On Zamyatin's We : A Critical Map of Utopia's 'Possible Worlds'

Author(s): PHILLIP E. WEGNER

Source: Utopian Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1993), pp. 94-116
Published by: Penn State University Press
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On Zamyatin's We:
A Critical Map ofUtopia's 'PossibleWorlds'*
PHILLIPE. WEGNER

Many of the literary critical investigations of the last few decades

have argued that the accepted meaning of any text is a product of the inter
pretive institutions and communities acting upon it. Fredric Jameson sug
gests thatwe can never really find textual meaning as a "thing-in-itself."
"Rather," he writes, "texts come before us as the always-already-read; we
apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous interpretations,or?
if the text is brand-new?through sedimented reading habits and categories
developed by those inherited interpretive traditions" (The Political Uncon
scious, 9). And, as Stanley Fish elsewhere argues, some interpretations, for
a variety of reasons, succeed so well thatwe no longer view them as argu
ments about themeaning of a work, but instead take them as "simple asser
tion(s) about theworld" itself (194).
Such sedimented reading habits have long shaped the way readers
approach Yevgeny Zamyatin's powerful evocation of the future,We (1921).
It has become something of a critical commonplace, for example, to regard
We as one of thefirst and most successful of the twentieth century's anti- or
dys-topias. Indeed, inWestern Europe and theUnited States, We has come
to be known primarily as themodel for the bleak masterpiece of thedystopian
form,George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.1 (Of course, the critical rewrit
ing of We followed a quite different trajectory in the former Soviet Union,
where the textwas not officially published until 1988 and had previously
circulated primarily in the clandestine samizdat press.) The Anglo-Ameri
can treatment of We as a dystopia most likely arose from a number of
sources: itmight well have begun with Orwell's own discussion of the text
and, later,would have been bolstered by efforts to recover literaryprecur
sors to Cold War attitudes toward socialism2?for the dystopia always
already seemed especially amiable to themost violently reactionary politi
cal agendas, as any study of the early uses of Orwell's narrative bears out.
However, even in our own post-Cold War universe, where these older polit
ical struggles no longer seem to have the same urgency, reading We as a
a
dystopia still has its attractions, for such an interpretationcreates version
of the text consonant with our contemporary fin-de-si?cle attitude toward
the various Utopian projects of the earlier part of this century. Indeed, the
a
dystopian narrative form seems especially amenable to historical moment
like our own in which we have become deeply suspicious of even the hope

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 On Zamyatin's We 95

of radical social change (there not being anything "new" in theNew World
Order), for while the Utopian narrative gives voice to the desire for an
overarching transformation of contemporary society, its dystopian inverse
attempts to short-circuit this same desire by purportedly presenting the
"inevitable" consequence of any attempt to realize large changes in the
world. As Irving Howe succinctly puts it, "Not progress denied but progress
realized is the nightmare haunting the antiutopian novel" (67). Thus, even
many of the recent interpretationsof We that seek to find a glimmer of hope
in the text accept the critical assumption that Zamyatin's work invariably
casts a cold eye on the vision of radically other tomorrows: these readings
locate the narrative's vision of redemption not in a transformed future, but
rather in some mythical idealized or archetypal past.
One of the unfortunate consequences of this canonical interpretationof
We as an anti-utopian narrative is that it sets thework at odds with what we
know of its author's own life-long utopianism. As Darko Suvin rightly sug
gests, "Zamyatin thought of himself as a Utopian, paradoxically more revo
lutionary than the latter-day Bolsheviks" {Metamorphoses, 256). Indeed,
although itwould be expressed in differentways at different times, Zamy
atin appears to have consistently held a verymodernist faith in the need for
a total transformation of the social world and the subjects that inhabit it.
Early in his life, Zamyatin's desire for a radical reorganization of society
led to his participation in the unsuccessful 1905 Russian revolution and his
subsequent arrest for political activities. Later, his Utopian desires would be
sublimated intomore properly literary forums, finding expression in such
essays as "Tomorrow," and themuch-celebrated "On Literature, Revolu
tion, Entropy, and Other Matters." Moreover, despite his well-documented
persecution at the hands of an increasingly inflexible intellectual establish
ment, Zamyatin remained until the end of his life committed to the Utopian
ideals he regarded to be embodied in the Bolshevik revolution. Zamyatin's
biographer Alex Shane points out,
The heretic Zamjatin's objections to the Bolshevik dictatorship and to the dog
matic glorification and canonization of October did not represent a disillusion
ment with the Revolution; they were rather the logical consequence of his
conception of heresy and his belief in never-ending revolution. For him the
October Revolution always remained a positive, elemental force that did not
need the protective armor of dogma and deification. (19)

Shane's observations are born out in Zamyatin's 1931 letter to Stalin

requesting permission to leave the Soviet Union, to begin what would be a
painful exile in Paris. In the letter Zamyatin states thatwhile he is now
resigned to await the day when "it becomes possible in our country to serve
great ideas in literaturewithout cringing before littlemen," he remains con
fident that such a "time is near, for the creation of thematerial base will
inevitably be followed by the need to build the superstructure?an art and a
literature trulyworthy of the revolution" {TheDragon, xvii).
Such biographical evidence alone should never be taken as proof of any
interpretation of a complex text such as We. Formalist criticisms (of both

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96 UTOPIANSTUDIES

theRussian and American varieties) have long cautioned against confusing

the outlook of the textwith that of its author. Moreover, we run an addi
tional risk, one that is especially pressing in the case ofWe, of reducing the
complex heterogeneity of the narrative into a univocal positive or negative
assessment of the utopia vision. Mikhail Bakhtin sees a related dilemma
plaguing the criticism of an earlier Russian author, Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Bakhtin notes that "Everyone interprets in his own way Dostoevsky's ulti
mate word, but all equally interpretit as a single word, a single voice, a single
accent," thereby creating a unified monological voice in theDostoevsky's
work that purportedly reflects the author's consciousness (43). Bakhtin's
statements about Dostoevsky's work have a special relevance for a discussion
of Zamyatin's We, for a long and interesting critical literaturehas developed
demonstrating Zamyatin's thematic and philosophical reliance upon Dos
toevsky's oeuvre, especially Notes from theUnderground and The Brothers
Karamazov.3 Bakhtin's criticism similarly provides us with the tools to
uncover formal resemblances between the two authors' texts. In his study of
Dostoevsky's "poetics"?an inquiry begun, interestingly enough, about the
same time thatZamyatin was writing We?Bakhtin contends thatDostoevsky
breaks with the tradition of European realism and generates a wholly new
narrative genre: the "polyphonic novel." As Bakhtin says of Dostoevsky's
work (and especially to the degree thatBakhtin is really developing a theory
of modernist narrative) so may it be argued of Zamyatin's We, that unlike
the realist narrative it does not present "a multitude of characters and fates
in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness;
rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with itsown
world, combine but are notmerged in the unity of the event" (6). With both
writers then, realist concerns with time are displaced by an emphasis on a
narrative space inwhich a plurality of fictional worlds simultaneously coexist
and interact (Bakhtin, 28). In fact,Zamyatin's narrativemay be distinguished
from utopian-dystopian texts such as Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward
or (the more significant reference here) George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty
Four, in that it does not configure any singular monolithic futureworld?
be it ideal or nightmare. Instead, We generates a vital index to what Suvin
elsewhere calls the "Possible Worlds of Utopian fiction." These worlds are
the variously arrayed narrative topoi emerging from all kinds of Utopian
texts: fictional universes that are dramatically distinct from, yet still inextri
cably bound to, the empirical (and ideological) realities of the texts' readers.
In exploring the inter-relationship between "Possible Worlds" that range
from thefluid Utopian "horizon" to the absolute closure of the truedystopia,
We maps out the contours of modern Utopian thought?a mapping operation
that at the same time tells us interesting things about the historical context
in which Zamyatin himself operates. We thus comes to occupy a crucial
junctural point in traditions of both world and Russian Utopian literature.4

The events ofWe are set during the thirtiethcentury?although the liter
ary critical term "setting" is here a misnomer, for We, like all Utopian

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 On Zamyatin's We 97

narratives, is really about what is usually called setting. Early in the narra
tive, the reader learns that the planet's population has been reduced by eighty
percent and the rural environs returned to theirprimitive state as a consequence
of a destructive two-hundred-year-long war waged "between the city and the
village" (We, 21). On an immediate level, Zamyatin here clearly refers to
struggles of the recent Civil War, the peasant insurgency movements of
1920-21, and the increasing ideological inflexibility concerning the national
peasantry developing among some Party intellectuals (the disastrous conse
quences of which would become evident soon enough). At the same time,
however, the opposition between the city and the village comes to serve a
broader figurai duty in the narrative. Raymond Williams has shown us, albeit
in the quite different context of early modem England, the central symbolic
role the opposition between the "city and the country" plays in the con
sciousness of a society in themidst of the liquidating upheavals of social
modernization: the dense built environment of the urban industrial center
serves as thematerial emblem of the dramatic transformationswrought
by
the historical forces of modernization (of which the revolution is one part),
while the city's "Other," the rural countryside, comes to stand for the already
existing traditional, agrarian, and, in the case of Zamyatin's Russia, feudal
social organization against which these forces are directed. (T.R.N. Edwards
also reminds us that the city-country antithesis would have implied for read
ers in Zamyatin's time "the historical Russian dilemma of choice between
West and East" [85].) The conflict between these two forces was especially
dramatic during the foreshortened history of modernization that unfolded
in the post-revolutionary Soviet Union. Zamyatin himself evidenced little
nostalgia for a traditional rural existence?nor does We rework the simplis
tic attack on industrialism and celebration of the peasantry found in L.B.
Afanasev's earlier Journey toMars (1901) or the contemporary peasant
utopias of Apollon Karelin, Alexander Chayanov, and Peter Krasnov.5 Dur
ing a youthful exile from St. Petersburg?the city thatMarshall Berman calls
"the clearest expression" of a problematic modernity found on Russian soil
(175)?Zamyatin gained a first-hand experience of the "idiocy of rural life,"
an experience thathe would put to use in his
ruthlessly satirical dissection, A
Provincial Tale (1913). In We, however, Zamyatin turns his critical gaze
onto the other element of this dialectic, the social environs of the
city. The
city that the reader finds inWe is unlike any yet built: Zamyatin's "One
State"?an array of perfect geometric forms constructed, like themassive
"Green Wall" which separates the city from the outside world, of
"impreg
nable, eternal glass"?is the realization of themodernist dream of the new
super-rational "machine for living." This design at once recalls Nikolai
Chernyshevsky's vision of the crystal palace and prefigures real-world urban
architectures such as those of Mies Van der Rohe and the CIAM group
(Berman, 247-248).
The equation of the contemporary metropolis with the "locus of the
utopia" has a long and honored intellectual pedigree, extending at least back
to Plato's Republic.6 And yet, as the very name of the
"utopia" inWe, the

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 98 UTOPIANSTUDIES

One State, already suggests, Zamyatin recognizes a second equally signifi

cant level of reference at work in the Utopian narrative form: for beginning
with the founding text of themodern genre, Thomas More* s Utopia, the
Utopian locus has emerged as nothing less than an idealized figure of the
central political, economic, and cultural vehicle of social modernization?the
nation-state. Much of the critical energy inWe will thus be directed toward
revealing the limitations of thismodern ideological formation, and, in turn,
severing the linkage between the eu-topos, the happy place, and the state.
Social life in the One State, as in its urban environment, has been
rationally organized in all aspects. This "perfect" regular social structure
has been largely derived from the ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the
American modernist hero-villain whose time-motion studies of workplace
efficiency and subsequent "principles of scientific management" would
have a profound effect on twentieth-century social life.7 In theworld of the
One State, Taylor's scientific principles serve as the basis for the "Table of
Hours," a precise, detailed schedule of themovements of each of the city's
tenmillion inhabitants, or "numbers." In the opening pages of We, one of
these numbers, the narrative's protagonist D-503, describes thedaily routine
in his "ideal" world:
Every morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the same hour and the same
moment, we?millions of us?get up as one. At the same hour, in million
headed unison, we start work; and in million-headed unison we end it. And,
fused into a single million-handed body, at the same second, designated by the
Table, we lift our spoons to our mouths. At the same second, we come out for
our walk, go to the auditorium, go to the hall for Taylor exercises, fall

asleep_(We, 12)

All the institutions and practices of theOne State?the collectivization of

both manual and intellectual labor, the strict regulation of free time (with
the significant exception of daily Personal Hours and sexual intercourse,
which D-503 admits to be a flaw in the social equation), the standardized
dress of the blue-grey "unifs," and the ritual celebration of the fusion of the
individual into the group?work toward a common goal: to assure the satis
faction of the society's material wants (unlike Orwell's Oceania, depriva
tion is unknown in the environs of theOne State) and to secure the stable
functioning and smooth reproduction of the current order of things by pro
ducing a mechanical unanimity among the needs and desires of the State's
inhabitants.
The potential consequences of the industrial modernization process
now known as "Taylorization"?that human life would be reduced to the
level of themachine?served as a popular contemporary theme, similarly at
the heart of KarelCapek's drama R.U.R. (1920) and Fritz Lang's expres
sionist classic Metropolis (1926).8 (Indeed, the passage quoted above sounds
as if itwere a description of the opening scenes of Lang's film.) However,
inWe (as to some degree in these related visions), we find no easy rejection
of themodern world; indeed, early in the narrative, themathematician and
engineer D-503 paints a stirringportrait of the social and spatial environments

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 On Zamyatin's We 99

of his ideal modernist city. The whole of the narrative comes to the reader
through D-503's diary notes; any reflection offered on the social order is
always already mediated through his consciousness. The diary itself is
intended as a paean to the "mathematically perfect life of theOne State," to
be placed aboard the spaceship Integral as it embarks on its imperial mis
sion of spreading perfection throughout the solar system (We, 2). D-503's
deepest libidinal responses to his social environment are thus to be found in
his descriptions of the spaces of theOne State:
In themorning I was at the dock where the Integral is being built, and suddenly
I saw: the lathes; the regulator spheres rotating with closed eyes, utterly obliv
ious of all; the cranks flashing, swinging left and right; the balance beam

proudly swaying its shoulders; the bit of the slotting machine dancing up and
down in time to unheard music. Suddenly I saw the whole beauty of this
grandiose mechanical ballet, flooded with pale blue sunlight. (We, 3-4)

This aestheticization of modern technology indicates a relationship on the

part of D-503 to theworld of the city-State that belies what littlewe know
of his personal history: here, D-503 appears less a life-long resident of the
State than someone only recently thrust into this radically Other environ
ment, one still awe-struck by the utter originality of this social space. While
this passage serves as part of Zamyatin's critique of the Proletarian Poets,
mocking their use of what had quickly become a conventionalized imagery
of the industrial order, its very presence in the text cannot help but remind
the reader of the sheer newness inZamyatin's day of the forms unleashed in
the modern city.9 D-503 at thismoment then seems nothing less than a
stand-in for the engineer and artist Zamyatin himself, whose own libidinal
investments in his modernizing world are expressed in the very narrative
form of We. Zamyatin's deployment of an elliptical stream-of-conscious
ness narrative voice and usage of symbolist and
expressionist imagery signal
both his rejection of the "closed" canon of literarypast and his affirmative
commitment to the potential of the new.10
At the same time, however, Zamyatin's self-conscious modernist tech
nique points toward a deeper ambivalence running through the narrative.
The very uniqueness of the form of We, those signatory elements of style
thatmark its special identity as a narrative object, can also be understood as
a gesture of defiance directed at the standardization of
contemporary life?
be it thatof the emergent state bureaucracy of the post-revolutionary Soviet
Union or the entrenched bourgeois capitalism thatZamyatin came to loath
during his time inGreat Britain.11Moreover, this same dynamic is replicated
in the structure of the narrative: D-503 too emerges as a kind of modernist
monument, a self that suddenly leaps out from the homogenized mass. Soon
after encountering themysterious female number 1-330?the embodiment
in the text of the principles of both individual and social revolution?D-503
begins to deviate from the daily routine laid out by the Table of Hours.
Further unprecedented events rapidly follow. D-503 has his first "dream,"
and is soon diagnosed as having contracted the dreaded "soul-disease." As
D-503 describes it in his own richly suggestive terms, such a condition

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 100 UTOPIANSTUDIES

marks the development of an interior self, an individual identity now dis

tinctfrom the plane of the social aggregate: "The plane has acquired vol
ume, it has become a body, a world, and everything is now inside the
mirror?inside you" (We, 89).
The consequences of thisemergent selfhood are quite upsetting forD-503.
He is wracked by rending anxieties as he comes to doubt the stable perfec
tion of his world. His psychic trauma is furtherexacerbated by 1-330, who
challenges D-503's fragile new identityby guiding him through a series of
increasingly trasgressive adventures. At one of the climactic moments of
the narrative, 1-330 leads D-503 outside the walls of the One State and
introduces him to the garden dwelling of theMEPHI people. The society of
theMEPHI appears to be the direct antithesis of D-503's modernist city:
while in the State D-503 sees only the blue-grey unifs of the numbers, here
he discovers "black, red, golden, bay, roan, and white people"; while inside
theGreen Wall he finds a rational ordered artificial space, here he encounters
the chaos of the natural environment; while in his society mathematical
rationality rules, here pre-rational desires are given full play; and finally,
where in the State he is part of an integrated collective whole, here the full
realization of his new-found individuality comes crashing home: "I was I, a
separate entity, a world. I had ceased to be a component, as I had been, and
become a unit" (We, 156-157). The pastoral primitive "world" of the
MEPHI thus represents a quite different avatar of the pre-modern "country
side" thatD-503 had earlier invoked. Here, the valences between the terms
of themodern city and pre-modern country have been reversed: the latter is
now the positive pole, for the world of theMEPHI seems to promise the
possibility of individual self-realization unavailable within the (en)closure
of theOne State.
During the visit to theMEPHI, 1-330 first reveals her own plans. She
will foment a revolution which D-503 will aid by relinquishing control of
the Integral Finally, however, the shattering of his social world proves to
be more thanD-503 can bear. He rejects the possibility of a revolutionary
challenge to the One State, and, in a fit of anxiety, submits himself to the
Office of the Guardians, the State's security force. There he undergoes a
fantasectomy, a medical procedure that excises the physical centers of the
as another
imagination within the brain (the imagination serving in the text
figurai locus of selfhood). This operation cures D-503 of his "madness,"
and he subsequently betrays the revolutionary movement. The text ends
with a now fully re-integrated D-503 stolidly viewing the liquidation of
1-330 and chillingly reflecting on the "inevitable" victory of a now even
more absolute State.
The subject position occupied by D-503 at the end of the narrative is thus
At first,D-503
quite different from the one he occupied in the opening pages.
is ideologically interpolated by the State, and thus, he believes thathe freely
"consents" to sacrifice his individuality to the greater good of social unity.
At thismoment, State society appears a relatively static construct. As the
narrative soon demonstrates, however, this is only an appearance. The State

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 On Zamyatin's We 101

is hauntedby thepossibilityof oppositionalactivity?forit is in thevery

nature of the kind of ideological "choice" offered to D-503 that it leaves
open other potentially transgressive choices. Or, to use another language,
Zamyatin shows inWe that there can be no such thing as a "fully sutured"
or absolutely closed ideological totality (Laclau and Mouffe, 129). Indeed,
it is D-503's decision to follow an alternative and ultimately oppositional
path that serves as themotor driving the narrative action. This complex
dynamic is symbolized in the narrative by the figure of the irrational num
ber, the square root of negative one (V-l) (We, 39-40). D-503 finds the con
cept of the irrational number so exasperating precisely because it is a
"challenge" to his mathematical understanding of theworld that arises from
the logic of just such an understanding: for in society as inmathematics, as
D-503 only too painfully discovers, both the rational and irrational are sub
sets of the "real." During the course of the narrative,D-503 finds thathe too
has become an "irrational" number: an alien subjectivity that ironically
emerges from the very State ideologies intended to make such an occur
rence impossible.12
This systemically-produced potential for opposition necessitates that
the invisible leaders of the State deploy surveillance technologies (the glass
walls, the recording membranes in the streets) and disciplinary apparatuses
(the State security forces and the torturebell) to assure the continued acquies
cence of all members of the social body. Regardless of these precautions,
rebels such as 1-330 activate the latent potential embedded in D-503 and
other members of the State society. Only with the conclusion of the narra
tive is the issue of ideological and repressive control made moot?for the
excision of D-503's imagination likewise removes any possibility for dis
agreement or opposition.
The changes of condition undergone by D-503 during the course of
the narrative?changes regularly ignored in discussions of the text?serve
as important keys to the play of "Possible Worlds" inWe: each of the
three conditions thatwe have thus far examined?D-503 as a happy func
tioning member of the State, D-503 as the conflict-ridden individual, and
D-503 as the non-self?represent a different potential articulation of the
future social world. Indeed, in We, the individual is a synechdoche for
the whole, a sign of the social body of which he is always already a part.
Zamyatin thereby shows us that the "worlds" of his text (and, in fact, of all
Utopian texts) are never simply inert containers that individuals passively
inhabit, but rather complex, continuously evolving constructs that emerge at
the intersection of the subject's point of view and the observed social
object. These worlds then change as the individuals that interactwithin and
through them change; and, as we will see dramatically evidenced inWe,
every presently constituted world is surrounded by a range of receding and
emerging alternatives.
Before we can look at the specific spatio-ideological configurations
of each of these textual worlds, we need to first lay into place the other
crucial discursive oppositive that is at work inWe?that of freedom and

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 102 UTOPIANSTUDIES

happiness. In a key passage, which famously has roots in theGrand Inquisi

tor section of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, the poet R-13 states
that the tension between these concepts lies at the very foundation of human
civilization.:
that ancient legend about paradise. .. it's about us, about today. Yes!
Why,
Just think. Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without free
dom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative. Those
idiots chose freedom, and what came of it? Of course, for ages afterward they
longed for the chains. The chains?you understand? That's what world sorrow
was about. For ages! And only we have found the way of restoring happi
ness .... (We, 61; emphasis added)

This contradiction, as it operates inZamyatin's narrative, bears a strik

ing resemblance to ethical-legal antinomy described by Ernst Bloch in his
Natural Law and Human Dignity. Through a detailed examination of key
texts in the long history ofWestern ethical thought,Bloch shows that two
separate and complementary fields of "Utopian" thought have emerged: that
of social utopia and that of natural law (Naturrecht). While both seek a
more humane society, they diverge in their approaches. Bloch summarizes
these differences as follows:
Social Utopias are primarily directed toward happiness, at least toward the abo
lition of misery and the conditions that preserve or produce such misery. Natu
ral law theories, as is so readily apparent, are primarily directed toward dignity,
toward human rights, toward juridical guarantees of human security or freedom
as categories of human pride. Accordingly, social utopias are oriented above all
toward the abolition of human suffering; natural law is oriented above all toward
the abolition of human degradation. Social utopias want to clear away all that
stands in the way of the eudaemonia of everyone; natural law wants to do away
with all that stands in theway of autonomy and its eunomia. (Natural Law, 205)

This political contradiction, between the needs of the society and the desires
of the individual, can thus be rewritten in termsof the even more fundamen
tal conceptual antinomy of the subject (the individual) and the object (Soci
ety). Inmany traditional discussions of ethics, one of these positions?more
often than not the latter?is ultimately privileged at the expense of the
other. And yet, this division of ethical thought and the apparent oppositions
which it produces are, according to Bloch, fundamentally flawed, for the
simple reason that "there can be no human dignity without the end ofmisery
and need, but also no human happiness without the end of old and new
forms of servitude." Bloch then locates the projected dialectical resolution
of this antithesis in the transformed and expanded Utopian thinkingofMarx
ism, "insofar as it simultaneously seeks to come to grips with theperson and
the collective, and to the extent that?far from the normalized masses of
men, near to unalienated solidarity?it seeks to contain the one within the
other" (Natural Law, 208).
We similarly struggles tomap the difficulties that arise when one of
these goals, namely that of social "happiness," becomes so prominent in
theminds of social planners that it all but eradicates any consideration of

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 On Zamyatin's We 103

"freedom" or "dignity." D-503 comes to realize that a self-stabilizing social

body, where the problems of collective need have been resolved (the One
State), comes into being only through the dramatic negation or repression of
individual desire: or to put it another way, the State emerges only when its
subjects accept what D-503 calls an "ideal unfreedom." Later in the text,
1-330 ironically declares, "And happiness . . Well,
. after all, desires torment
us, don't they?And, clearly, happiness is when there are no more desires,
not one . . .What a mistake, what ridiculous prejudice it's been to have
marked happiness always with a plus sign. Absolute happiness should, of
course, carry a minus sign?the divine minus" (We, 184). Here, drawing
upon nineteenth-century thermodynamics theory, especially that found in
thework of German physicist, Julius Robert von Mayer, Zamyatin projects
thefreedom-happiness dichotomy into a cosmology.13 Energy, the dynamic
forces of creation and destruction, desire and movement, is equated tofree
dom, while entropy, stasis and the cessation of desire, is the sign of happi
ness. The "divine minus," negative 273 degrees, is the point, according to
the second law of thermodynamics, of final entropy, the heat "death" of the
universe?an image which resonates with the haunting final pages of
Wells's The Time Machine.1* 1-330 implies that a fully achieved happiness
is realized only in the absolutely static, posthistorical social order?Claude
L?vi-Strauss's "cold" society projected into themodern world?that we
find only at the end of the text; or, as D-503 himself earlier states, "The
ideal (clearly) is the condition where nothing happens any more" (We, 24).
However, as Zamyatin so skillfully demonstrates, such a "victory" is a
pyrrhic one: for the realization of the absolute happiness represented by the
"divine minus" will for all intents and purposes render the very notion of
happiness obsolete. And in such a situation, the State's raison d'etre disap
pears. Ironically then, as the rational State moves toward its ideal, it simul
taneously slips back into the condition represented by the other "divine
minus" of the text?the "irrationality," or better yet the "non-rationality," of
the square root of negative one. The destructive arc ofmodern rational soci
ety back into the irrational, here so skillfully treated inWe, will be later
more extensively elaborated as the "dialectic of Enlightenment" of Theodor
Adorno andMax Horkheimer.
Of course, the converse of this happiness-unfreedom couple is also
true: forD-503 to become a fully independent individual, he must sacrifice
his own previous happiness. In the narrative, as the energy-entropy passage
makes clear, identity and desire are inextricably woven together. Indeed,
D-503's expressions of selfhood are precipitated by his sexual desire for
1-330 (a motif played out in a quite different fashion inNineteen Eighty
Four). As D-503 discovers his "self," his interests increasingly come into
conflict with the strictures of the State. More importantly,he experiences a
growing sense of isolation from the collective whole: at the once joyous
celebration of group fushion, D-503 can now only observe, "I had no place
here?I, the criminal, the poisoned one. Never again would I merge into the
regular, precise, mechanical rhythm, never again float on the mirrorlike

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 104 UTOPIANSTUDIES

untroubled sea" (We, 83). Alienation, anomie, and angst: D-503 exhibits all
the unhappy symptoms of a verymodern existential crisis. This cycle, more
over, is repeated in other characters and reduplicated on the level of theOne
State as a whole. O-90, D-503's former "approved" sexual liaison, becomes
jealous of his involvement with 1-330; finally, in a desperate attempt
to regain "control" of D-503, she commits the heinous anti-social act of
becoming pregnant by him. As the epidemic of individuality spreads
throughout the State, open anarchy bursts forth; ironically enough, this
occurs during the celebration of theDay of Unanimity, the ritualistic reaffir
mation of social unity. Again, only with the absolute negation of the self
which occurs at the conclusion of the narrative is some semblance of order
once more instituted.
The twomajor oppositional pairings thatwe have examined thus far?
those of "city and the country" and "happiness and freedom"?are simi
one
larly intertwined within the deep narrative structure of We. On the
hand, Zamyatin's narrative suggests that the very physical locus of the
idealized modern city?a fixed super-rationalized organization of human
space?itself negates the possibility of freedom. Michel de Certeau points
out that the Utopian discourse of the modern metropolis aims at "the
creation of a universal and anonymous subject which is the city itself:
it gradually becomes possible to attribute to it, as to its political model,
Hobbes' State, all the functions and predicates that were previously
scattered and assigned tomany different real subjects?groups, associa
tions, or individuals" (94). When the city-state achieves this kind of closed
absolute subjectivity, the multiple conflicting human subjectivities by
which Zamyatin defines freedom disappear. And, of course, this is exactly
what occurs in the "ideally unfree" machine-like spaces of theOne State.15
De Certeau further argues that the espace propre of the city attempts to
com
"repress all the physical, mental and political pollutions thatwould
promise it"?the very kinds of "pollutions" that the State finds in the irra
tional number, D-503's emergent subjectivity, and the nascent revolt of the
numbers (94).
On the other hand, We also shows that the social world of theMEPHI
represents the negation of the "happiness" found in theOne State. A number
of readers?no doubt in part precisely because of this narrative dynamic?
have located the "true" utopia of the text in theMEPHI garden. Alexandra
Aldridge contends that We a
expresses deeply nostalgic anti-modern longing
for the restoration of a lost connection between humanity and the natural
world. Aldridge argues thatZamyatin draws upon a mythopoetic polarity
between City and Garden, or the urban and the arcadian utopia. The narra
tive demonstrates the disastrous consequences inherent in the former of
these two possibilities, and finds salvation in the latter?here expressed in
the figure of theMEPHI people. Aldridge writes, "In the drift toward
'entropy' the forces of 'energy' have been overwhelmed.... Therefore, the
only option left is to reverse the entropie process, to regenerate humanity by
starting over in a state of benign anarchy, in the unfettered greenery of the

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 On Zamyatin's We 105

Garden" ("Myths of Origin," 74).16 Moving along similar lines, Gorman

Beauchamp claims that the text's politics resemble those of a Bakunin
esque destructive anarchism: anti-bureaucratic, anti-statist, anti-Marxist,
and implicitly anti-collective, Zamyatin locates his utopia in a radical indi
vidualism personified by theMEPHI. Beauchamp revealingly notes, "As
with the 'proles' in 1984, whatever hope the novel holds lies with theprimi
tives, with the savages beyond theWall who have escaped the yoke of
Reason" (70).17
The false promise of this kind of romantic primitivism has already
been pointed out by Raymond Williams in his great study of Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four.18 (Interestingly enough, the other most famous
dystopia of the twentieth century, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World,
employs a similar opposition, this time presented as that between an urban
authoritarian consumer society and the primitive world of the Savage's
reservation. Of course, for the often bitterly cynical Huxley, neither posi
tion appears very attractive.19) There are hints within the narrative of We,
however, that suggest Zamyatin too recognizes the limitations of this form
of modernist primitivism and the Romantic theory of the individual that
comes with it.One of the prominent physical features that
distinguishes the
MEPHI from the numbers of the State is their coat of "short, glossy fur"
(We, 156). Ifwe turnback to the earliest pages of the narrative, we see that
1-330 is first drawn to D-503 because she recognizes in him a potential
MEPHI self?externally manifest inwhat D-503 calls the "stupid atavism"
of his "hairy, shaggy. . . ape's hands" (We, 1). Later, as D-503's own exis
tential crisis grows, he feels himself bifurcating into two distinct individ
uals: "The former one, D-503, number D-503, and the other. . . .Before,
he had just barely shown his hairy paws from within the shell; now all of
him broke out, the shell cracked" (We, 56). The physical identification of
the torment-ridden D-503 with theMEPHI then reveals the price of a
return to the lost pre-modern world: the sacrifice of the kinds of
security
and collective identity that the emergence of the State made possible.
Indeed, theMEPHI represent the very negation of the concept of "society"
itself, a Rousseauistic retreat to a fictional, isolated, monadic existence.
Thus, both themodern city and the pre-modern countryside appear, within
the structural context of the narrative, as fundamentally
negative con
cepts, each lacking a portion of the positive attributes of the happiness
freedom opposition.
These four interlocked figures?the modern city, pre-modern country
side, freedom, and happiness?together produce the conceptual field within
which the narrative of We unfolds. In order tomore concretely visualize the
relational lines of force running through the narrative?relations of contra
diction (happiness-freedom; city-countryside) and of negation (freedom
city; happiness-countryside)?I will draw upon the analytical resources of
the "semiotic rectangle," first developed by the French semiotician AJ.
Greimas.20 A diagram of the conceptual coordinates inWe would thus
appear as follows:

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 106 UTOPIANSTUDIES

Freedom Happiness
(Subject?individual
-
desire) (Object?the collective)
S -^ S

-^
S
Countryside TheCity
(Primitive?non-social) (fixed environment)

This conceptual diagram of the narrative suggests that no one of these

simpler figures alone accounts for any of the text's "Possible Worlds."
Rather, each World emerges as a more complex synthesis of the two terms
that compose each side of the rectangle. Those resolutions produced on the
left and right sides of the rectangle represent the two Possible Worlds that
we have examined most closely thus far.On the right side appears the clas
sic "Utopian" World of the One State as D-503 delineates it in the narra
tive's opening pages. As I noted above, the D-503 of this firstWorld
accepts and even celebrates the negation of individuality thatmakes pos
sible the security and ideal unfreedom of the State. (As a point of compari
son, remember thatD-503, unlike Orwell's laterWinston Smith, at first sees
no conflict between the observations expressed in his journal and the social
values of the State.) On the left-hand side, we have the "D-503 condition"
that emerges after he encounters 1-330. While he is now largely indepen
dent of the social collective and his "free" choices are shaped by his newly
emergent desires, he is also wracked by the internal pangs of selfhood as
he begins tomove along a path which he recognizes as inevitably placing
him in opposition to the State. With these two social Worlds in place, we
a rational social
might summarize the argument of the narrative as follows:
order is predicated on the violent repression of the self and its desires.
Conversely, the expression of these individual desires means the loss of
the feelings of security produced by the sense of integration in a stable,
organic society.
The same opposition of Possible Worlds may then be plotted along the
historical trajectory leading to the One State. As the poet R-13 informs
D-503, it was the larger social experience of an unbearable freedom,
coupled with the absence of security and stability, that led to the "original"
revolutionary founding of the State. Thus, in D-503's existential crisis, as
well as in the anarchy emerging in the city after the destruction of the green
wall (We, 217-221) (I exclude the revolutionary movement of 1-330 for
reasons thatwill become clear shortly), we witness nothing less than the
re-emergence of the historical condition?a condition which bears a strik
ing resemblance to Zamyatin's own historical moment?that precedes the
existence of the "utopia" of theOne State. The cancellation of this unhappy
situation calls the ambiguous utopia into being; or, to state the matter

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 On Zamyatin's We 107

directly, the "utopia-of-the-state" envisioned inWe is nothing less than the

inverted or, to use Louis Marin's term, the "neutral" image of the crisis
ridden present in which Zamyatin produces We. InWe then, the exhilarating
and equally terrifyingsense of freedom experienced in the immediate post
revolutionary moment has been transmuted into a situation where there is no
fear precisely because there is no possibility for remaking society.
If we restrict our attention solely to the conflict unfolding in the
narrative between these two Possible Worlds, we produce a version of
Zamyatin's text that is strikingly resonate with the narrative of social forma
tionmore famously developed a decade later by Sigmund Freud in his Civi
lization and Its Discontents (1930). (Interestingly,We readily lends itself to
Freudian critical approaches, wherein D-503 and 1-330's struggles are
rewritten as the internal conflict between an overly vigilant, rational super
ego and unbounded instinctual desire.21) More importantly, however, with
only this version of We in hand, we must ultimately come to grips with the
more serious claims, levelled by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., that theworld
of Happiness-City and that of Freedom-Countryside are "formally equal,"
and that the narrative thus provides us with no "ethical or axiological basis"
for preferring one over the other. As a consequence, Csicsery-Ronay goes
on to argue, the narrative of We can be decoded as nothing more than a
"myth" about the opposed ontological constants structuring human exis
tence (Kern, 242-244).
Given only these two Possible Worlds to work with, I find Csicsery
Ronay's conclusions persuasive; indeed, as I have already argued,We balances
the shortcomings inherent in each of these two worlds against those found
in the other. However, here is where the application of the Greimasian
machinery to Zamyatin's narrative becomes invaluable: for it leads us to
postulate the existence of two other Possible Worlds. Before going any fur
ther then, allow me first to elaborate the fully realized complex of terms at
work in the narrative (leaving one position for themoment blank):

D-503
(after operation)

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 108 UTOPIANSTUDIES

We have already glanced at thePossible World thatfills what Greimas calls the
"neutral" position, the resolution of the "negative" opposition of the country
side and the city?the world that fully emerges only in the narrative's con
cluding pages. As Antonio Gramsci elsewhere reminds us, whenever a state's
ideological foundations are called into question, that state responds by bring
ing the fullweight of its repressive machinery to bear on those who threaten
it.The One State proves to be no exception. With the challenge of 1-330's
rebellion growing, the State demands thatall of its citizens undergo the fanta
sectomy procedure or face execution in the glass bell. Consequently, D-503's
new subjectivity, with all itspain and potentiality, is brutally torn away. This
change is reflected in the tone of thefinal chapter,where D-503's once vibrant,
expressive language flattens into a dull recitation of the events. He now occu
pies a rigidly fixed position within an absolute grid of State power. D-503
thus suffersa figurative death equivalent to the literal execution of 1-330. And,
with this double murder, thewindow of revolutionary opportunity, and the
promise of a liberatory transformationof the social order, appears to have been
violently slammed shut. Such a situation would be, according toBloch, the
moment forfinal despair?as Jameson notes in his discussion of Bloch's work,
"from a temporal point of view what characterizes death is precisely its struc
ture as that instant inwhich no future (and no hope) is any longer possible"
(Marxism and Form, 135). The closure of both subjective and objective his
torical possibilities?and hence the simultaneous neutralization of the cate
gories of happiness and freedom?produces total stasis, absolute entropy.
By emphasizing this position, we could see in Zamyatin's narrative a
bleak pessimism rivalling that of its great successor Nineteen Eighty-Four.
However, one position in our map of We's Possible Worlds remains as of
yet unfilled: thatof the complex resolution, or the "impossible" synthesis of
the positive opposition of happiness and freedom. The placeholder for such
a potential social topos is located in the narrative's conceptual figure, the
"
"infinite revolution. This central narrative trope is first invoked during the
exchange between D-503 and 1-330 that follows upon the revelation of the
plan to seize control of the Integral:
I jumped up. "It's unthinkable! Absurd! Don't you realize thatwhat you're

planning is revolution?"
"Yes, revolution! Why is this absurd?"
"It is absurd because there can be no revolution. Because our?I am saying
this, not you?our revolution was the final one. And there can be no others.
Everyone knows this.. .."
The mocking sharp triangle of eyebrows. "My dear?you are a mathemati
cian. More?you are a philosopher, a mathematical philosopher. Well, then:
name me the final number."
"What do you mean? I... I don't understand: what final number?"
"Well the final, the ultimate, the largest."
"But that's preposterous! If the number of numbers is infinite, how can
there be a final number?"
"Then how can there be a final revolution? There is no final one; revolu
tions are infinite. The final one is for children: children are frightened by infin
"
. . . (We, 174)
ity, and it's important that children sleep peacefully at night.

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 On Zamyatin's We 109

This passage offers one of the fullest visions found in the narrative of the
"World" of the infinite revolution. In the very concept itself,Zamyatin com
bines a call for a definitive and total break with the conditions of the present
("revolution"), and an open-ended extension of such a transformativeproc
ess into any possible future ("infinite"). This then is counterpoised to the
State's own understanding of history, here summarized by D-503, as a
closed teleological process inwhich the historical narrative reaches itshigh
est point with the realization of the "perfect" structures of the One State,
and therein comes to a conclusion.
The implied resemblance between the historical vision of theOne State
and that found in the classical Utopian narrative is no accident: forWe is as
clearly "modernist" in its conceptualization as it is in form. InWe, theNew
tonian causality of the classical utopia, wherein singular past and future
conditions are joined together by an empirically verifiable chain of events,
has been displaced by the kinds of complex causal models at work in
Heisenberg's quantum mechanics. Every present inZamyatin's Utopian nar
rative opens up onto a number of futures, a range of Possible Worlds?the
One State, anarchic individualism, dystopia, and the infinite revolution?
that are less the products of objective historical laws than the consequence
of human agents acting upon and within theirenvironments.What We sacri
fices in the progressivist confidence expressed in the classical utopia, it
compensates for by holding open a place for the Utopian potential of revolu
tionary human action.
The vehicle for the actualization of this Utopian possibility is to be
found in the narrative not inD-503, but rather in 1-330. Far more than a
shallow narrative figure employed to activate the latent subjectivity stirring
within D-503 (as some readers have argued), she serves as the guiding force
and major theoretician of the "World" of the infinite revolution. The differ
ent positions occupied within the narrative by these two characters is further
borne out in their respective fates. D-503, on the one hand, rejects both the
pains of subjectivity and the possibility of transformation: he determines to
sacrifice himself to the State in order to "resurrect" the old order of happi
ness. (It is important to have a clear understanding of the
unfolding of
events in the penultimate chapter. Although, in the end, D-503 is apparently
seized and forced to undergo the operation against his will, ht freely enters
the Office of the Guardians with the expressed goal of confessing his
actions. After he fails in this attempt?he realizes that he has told his story
to an agent of the revolution?he flees to the underground station where he
is captured [We, 225-229].) 1-330, on the other hand, refuses to testify
even under torture. In the end she remains true to the Utopian promise of
the revolution.22
Similarly, it is through 1-330 that Zamyatin reveals the dialectical
nature of his concept of infinite revolution. Soon after their return from the
MEPHI, 1-330 flatly refuses D-503's desperate plea that they "go together
there, beyond theWall, to those . . .whoever they are" (We, 163). In doing
so, she definitively rejects any anti-revolutionary (and anti-utopian?) retreat

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 110 UTOPIANSTUDIES

into an idealized natural-primitive world. Although momentarily taken

aback by her refusal, D-503 soon comes to his single most important
insight: "Who are they?The half we have lost? H2 and O? And in order to
get H20?streams, oceans, waterfalls, waves, storms?the two halves must
unite ..." (We, 163). D-503 here offers a crude, but nonetheless crucial,
analogy of the dialectical process: two independent entities come together in
such a way that each maintains its unique identitywhile producing a quali
tatively Other substance. As the very imagery of this passage suggests, the
product of such process will be dynamic energetic forces: the waves and
storms are less ends in themselves than the means of further transforma
tions.23The vision of social change offered in the text likewise becomes a
deeply dialectical one. The way "beyond" the situation of social closure
does not lie in the simple "return" to a state of "freedom" represented by an
impossibly idealized primitive garden, but rather in overcoming those social
contradictions?the city and the countryside, freedom and happiness,
energy and entropy, imagination and reason, desire and satisfaction, and
finally, the individual and society?that prevent the emergence of a wholly
and unexpectedly new situation.24 Real happiness is impossible without
freedom; however, the concept of freedom too will remain empty, as much
in our own present as inZamyatin's, without the elimination of those condi
tions thatblock the equality, or happiness, of all.
It is never fully explicated in the text of We precisely what the "world
ness" of this dramatically different human situation might be. Nor, of
course, could it be. Such a radically Other World, "the total leap out of
everything that previously existed," as Ernst Bloch elsewhere usefully
reminds us, escapes any attempt to represent it from the perspective of the
"present"?both Zamyatin's own historical moment and the "present" of the
One State (Bloch, Principle ofHope, 203). Lacking the cognitive reference
points by which such a situation might be surveyed, the utopographer
becomes much like the physicist attempting to represent a four- or five
dimensional object within the confines of three-dimensional space. These
objects can be "seen" only in strange geometric models, shadow images?
registered, as itwere, on the extreme periphery of our conceptual retina?of
something whose "truth-content" necessarily resides elsewhere.25 None
theless, the absent presence of the figure of the infinite revolution serves a
crucial role in the play of Possible Worlds inWe: for such a figure?what
Suvin, echoing Bloch, labels theworld of the "utopian horizon"?critically
illuminates thatwhich is "not-yet" available to us.
The restored presence of this fourth possibility renders the apparently
more ambiguous. Let
pessimistic "dystopian" conclusion of the narrative far
me quote thefinal two paragraphs in full:
This [the execution of the rebels] cannot be postponed, because in thewest
ern parts of the city there is still chaos, roaring, corpses, beasts and,?unfortu

nately?a considerable group of numbers who have betrayed Reason.

However, on the Fortieth cross-town avenue, we have succeeded in erecting
a temporary barrier of high-voltage waves. And I hope that we shall conquer.

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 On Zamyatin's We 111

More than that?I am certain we shall conquer. Because Reason must prevail.

(We,232)
The first-person point-of-view employed throughout the text now forces us
to call into question the truth-contentof this statement. For at this point,
D-503's post-subjective perspective is exactly identical with that of the
State ("we have succeeded," "we shall conquer"). He is thus unable to
imaginatively project any other resolution to the situation. However, from
the external, unknowable perspective of the still struggling "numbers who
have betrayed Reason," quite differentpossibilities arise.
Zamyatin hints in the penultimate chapter that he too recognizes the
imaginative bind generated by a closed, self-present totality such as theOne
State. While in hiding, D-503 encounters a physicist who claims to have
calculated the closed spherical dimensions of the universe and, thereby,
proven that infinitydoes not exist. The physicist then extends these conclu
sions into the realm of epistemology. He proclaims, "Everything is finite,
everything is simple, everything is calculable." To which D-503 simply
responds, "Just listen tome! You must?you must give me an answer: out
there,where your finite universe ends! What is out there, beyond it?" (We,
230). Of course, no answer is forthcoming.26
And finally, one significant character remains unaccounted for: that of
O-90, D-503's former lover who has gone "outside" the city to bear her
child among theMEPHI. This figure?at once the supplement of the finite
ideational system of the State and the Utopian emblem of the continued
presence of the worldness of the future?forestalls any grim closure sug
gested at the narrative's end.

By way of conclusion, I want to suggest an additional way by which we

might approach the complicated map constructed inWe of Utopia's Possible
Worlds: as a guide to the situation of Zamyatin's own historical present.
Only when all the narrative's multiple spaces are again set intoplace can we
even begin to explore themanner inwhich Zamyatin's text
responds to the
concrete possibilities illuminated by the then still active conflagration of the
Soviet revolution. Zamyatin does not view the revolutionary process as a
failure, nor does he uncritically reject themodern world and advocate a
retreat to an idealistic anarchic individualism. Rather, the existential crisis
of D-503 can be read, in part, as a figure of the historical crisis emerging in
the Soviet Union of the 1920s. Zamyatin maps two potential roads emerging
from this situation. Along the first lies theOne State, wherein the revolu
tionary struggle collapses into a process of rationalized modernization
undertaken within the confines of a bureaucratic state. (Zamyatin, unlike his
predecessor Alexander Bogdanov, however, did not seem to recognize that
the "wall" isolating the state would be as much a product of theWestern
capitalist countries' policy of encirclement as itwas a "decision" on the part
of the leaders of the new nation.) The dangers here are likewise twofold:
first, that the emphasis on objective social process will subsume the subject
(that is, in the realization of social utopia, the concerns of natural law and

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112 UTOPIANSTUDIES

human dignity will be forgotten); and secondly, that the process of change
will terminate in a farmore bleak "fully other" situation, inwhich both the
Utopian impulse and the space of the futurehave disappeared. It is this latter
road thatOrwell will come tomap with greater precision and unfortunate
consequence. However, Zamyatin, in recognizing the real historical limita
tions involved in any state-bound solution to the dilemmas of themodern
world, still holds out the possibility of a global change in human existence.
Zamyatin thus uncovers a second road leading out of his present, the road of
the "infinite revolution"?an explosive continuation and expansion of the
process of transformation, undertaken in order to clear the space for the
emergence of an unexpectedly new human situation.We need only hear in
this formulation the faintest echoes of the concept of "permanent revolu
tion" advocated by themore famous Soviet exile, Leon Trotsky, to recall
which way was not taken.

NOTES
*I would like to thank Fredde Jameson, Darko Suvin, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and Susan
Hegeman for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
1. Isaac Deutscher was among the first to observe the connection between the two narratives
in his still vital 1954 critique of Orwell's novel (Williams, A Collection, 119-132). Other dis
cussions of We as a prototype of the negative utopia or dystopia include Brown (Kern,

209-227); Hillegas (99-109); and, more recently, Kumar. However, two significant excep
tions to this critical trend can be found in Rose (167-175) and Suvin, Metamorphoses

(255-259), a discussion from which I benefitted immensely.

2. Indeed, Richard Stites observes, "When Zamyatin's book was revived and reissued in the
with late Stalinism, the publication of Orwell's 1984
early 1950s in theWest?coinciding
(which was indebted to it), and the emergence of the theory of totalitarianism, many took
Zamyatin's nightmare to be simply an accurate rendition of Soviet reality from the very
beginning" (Revolutionary Dreams, 188).
3. For only a few of the discussions of the influences of Dostoevsky's work on We see Jack
son, 150-157; Shane, 138-144; Richard A. Gregg, "Two Adams and Eve in the Crystal
Palace: Dostoevsky, The Bible, and WE" (Kern, 61-69); Edwards, especially 52-55; Morson,
including his provocative analysis of "Anti-utopia as a Parodie Genre" (115-142); and Hoyles.
4. For those readers interested in a discussion of the place of We in the history of Russian

Utopian and science fiction literature, see Suvin, "Russian SF and Its Tradition" (Metamor
243-269); McGuire; and Stites "Fantasy and Revolution," and his rich and wide
phoses,
ranging survey of the artistic, social, and cultural experiments of the revolutionary era,

Revolutionary Dreams.
5. See Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 35 and 184-187; although I disagree with his assess
ment of We as an "antiurban dystopia."
6. Lewis Mumford even claims that "the first utopia was the city itself." See his "Utopia, The

City and The Machine," (Manuel, 3-24).

7. In the original 1924 English edition of We, Gregory Zilboorg translates the name of the

society in narrative as the "United State"?thereby suggesting thatZamyatin's critique is also

aimed, at least in part, at the birthplace of Taylorism. Zilboorg further bears this out in his
original Foreword: "The problem of the creative individual versus the mob is not merely a
Russian problem. It is as apparent in a Ford factory as under a Bolshevik dictatorship" (xv).

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 On Zamyatin's We 113

For a more detailed discussion of the play of Taylorism in the narrative, see Gorman

Beauchamp, "Man as Robot: The Taylor System inWe" (Erlich and Dunn, 85-93).
8. For a useful introductory survey of the cultural responses to Taylorist modernization,
see Wollen.
9. See Kathleen Lewis and Harry Weber for a general analysis of Zamyatin's use of the Pro
letarian Poets(Kern, 186-196).
10. For Zamyatin's own espousal of modernist technical experimentation, see the manifesto
"On Literature, Revolution, and Entropy" (A Soviet Heretic, 173-179); for some useful intro
ductions to the matter of literary style and form inWe, see the essays by Carl R. Proffer, Ray
Parrott, Gary Kern, Milton Ehre, and Susan Layton collected inKern (118-148).
11. In Zamyatin's satire on the modern English bourgeoisie, The Islanders (1918), we find an
echo of many of the themes inWe: on the first page of the narrative, the character Vicar Doo

ley declares, "life must become an harmonious machine and with mechanical inevitability
lead us to the desired goal." And at the narrative's conclusion, after the disorder that was
introduced into his world has been corrected, Dooley offers this reflection, "If the state would

forcefully lead the weak souls along the one path?it would not be necessary to resort to such
sad though just measures.... Salvation would come with mathematical inevitability, under
stand, mathematical?" (2 and 44).
12. For a discussion that heavily emphasizes the role of the irrational antithesis in Zamyatin's
work, see Edwards.
13. For an examination of the influence of Mayer on Zamyatin's thought, see Shane, 45-48;
and more recently, Cooke.
14. Zamyatin was quite familiar with Wells's thought, and in fact served as the editor of a
five volume edition ofWells's work for theWorld Literature publishing house. See his essay
"H.G. Wells" (Soviet Heretic, 259-290); and Hillegas for further discussion.
15. Again, in The Islanders, Vicar Dooley declares, "if the individual?always criminal and

disorderly?is replaced by the will of The Great Machine of the State, then with mechanical
that??mechanical. . ." (8).
inevitability?understand
16. However, see Aldridge's,
also "Origins of Dystopia: When the Sleeper Awakes and We"
(Erlich and Dunn, and The Scientific World View, 33-44.
63-84)
17. Hoy les similarly writes, "If there is a theocratic utopia at the absent centre of Dostoev
sky's discourse, then there is a romantic primitivist one in Zamyatin, however modernistically
garbed" (108). Edwards's rich detailed discussion of the text also comes to a similar conclusion.
18. "This stale revolutionary romanticism is as insulting as the original observation. It is the

rising of the animals, as in the fable.... Orwell created the conditions for defeat and despair"
(Williams, George Orwell, 79-80).
19. For another example of the occasional vicious anti-utopianism in Huxley's writing
(although also see note 24 below), see his nasty little essay on the early twentieth-century
California socialist community of Llano del Rio, "Ozymandias, the Utopia That Failed"
(Tomorrow, 68-81). For a different reading of Llano's failure, see Mike Davis, "The View
From Futures Past" (City of Quartz, 3-14).
20. Also see Jameson, "Character Systems in 'Dr. Bloodmoney'," and The Political Uncon
scious, especially 46-49 and 82-83.
21. Christopher Collins in his essay "Zamyatin's We as Myth" goes even further, reading the
text as an archetype of the struggle between the ego and the Jungian anima (Kern, 70-79).
22. A detailed comparison between 1-330 and Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four would reveal a

good deal about the quite different thematic concerns of Orwell's novel.
23. In the 1919 essay "Tomorrow" Zamyatin suggests his affinity for a dialectical under
standing of historical process: "He who has found his ideal today is, like Lot's wife, already
turned into a pillar of salt, has already sunk into the earth and does not move ahead....

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 114 UTOPIANSTUDIES

Today denies yesterday, but is a denial of denial tomorrow. This is the constant dialectic path
which in a grandiose parabola sweeps the world into infinity.Yesterday, the thesis; today, the
antithesis; and tomorrow, the synthesis" (Soviet Heretic, 51). Also see Shane, 22-23.
24. Huxley too seems to have later come to rethink his text, however vaguely, along similar
lines. In the 1946 preface he writes, "If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Sav
age a third alternative. Between the utopia and the primitive horns of his dilemma would lie
the possibility of sanity?a possibility already actualized, to some extent in the community of
exiles and refugees from the Brave New World, living within the borders of the Reserva
tion .... Brought up among the primitives, the Savage (in this hypothetical new version of
the book) would not be transported to Utopia until he had an opportunity of learning some

thing at first hand about the nature of a society composed of freely co-operating individuals
devoted to the pursuit of sanity" (Brave New World, viii-ix). Any treatment of his late Utopian
narrative Island (1962) should take this statement into consideration.
25. I would argue that a similar problematic is explored in the work of Zamyatin's brilliant
successors, the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Csicsery-Ronay, however, offers a quite
different reading of the relationship between Zamyatin and the Strugatskys (Kern, 236-259).
26. There may be one more level of irony operating here?according to theoretical models of
an oscillating universe, if spatial expansion is finite, then absolute entropy would not occur (a

theory given more substance by recent dramatic astronomical discoveries). From this point of
view then, the universe would be infinite?although importantly, the same could not be said
for our familiar time-space configuration.

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