Islanders & The Fisher of Men

by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Евгений Иванович Замятин

English, Russian (translation)

Genres: Russia, Fiction, Literature, Russian Literature, Classics

Paperback

Published January 1, 1985

About the author

Yevgeny Zamyatin (Russian: Евгений Замятин, sometimes also seen spelled Eugene Zamiatin) Russian novelist, playwright, short story writer, and essayist, whose famous anti-utopia (1924, We) prefigured Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), and inspired George Orwell's 1984 (1949). The book was considered a "malicious slander on socialism" in the Soviet Union, and it was not until 1988 when Zamyatin was rehabilitated. In the English-speaking world We has appeared in several translations.

"And then, just the way it was this morning in the hangar, I saw again, as though right then for the first time in my life, I saw everything: the unalterably straight streets, the sparkling glass of the sidewalks, the divine parallelepipeds of the transparent dwellings, the squared harmony of our gray-blue ranks. And so I felt that I - not generations of people, but I myself - I had conquered the old God and the old life, I myself had created all this, and I'm like a tower, I'm afraid to move my elbow for fear of shattering the walls, the cupolas, the machines..." (from We, trans. by Clarence Brown)
Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin was born in the provincial town of Lebedian, some two hundred miles south of Moscow. His father was an Orthodox priest and schoolmaster, and his mother a musician. He attended Progymnasium in Lebedian and gymnasium in Voronezh. From 1902 to 1908 he studied naval engineering at St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute. While still a student, he joined the Bolshevik Party. In 1905 he made a study trip in the Near East. Due to his revolutionary activities Zamyatin was arrested in 1905 and exiled. His first short story, 'Odin' (1908), was drew on his experiences in prison.
Zamyatin applied to Stalin for permission to emigrate in 1931 and lived in Paris until his death.

Reviews

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yevgeny Zamyatin seems most famous for writing We, the first dystopian science-fiction novel about a future world where machines run everything. But before he wrote that, he wrote (among other things) these two pieces: a novella and a short story. A detail and a character from the first presage WE, while the second piece seems like it was considered as a possible ending for the novella.

What you have here is Zamyatin's rather wry take on the British People of the time (c. 1916) from observations made when Zamyatin had been sent to Newcastle upon Tyne to supervise ship construction (he was a naval engineer by trade).

"Islanders" is something of a satire of the British predilection for efficiency and proper planning (see: MARY POPPINS) which had arisen along with the machine age and a burgeoning middle-class. The Reverend Dewley, one of the main characters, is author of PRECEPTS OF COMPULSORY SALVATION, which saves your soul by allowing you to map out your every hour of the day ahead of time on a timetable, making sure you get everything done, including your religious duties (Rev. Dewley's "duty" to Mrs. Dewley is scheduled for "every third Saturday" - the lucky woman...). One day a man gets knocked down in the street by a car, right in front of Rev. Dewley's well-appointed home and so throws the meticulous plans into disarray. But this is not the main plot of the story - the event just allows the Reverend and wife, along with some other meddling upper-crust busy-bodies, to acquaint themselves with the accident victim, Mr. Campbell, and then take an interest in his life as he is subsequently employed by the boisterous Mr. O'Kelly, local lawyer and ne'er-do-well (he brags of his "inflatable suitcase" that allows him to room at any hotel with a lady, as they would usually be turned away for not having any luggage - Mr. O'Kelly is married, natch). Society looks on disapprovingly as Mr. Campbell falls into the orbit of O'Kelly and Didi, a dancer in a nightclub, with whom he falls in love. Tragedy ensues after a trust of love is broken and society gets the pound of flesh it craved anyway.

This was fun. There's some good descriptions and a quite powerful conception of Campbell as a man who, previous to getting knocked down, has driven his life like a car, lawfully and safely, and now finds the steering wheel spinning out of control occasionally (a scene of drunken attendance at a prizefight that ends with Campbell climbing from the crowd and taking on the boxer himself is well done, capturing the reeling logic of the inebriated and the likely result of such a forced encounter - i.e. not good for Campbell). The ending is dark indeed.

"Fishers Of Men" is also about a respected and respectable man, Mr. Craggs - an apostle in the Fight Against Vice campaign - and how he makes his living. It ends with an exciting and well-described air attack on London by zeppelin, prefiguring the Blitz. It's also about a Don Juan church organist, a public park at dusk, and some filmy lingerie. Again, interesting in its drive to expose the hypocrisy of the times.

Another book with some more Zamyatin shorts may be coming by Inter-Library loan.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Zamyatin's cynical warmth and bleakly sardonic view of humanity is here turned upon the England in which he resided for some time during WWI, foreign lands which (as others have noted) became the model for homogenized dystopian society in his later warnings about Russia's post-Revolution path. Here, respectable faces without the least variation uphold propriety while nudging tragic events onto courses they will then placidly condemn. Strange how many engaging characterizations turn up amid the doom and hypocrisy, nonetheless, all part of the magic of Zamyaytin's deft synechdoche and deep understanding of very different facets of the human race. A good companion to his even finer A God-forsaken Hole, or the excellent "The North", composed around the same time.

This completes all of Zamyatin's novels and novellas, as far as I know, tragically. Maybe some great lost novel of his later Parisian years will yet turn up, though.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anyone who knows the Newcastle suburb of Jesmond might be surprised to learn that it unwittingly became the archetypal Dystopia of 20th century fiction. But it can lay claim to be the stepfather of Orwell's Airstrip One, or at least the 'funny uncle' of the World State in Brave New World. This is because Jesmond was, for a short while during the First World War, the residence of the Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin. And he hated it. He loathed the respectable gents going off to work in the city in their (to a Russian) near-identical and absurd hats. He found the white, scrubbed steps of the houses as repellent as false teeth. And above all he disliked the tidiness and conformity that gave Jesmond that markedly 'un-Russian' feel visitors still remark upon today.

None of which would have mattered if Zamyatin had stuck to his day job - designing icebreakers for the Tsarist navy. But he was also a radical author - jailed in 1905 for supporting that year's abortive revolution - and HG Wells' Russian translator. In Jesmond Zamyatin saw, at least in embryo, the worst aspects of Wells' scientific utopias, and in Islanders he fired a broadside at the whole idea of an orderly, disciplined and rational society.

As a vision of life on Tyneside in the early 20th century, it is intense but somewhat limited, to say the least. (To be fair to Jesmond, when Zamyatin ended up as an exile in 1930s Paris, having escaped Stalin's crackdown on unorthodox writers, he found that he didn't like Parisians either. He was a first class grumpy bastard, really.) But Islanders provided the nucleus for Zamyatin's great novel, We, which helped inspired both Huxley and Orwell. So, technically, if it hadn't been for Zamyatin's deep dislike of polite Jesmond society we'd probably have no soma, no feelies, no Epsilon semi-morons on the one hand, and no Big Brother, no Newspeak, and no Two Minutes' Hate on the other.

The companion story, A Fisher of Men, is set in London and is arguably a less original work, as it's a study of English hypocrisy. It concerns a clergyman whose pastime is spying on 'courting couples' in the park. Unfortunately one of his excursions coincides with a Zeppelin raid, and wackiness ensues. But, like Islanders, it offers a bizarrely compelling perspective on English life in a period that has been thoroughly swaddled in soft focus cliches by English novelists and film makers.

[Li'l Vishnu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Down below, everything was becoming furred, everything was growing over with a violet evening coat: trees, people. Under the heavy fur coats of the bushes, gentle, hairy animals were breathing quickly and whispering. Mr Craggs, furry and inaudible, snuffled about the park like an enormous rat out of a dream. There was a flash of blades—the blades of his eyes on his furry snout. They had opened as night fell. Mr Craggs was panting. The raspberry umbrella was nowhere to be seen.
— p. 87, “The Fisher of Men”

This is We stripped of sci-fi. Moist and colorful as usual—in an angular art deco style. And this style is so fierce, I figured it wouldn’t suffer the loss of the science fiction setting.

But I think it does. Sure he has the same sort of caricatures in play—the raspberry umbrella, the apple-lady, the worm-like lips and so on—but they are merely going to a boxing match or shopping for irons. We really ratchets things up with its caged animals and shoebox hotels and forbidden sanctuaries.

This is still a really good time, though. Not so much in its plot, but in just letting him paint his tortoise-houses over a milky-pink sea. And the concourses of top hats and large white hats flashing past a streetlight like a long scaly glittering snake belly. A London nighttime is a black sky littered with “white triangles, squares and lines—the silent geometric delirium of searchlight” with concourses of elephant buses snubbing each other beneath. A choir singing: “orange-black branches of the bass voices” while the “women opened up like shells and God was flung into the heat.”

Still only a mere foreshadowing of what rare yellow hands and white-green mountains we would find in We.

[T.B. Caine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Islanders: 4/5
The Fisher of Men: 3/5

3.5/5 that I’m rounding up because most of this was Islanders.

This was a weirdly dream-y set of stories. And I don’t think I’m smart enough to understand what was going on in The Fisher of Men

[Carol Saad · Rating 4 out of 5]

He is a genius

[meow · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was soooo good (fav classic will be rereading)

[izzie · Rating 3 out of 5]

odd