We

by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Nobody living in this regime seems to believe in its surreal and brutal totalitarian tenets. So, our hero’s confident self-psychoanalysis soon goes awry.

As Zamyatin had put it in an earlier theoretical essay, “I Am Afraid”: “True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.”

Zamyatin was first arrested in 1905, at the age of twenty-one, as a Bolshevik student activist. He was beaten up by Tsarist cops, kept in solitary for months, and exiled to the provinces. This exemplary punishment merely fertilized his eccentricities. Zamyatin was able to sneak back from Finland into St. Petersburg in disguise, where he obtained an engineering degree while squatting in the city illegally. In 1911, the cops rediscovered Zamyatin. This time he was sent into Russian internal exile, where he whiled away the time composing satires. In 1914 one of these satires, “In the Backwoods,” was published. This time, not just Zamyatin but also his publisher faced arrest. The entire print run of the magazine was also rounded up, and Zamyatin’s book was put before a judge, but he somehow avoided jail. Zamyatin then was sent to England to supervise the construction of Russian icebreakers, where, as a brief change of pace, he satirized the British. However, life without Mother Russia never seemed to agree with him. He quickly returned to Russia between the revolutions of 1917, where, as a noted former troublemaker, he was given a literary job by Maxim Gorky.

There, in 1922, he published a Poe-like horror tale called “The Cave,” about miserable post-revolutionary Russians simply trying to stay fed and unfrozen in their wintry, unlit apartments.

Thus the genuinely weird sensibility of D-503, the hero and narrator of We. We is one of the first attempts to write about the future through the consciousness of someone born there and living there. Our hero’s unique, personal Newspeak is a colorful tossed salad of the wildest avant-gardism of the 1920s: Einstein, curved space and the fourth dimension, Marxist dialectic, Freud, free love, math, engineering, aviation, and rocketry. It’s a syncretic, wildly imaginative text that combs the world’s library of innovation, science, and dissent, in order to address the one topic it can never directly confront: the cruel descent of the Bolshevik rebellion into frozen dogma and totalitarian stasis.

Our hero’s metaphors are scientific and mathematical, to the extent that even women’s faces are described as geometric vectors or mathematical symbols.

These Zamyatin word-games, this attempt to be futuristic and think futuristically rather than merely describing futurity from the perspective of the present day, was Zamyatin’s literary breakthrough. This book reads like nothing else on earth before or since.

Yevgeny Zamyatin is orbiting in a literary space all his own with this one. It is a work without real ancestry, and its descendants have rarely matched its visionary daring. The term “science fiction” was not yet invented when Zamyatin composed this prescient text. It is nevertheless extremely sciencefictional. It has whole sets of sci-fi themes and conceits that were entirely fresh when Zamyatin created them: hermetically sealed cities, synthetic food, unisex suits, Metropolis-like crowds of drones marching through cyclopean apartment blocks, whizzing, roaring trips in giant spaceships, mind control through brain surgery. . . . They’re clichés now, of course: but they were only reduced to clichés through decades of effort by lesser artists.

Some Russian literary émigrés were able to thrive in Paris, but Zamyatin wasn’t one of them. Unable to finish a historical novel, he wasted away in silence and poverty, and he died on March 10, 1937. There’s little doubt that he had foreseen and expected this fate. Like his hero, he even seemed to somehow relish his own immolation: “The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. . . . But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.”

We is a novel of revolution. It is the sum of the utopian enthusiasms, which gestated in the nineteenth century and were delivered in the early twentieth.

By 1923, Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote: It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.

Zamyatin, an engineer, quantified this moment in his anti-utopia, fast-forwarding the cogs and wheels of early Soviet society ad absurdum.

That year, Trotsky was disciplining Russian society into a militarized labor force. Pastoral Russia had risen to its newfound volya (free will) but was now struggling against this new yoke. The Bolsheviks were building the new Soviet Man, who would outpace his human peers. The peasantry would bond into the strongest proletariat amalgam. The stuff of daily life was churned through the time and motion studies of the American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor. Russia was electrified—literally—and the darkest corners of the old life were irradiated with industrial ideas. The year 1920 was perched at the dawn of film, radio, and the automobile. It was also the year that the word robot came into being (originating in the Russian and Czech word rabotat’, which means “to work”). The Bolsheviks with their militaristic, urban-centric, industrial aggression were conquering all of Russia.

But, in all this, the arts were thriving, feeding on the stuff of ideas. Amongst the loudest avant-garde voices of the time were the Futurists with their provocative antics. The Proletarian Culture movement, Proletkult, was also in full swing after being established in 1917 with plans to engender a new proletarian cultural universal. By 1919, it became an enormous movement with half a million participants.4 Their ideas included god-building, tectology, and human mechanization. And it was these ideas that form the core of Zamyatin’s We.

In his cultural history of Russia, Natasha’s Dance, Orlando Figes describes Gastev’s research excellently: Hundreds of identically dressed trainees would be marched in columns to their benches, and orders would be given out by buzzes from machines. The workers were trained to hammer correctly, for instance by holding a hammer attached to and moved by a special machine, so that they internalized its mechanical rhythm. The same process was repeated for chiseling, filing and other basic skills. Gastev’s aim, by his own admission, was to turn the worker into a sort of ‘human robot’. . . Gastev envisaged a utopia where ‘people’ would be replaced by ‘proletarian units’ identified by ciphers such as ‘A,B,C, or 325, 075, 0, and so on.’ These automatons would be like machines, ‘incapable of individual thought’, and would simply obey their controller. A ‘mechanized collectivism’ would ‘take the place of the individual personality in the psychology of the proletariat’. There would no longer be a need for emotions, and the human soul would no longer be measured ‘by a shout or a smile but by a pressure gauge or a speedometer’.

For three years after that we were all locked up together in a steel projectile and, cooped up in darkness, whistled through space, no one knew where. In those last seconds-years before death, we had to do something, to settle down to some sort of a life in the hurtling missile. . . . And all the writers, all those who had survived, were constantly bumping into each other in the cramped space—Gorky and Merezhkovsky, Blok and Kuprin, Muyzhel and Gumilyov, Chukovsky and Volynsky. . . . In the frozen, hungry, typhus-ridden Petersburg, there raged an epidemic of cultural and educational activities. Since literature is not education, all poets and writers became lecturers. And in place of money there was a strange new unit of exchange—the ration, obtained by abandoning poems and novels for lectures.

Between 1917 and 1921, the latter part of which Zamyatin was living at Dom Isskustv, he wrote a novel, a play, two tales, fifteen stories, fourteen fables, four vignettes, and a dozen articles.

In 1921, Zamyatin’s pupils would form a literary group called the Serapion Brothers, which included the likes of Mikhail Zoshchenko, Lev Lunts, Vsevolod Ivanov, Veniamin Kaverin, Konstantin Fedin, Nikolay Tikhonov, Mikhail Slonimsky, and Viktor Shklovsky. And it was during this time of editing, teaching, and administrative duties that Zamyatin wrote We, most likely from 1920 to late 1921.10

was considered too dangerously satirical, and even Gorky, Zamyatin’s sponsor for much of the 1920s, would later say: “Zamyatin is too intelligent for an artist and should not allow his reason to direct his talent to satire.

In a strange twist of Zamyatinesque fantasy, I discovered that Chekhov House was supported by the Eastern European Fund of the Ford Foundation, established by Henry Ford in 1936. Just prior to that, Henry Ford had instigated operations that used the principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor to promote efficiency in his automobile factories—as did Lenin to advance his super-population in 1920. As extraordinary as it might sound, the name Henry Ford became well known throughout Russian villages in the 1920s—better known, in fact, than the names of many party leaders. Lenin had imported Ford Motor Company tractors in large numbers after the revolution.

And it was exactly this effect, the mechanizing of Russia, thanks to American industrial thought, that Zamyatin so fiercely satirized in his novel. Indeed, in 1922, Max Eastman, defender of the revolution in Russia, said, “I feel sometimes as though the whole modern world of capitalism and Communism and all were rushing toward some enormous efficient machine-made doom of the true values of life.”

The book is rife with symbols and its language as tight and suggestive as a coiled spring. In his essay “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters,” he describes writing and his conception of the fast “language of thought”: The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity—but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage. We must compress into a single second what was held before in a sixty-second minute. And hence, syntax becomes elliptic, volatile; the complex pyramids of periods are dismantled stone by stone into independent sentences. When you are moving fast, the canonized, the customary eludes the eye: hence, the unusual, often startling, symbolism and vocabulary. The image is sharp, synthetic, with a single salient feature—the one feature you will glimpse from a speeding car.

503 explains that he is afraid of the square root of minus one (√-1) because it is an “irrational number” (it is also, in fact, an imaginary number, but Zamyatin chose the word irrational with distinct purpose). In his Universe of the Mind, Yuri Lotman said: “Modern science from nuclear physics to linguistics sees the scientist as inside the world being described and as a part of that world. But the object and the observer are as a rule described in different languages, and consequently the problem of translation is a universal scientific task.”

This was Zamyatin’s feat—he rendered emotions in equations, relationships in geometry, and philosophy in calculus while delivering a page-turning story.

Every material that Zamyatin conjures has something else to say beyond its simple semantics. Onomasticians and toponymists have a field day with this book.

Zamyatin’s sentences are rife with rhythmic markers of syntax—particularly the dash, the colon, and the ellipsis. To me, it is entirely clear that the relation between the rhythmics of verse and prose is the same as that between arithmetic and integral calculus. In arithmetic we sum up individual items; in integral calculus we deal with sums, series. The prose foot is measured, not by the distance between stressed syllables, but by the distance between (logically) stressed words . And in prose, just as in integral calculus, we deal not with constant quantities (as in verse and arithmetic) but with variable ones. In prose, the foot is always a variable quantity, it is always being either slowed or accelerated. This, of course, is not fortuitous: it is determined by the emotional and semantic accelerations and retardations in the text.

There are unexpected shifts of tense. He omits verbs and other grammatical elements. He avoids the words like and such as, preferring direct metaphor. I kept his sentence fragments. There are neologisms like javenishly, which describes the way a doctor laughs at D-503. Zamyatin insists on the leitmotif as a device to achieve artistic economy, so these signifiers are necessarily translated consistently throughout the book. Overall, Zamyatin approaches the design of his meticulous text with extreme logic.

The syntactical pacing and pulsing in both the Russian and this translation may seem strange at first, until you surrender to Zamyatin’s “language of thought.” In his essay “On Language” (1919–20), Zamyatin explained: “[I]f you try to follow the language of thought in your own mind, you will not find even the simplest sentences— only shreds, fragments of simple sentences. Only the most essential elements of a sentence are used: sometimes only a verb or only an epithet, an object . . . At first glance this assertion may seem paradoxical: why should fragments of sentences, scattered as after an explosion, have greater effect on the reader than the same thoughts and images arranged in regular, steady, marching ranks? . . . [because] you meet the reader’s natural instinctive need. You do not compel him to skim . . .”

RECORD ONE KEYWORDS: A Declaration. The Wisest of Lines. An Epic.

I will just attempt to record what I see, what I think—or, more exactly, what we think. (Yes, that’s right: we. And let that also be the title of these records: We.)

This text is me; and simultaneously not me. And it will feed for many months on my sap, my blood, and then, in anguish, it will be ripped from my self and placed at the foot of the One State.

The blessed-blue sky, the tiny baby suns in each badge, faces unclouded by the folly of thought . . . All these were rays, you see— all made of some sort of unified, radiant, smiling matter. And a brass beat: Tra-ta-ta-tam, Tra-ta-ta-tam—like sun-sparkling brass stairs—and with each step up, you climb higher and higher into the head-spinning blueness . . .

And then, in an instant: a hop across centuries from + to -. I was reminded—obviously, it was association by contrast—I was suddenly reminded of a picture in the museum depicting their olden day, twentieth-century avenue in deafening multicolor: a jumbled crush of people, wheels, animals, posters, trees, paint, birds . . . And do you know, they say that it was actually like that—that it’s actually possible. I found that so improbable, so ludicrous, that I couldn’t contain myself and laughed out loud.

I looked through all that I wrote yesterday and I see: I was not writing clearly enough. I mean, all this is of course completely clear to any one of us. But how do I know: it may be that you, unknown reader, to whom the Integral will be carrying these records, have only read the great Book of Civilization up to the page that describes the life of our ancestors nine hundred years ago?

It is amusing to me—and at the same time very laborious to explain all this. It is exactly as if a writer of, let’s say, the twentieth century, were made to explain in his novel the meaning of the words “jacket,” “apartment,” or “wife.” But then again, if his novel is to be translated for barbarians, would it make any sense to carry on without notes about the likes of “jackets”?

The Table . . . Right now, from the wall of my room, from the panel of gold underlay, the burgundy numbers are looking me in the eye, sternly but tenderly. I am involuntarily reminded of that which the Ancients called “icons,” and I feel like making up poems or prayers (the same thing). Ah, if only I were a poet, I would rightly exalt you, O Table, O heart and pulse of the One State. All of us (perhaps you, too), as children, read at school that greatest of all ancient literary legacies: The Railroad Schedule. But even if you put that next to the Table, you will see it is graphite next to diamond: in each is the same C, carbon, but how eternal, how transparent, how dazzling is the diamond. Who is not made breathless when racing and rumbling through the pages of the Schedule ? But the Table of Hours—it transforms each of us into the real-life, six-wheeled, steel heroes of a great epic.

I’ve come to read and hear many unlikely things about the times when people lived in freedom, i.e., the unorganized savage state. But the most unlikely thing, it seems to me, is this: how could the olden day governmental power—primitive though it was—have allowed people to live without anything like our Table, without the scheduled walks, without the precise regulation of mealtimes, getting up and going to bed whenever it occurred to them? Various historians even say that, apparently, in those times, lights burned in the streets all night long, and all night long, people rode and walked the streets.

The State (humaneness) forbade killing to death any one person but didn’t forbid the half-killing of millions. To kill a man, that is, to decrease the sum of a human life span by fifty years—this was criminal. But decreasing the sum of many humans’ lives by fifty million years— this was not criminal. Isn’t that funny? This mathematical-moral mystery could be solved in half a minute by any ten-year-old cipher here among us; but they couldn’t do it—not with all their Kants put together (because not one of their Kants ever figured out how to build a system of scientific ethics based on subtraction, addition, division, and multiplication).

And, like wild animals, obliviously giving birth to children. Isn’t it funny to know crop breeding, poultry breeding, fish breeding (we have specific information that they knew how to do these things), and not to be able to get to the top rung of that logical ladder: child breeding? Not to pursue those ideas all the way to our Maternal and Paternal Norms?

There’s the bell. We stood and sang the Hymn of the One State, and on the stage, the phonolector sparkled with its golden loudspeaker and keen wit: “Esteemed ciphers! Not long ago, archaeologists uncovered a book from the twentieth century. In it, an ironical author tells the story of a barbarian and a barometer. The barbarian noticed: every time the barometer pointed to ‘rain,’ it actually rained. And then, one day, when the barbarian wanted it to rain, he tapped out just enough mercury so that the level would indicate ‘rain’ ” (on the screen, a barbarian in feathers, tapping out the mercury; the sound of laughter). “You laugh: but does it not seem to you more appropriate to laugh at the Europeans of that epoch? Like the barbarian, the European wanted ‘rain’—rain with a capital R, algebraic rain. But he stood before the barometer like a big wet chicken. At least the barbarian had more gumption and verve and—though barbarous—logic: he was able to establish that there is a connection between effect and cause. Having tapped out the mercury, he achieved that first step along the great path, toward . . .”

“. . . By simply turning this handle, any of you could produce up to three sonatas an hour. What a struggle this was for our ancestors. They could create only if they drove themselves to fits of ‘inspiration,’ a strange form of epilepsy. And here is an amusing illustration of their results: the music of Scriabin, twentieth century. This black box” (at this point the curtains moved apart on the stage and there stood their ancient instrument) “they called this box ‘grand’ or ‘forte,’ which again proves how much all of their music . . .”

With particular pleasure, I then listened to our contemporary music. (It was demonstrated at the end for the sake of contrast.) Crystal chromatic degrees converging and diverging in infinite sequences and the summarizing chords of Taylor and Maclaurin formulae with a gait like Pythagorean pant-legs, so whole-toned and quadrilateral-heavy; the melancholy melodies of diminishing oscillations; pauses producing bright rhythms according to Frauenhofer lines, the spectral analysis of planets . . . What magnificence! What unwavering predictability! And how pitiful that whimsical music of the Ancients, delimited by nothing except wild fantasy . . .

We have nothing to hide from one another. This also eases the arduous and distinguished task of the Guardians. Otherwise, who knows what could happen? It’s possible that it was exactly those strange nontransparent habitations of the Ancients that gave rise to that sorry cellular mentality of theirs. “My (sic!) house is my castle”— they really should have thought that through!

Again, something’s not right here. Again, I’ve been talking to you, my unknown reader, as though . . . well, let’s say, as though you were my old comrade R-13, the poet with African lips, a person everyone knows. Meanwhile, you—on the moon, on Venus, on Mars, on Mercury—who knows you? Where and who are you?

So here goes. Some ancient sage once said something clever (accidentally, of course): “Love and hunger are the masters of the world.” Ergo, to take control of the world, man must take control of the masters of the world. Our ancestors finally conquered Hunger with a heavy cost: I am talking about the Two-Hundred-Year War, the war between the city and the countryside.

But in the thirty-fifth year before the founding of the One State, our modern petroleum-based food was invented. True, only 0.2 percent of the population of the earthly sphere survived. But in exchange for all that—the cleansing of thousand-year-old filth— how glistening the face of the earth has become! In exchange for all that, this zero-point-two percent has tasted bliss in the ramparts of the One State.

So it’s natural that having subjugated Hunger (algebraically = to the sum of material goods), the One State began an offensive against the other master of the world—against Love. Finally, even this natural force was also conquered, i.e., organized and mathematicized, and around three hundred years ago, our historical Lex Sexualis was proclaimed: “Each cipher has the right to any other cipher as sexual product.”

You are thoroughly examined in the laboratories of the Bureau of Sex, the exact sexual hormone content of your blood is determined, and then they generate a corresponding Table of Sex Days for you. Then you make a statement that on your given day you would like to make use of this (or that) cipher, and you receive the appropriate ticket book (pink). And that’s it.

And that very thing, which was to the Ancients the source of innumerable silly tragedies, has been converted to a harmonic, pleasantly useful function of the organism, exactly like sleep, physical labor, ingestion, defecation, and the rest. From this you will see how the great strength of logic purifies everything, no matter what it touches.

Okay, this is really absurd, this really actually should be crossed out: we have channeled all the forces of nature—there cannot be any future catastrophes. And now everything is clear to me: that strange feeling inside is all due to that very quadratic predicament of mine, about which I spoke at the beginning of this record. And there is no X in me (it’s not possible). It is simply that I am afraid that some kind of X exists in you, unknown readers of mine. But I believe you won’t judge me too harshly. I believe you will understand that it is more difficult for me to write than for any author in the course of all human history: some wrote for their contemporaries, others for their descendants, but no one ever wrote for their ancestors or beings who resemble their own distant, savage ancestors . . .