We

by Yevgeny Zamyatin

It is as though, let us say, a writer of the twentieth century should start to explain in his novel such words as coat, apartment, wife. Yet if his novel had been translated for primitive races, how could he have avoided explaining what a coat meant? I am sure that the primitive man would look at a coat and think, “What is this for? It is only a burden, an unnecessary burden.”

It is clear that the history of mankind as far as our knowledge goes, is a history of the transition from nomadic forms to more sedentary ones.

All of us and perhaps all of you read in childhood while in school, that greatest of all monuments of ancient literature, the Official Railroad Guide.

I have had opportunity to read and hear many improbable things about those times when human beings still lived in the state of freedom, that is, an unorganized primitive state.

Today this simple mathematical moral problem could easily be solved in half a minute’s time by any ten-year-old Number, yet they couldn’t do it! All their Immanuel Kants together couldn’t do it! It didn’t enter the heads of all their Kants to build a system of scientific ethics, that is, ethics based on adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing.

“... By merely rotating this handle any one is enabled to produce about three sonatas per hour. What difficulties our predecessors had in making music! They were able to compose only by bringing themselves to strokes of inspiration,—an extinct form of epilepsy.

Normally we live surrounded by transparent walls which seem to be knitted of sparkling air; we live beneath the eye of everyone, always bathed in light.

Naturally, having conquered hunger (that is, algebraically speaking, having achieved the total of bodily welfare), the United State directed its attack against the second ruler of the world, against love. At last this element also was conquered, that is, organized and put into a mathematical formula. It is already three hundred years since our great historic Lex Sexualis was promulgated: “A Number may obtain a license to use any other Number as a sexual product.”

I believe you will understand that it is harder for me to write than it ever was for any author throughout human history. Some of them wrote for contemporaries, some for the future generations but none of them ever wrote for their ancestors, or beings like their primitive, distant ancestors.

The ideal (it’s clear), is to be found where nothing happens, but here.... I will give you an example: in the State paper I read that in two days the holiday of Justice will be celebrated on the Plaza of the Cube. This means that again some Number has impeded the smooth run of the great State machine. Again something that was not foreseen, or forecalculated happened.

This I- irritates me, repels me. She almost frightens me; but just because of that I answered, “Yes.”

I felt very guilty. It is clear that there must not be “love, just so,” but “love because of.” For all elements of nature should be....

A white plane above, dark blue walls, red, green, orange bindings of ancient books, yellow bronze candelabras, a statue of Buddha, furniture with lines distorted by epilepsy, impossible to reduce to any clear equation.

I wanted to quarrel with her, to scream at her (exactly, to scream), but I had to agree. It was impossible not to agree.

human beings are built as nonsensically as these stupid “apartments,” human heads are opaque, and there are only two very small windows that lead inside,—the eyes.

I could therefore have gone to the office of the Guardians to make my report; but after that stupid adventure I was so tired—besides, the law provides two days. I shall have time tomorrow; I have another twenty-four hours.

but we, people of today, we know all too well that dreaming is a serious mental disease. I.... Is it possible that my brain, this precise, clean, glittering mechanism, like a chronometer without a speck of dust on it, is...?

if human liberty is equal to zero, man does not commit any crime. That is clear.

“Walls are the foundation of every human—” I began.

To judge by the descriptions which reach us from the ancients, they felt somewhat like this during their “Church services,” but they served their nonsensical unknown god; we serve our rational god, whom we most thoroughly know.

What crushing, scorching power one must feel to be the tool, to be the resultant of hundreds of thousands of wills! How great his lot!

What would she say? What would she do in a second? How to learn it? How to calculate it, since she comes from beyond, from the wild ancient land of dreams?

There were two in paradise and the choice was offered to them: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. No other choice. Tertium non datur. They, fools that they were, chose freedom. Naturally, they longed for centuries afterwards for fetters, for the fetters of yore. This was the meaning of their world-weariness, Weltschmerz.

And we came along, planted a boot on his head and ... squash! Done with him! Paradise again! We returned to the simple-mindedness and innocence of Adam and Eve. No more meddling with good and evil and all that; everything is simple again, heavenly, childishly simple!

All this is magnificent, beautiful, noble, lofty, crystalline, pure. For all this preserves our non-freedom, that is, our happiness.

And

The ancient god created the ancient man, i.e., the man capable of mistakes, ergo the ancient god himself made a mistake. The multiplication table is more wise and more absolute than the ancient god, for the multiplication table never (do you understand—never) makes mistakes!

And in the same manner we domesticated and harnessed the wild element of poetry. Now poetry is no longer the unpardonable whistling of nightingales but a State Service! Poetry is a commodity.

The gods have become like us, ergo we have become like gods. And we shall come to you, my unknown readers on another planet, we shall come to you to make your life as god-like, as rational and as correct as ours....

I glanced at her lips in silence. All women are lips, lips only. Some are rosy lips, tense and round, a ring, a tender fence separating one from the world. But these! A second ago they were not here, and suddenly ... the slash of a knife!

“I hate fog. I am afraid of fog.” “Then you love it. For if you fear it because it is stronger than you, hate it because you fear it, you love it. For you cannot subject it to yourself. One loves only the things one cannot conquer.”

He had given us certificates, testifying that we were ill, that we were unable to go to work. Thus I stole my work from the United State; I was a thief; I deserved to be put beneath the Machine of the Well-Doer.

“Yes, it is too bad. Apparently a soul has formed in you.” A soul?—that strange ancient word that was forgotten long ago.... “Is it ... v-very dangerous?” I stuttered. “Incurable,” was the cut of the scissors.

man ceased to be a wild man only on the day when the Green Wall was completed, when by this wall we isolated our machine-like, perfect world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds and beasts....

At the time of the first explosion about a dozen loafing Numbers from the docks stood near the main tube—and nothing was left of them save a few crumbs and a little soot. With pride I write down now that this occurrence did not disturb the rhythm of our work even for a second. Not a man shrank.

A dozen Numbers represent hardly one hundred millionth part of the United State. For practical consideration, that is but an infinitesimal of the third order. That pity, a result of arithmetical ignorance, was known to the ancients; to us it seems absurd.

(A consonant means a male Number.)

Now if we put a drop of acid on the idea of “right”.... Even the ancients (the most mature of them) knew that the source of right was—might! Right is a function of might.

Here we have our scale: on the one side an ounce, on the other a ton. On one side “I,” on the other “we,” the United State. Is it not clear? To assume that I may have any “right” as far as the State is concerned, is like assuming that an ounce may equilibrate a ton in a scale! Hence the natural distribution: tons—rights, grams—duties.

But only think, everything that is great is simple.

The circles are at times golden, sometimes they are bloody, but all have 360 degrees. They go from 0° to 10°, 20°, 200°, 360°,—and then again 0°. Yes, we have returned to zero. But for a mathematically working mind it is clear that this zero is different; it is a perfectly new zero. We started from zero to the right and came to zero on the left.

Hence instead of plus zero, we are at minus zero. Do you understand?

And Homo Sapiens only then becomes Man in the complete sense of the word, when his punctuation includes no question marks, only exclamation points, commas and periods.

love children very much and I think that the most difficult and the most exalted love is—cruelty.

but he wrote a short note, handed it to one of those who had held me and again I was free. That is, I was again included in the orderly, endless, Assyrian rows of Numbers.

In the ancient days the Christians understood this feeling; they are our only (though very imperfect) direct forerunners. The greatness of the “Church of the United Flock” was known to them. They knew that resignation is virtue, and pride—a vice; that “We” is from God, “I” from the devil.

Is it not clear then, that consciousness of oneself is a sickness?

If we had taken pains to educate human foolishness through centuries, as we have done with our intelligence, it might perhaps have been transformed into something very precious.”

All that she left behind her was a barely perceptible scent, similar to that of a sweet, dry, yellow dust of flowers from behind the Green Wall;

It is also clear that yesterday’s “dissolution in the universe” taken to its limit is death. For death is exactly the most complete dissolution of the self in the universe. Hence: L=f (D), love is the function of death.