How could Zamyatin have seen the future so clearly? He didn’t, of course. He saw the present, and what was already lurking in its shadows. “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” says Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.” WE was a warning to its own place and time—one that was not heeded because it was not heard: the “diligent and reliable officials” took care of that. The courses were not departed from. Millions and millions died. Is it also a warning to us, in our time?
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