books smuggled from
Czechoslovakia where a Russian language pirated edition was published. “We”
wasn’t published in the Soviet Union until 1988.
Now we have a lively English translation of Zamyatin’s “We” by Natasha
Randall (Modern Library Trade Paperbacks, $12.95), who furnishes a useful
introduction with background information on the author and his unusual style
of writing, along with a foreward by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling
that discusses Zamyatin’s place in dystopian fiction. Even a quick scan of
the 203-page work shows similarities to Orwell, Huxley and even Jack
Finney’s 1955 novel “The Body Snatchers”, which was transformed the next
year into the wonderful Don Siegel movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
Here’s a link to Zamyatin’s life and career:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Zamyatin
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Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The protagonist of “We” is an engineer and mathematician — a rocket
scientist, really – called D-503 who has a girlfriend called 0-90. She wants
to have his child and D-503 seems to be heading in that direction. In One
State -- the name of this future society -- men are designated with odd
numbers and women with even numbers. People are called “ciphers.”
Everybody lives in glass-walled flats and when they have sex, a monitor
closes the blinds of the apartment for privacy. D-503’s monitor is a woman
called U – we don’t get the rest of her name – who has a comic interlude
with D-503 toward the end of the book. The “Big Brother” character of
Orwell’s novel is called the “Benefactor” in “We.”
D-503 – the predecessor of Orwell’s Winston Smith -- is the chief designer
of a spaceship called the Integral, which is only about 120 days away from
launching as the novel begins. Zamyatin (1884 -1937) was a naval engineer
whose varied career included designing icebreakers in England for use in
Czarist Russia. He dressed in English tweeds and was nicknamed “The
Englishman.” On his return to Russia, he supervised translations from
writers as varied as Jack London and H.G. Wells. English writer Jerome K.
Jerome’s “A New Utopia” (1891) is often cited as an influence on Zamyatin’s
creation of “We.”
He was imprisoned by both the Czarist regime and the Bolsheviks. Stalin
allowed him to leave the Soviet Union in 1931 and he died in poverty in
Paris. “We” is his only novel, but what a work it is, especially to those
who see invasions of privacy in the form of wars against terrorism and the
Germanic sounding “Homeland” Security!
Everything is going fine until D-503 meets The Other Woman – the lovely and
intriguing I-330. She’s much like Julia in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and the
two even have trysts in a place called the “Ancient House” – very similar to
the old-fashioned apartment where Winston and Julia meet in Orwell’s novel.
The similarities are really amazing and we know from his biographies that
Orwell read a translation of “We” and contrasted it to Huxley’s dystopic
work. For more on Orwell’s novel and how it came about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
If you want to learn more about dystopias (the word was coined by John
Stuart Mill about 1865) check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dystopia.
There’s a related literary form called alternate history; the best web
site I’ve found on this genre is: http://www.uchronia.net. It covers the
works of Harry Harrison, Harry Turtledove, Philip K. Dick, Jack London, and
many, many other authors. Uchronia lists the winners of the Sidewise Awards
for Alternate History, the alternate history equivalent of the Edgars, the
Oscars and the Emmys.
Here’s a definition of alternate history from the site: “In an alternate
history, one or more past events are changed and the subsequent effects on
history somehow described. This description may comprise the entire plotline
of a novel, or it may just provide a brief background to a short story.
Perhaps the most common themes in alternate history are ‘What if the Nazis
won World War II?’ and ‘What if the Confederacy won the American Civil
War?’"
The Nazi theme was explored in Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle”
and Harry Harrison wrote several alternate history novels about Confederates
winning the War Between the States, most notably “A Rebel in Time.” The
definition of “alternate history” excludes works by writers like Huxley,
Zamyatin and Orwell because there must be a point where the divergence takes
place. A recent alternate history novel by a “mainstream” writer is “The
Plot Against America” by Philip Roth, which I reviewed when it came out in
2004.
If you’re familiar with Orwell’s classic “Nineteen Eight-Four”, the plot of
“We” is similar, but with a twist at the end. A novel in the form of 40
diary entries by D-503, “We” is a magnificent classic and Randall’s
translation makes it wonderfully accessible to present-day readers.
Web site: www.modernlibrary.com