In its style, too, We is a remarkable achievement, for Zamyatin had a perfect ear and perfect taste. “The language of our epoch is sharp and rapid as a code,” he wrote in 1923. In We, which is as carefully structured as a poem, the reader will find none of the slow, singing richness of his provincial stories, none of the sly laughter of his “impious tales.” We, about the square state and square men, is written in a style of utmost severity and discipline—a style in perfect harmony with the author’s intention, with the totally controlled society he evokes, where emotion is banished (yet survives), where every moment is lived according to schedule in a glass-enclosed city of glass houses and absolute straight lines, where even lovemaking is done on scheduled days and scheduled hours.
But just as Zamyatin was much more than a keen political intellect, so We, within the astonishing discipline of its style, is much more than a political statement. It is a complex philosophical novel of endless subtlety and nuance, allusion and reflections. It is also a profoundly moving human tragedy, and a study in the variety of human loves (passion—D-503; domination—I-330; jealousy—U; tenderness, and gentle, total giving of the self— O-90). And, though the people are nameless “numbers,” they are never schematic figures; each is an individual, convincingly and movingly alive.
Zamyatin’s main concern in the novel is the problem of man in its multiple aspects: the relation of the individual to society and to other men; the conflict between the tempting safety of unfreedom and the will to free identity; the fear and the lure of alienation; the rift between the rational and the irrational. We is also a study of a society that claims to be based on the purely rational—and hence becomes deadly, dehumanizing, absurd.
“Who are they?” the hero asks after he has seen the gentle, hairy creatures outside the Wall that encloses the One State. “The half we have lost?” The feeling half. The irrational half that lives outside of schedules and straight lines. Yet even in the One State, where nothing spontaneous is permitted, the state that is walled off from everything unstructured and alive, life and humanity assert themselves. The hero—a builder and mathematician who has been thoroughly shaped by his society, who never questions it—has atavistic “hairy hands.” Seduced into violent and irrational passion, he makes a shocking discovery of an unsuspected, long-suppressed realm—the realm within, of individual identity, of self. “Who am I? What am I like?” he cries despairingly. In a supremely tragicomic scene, he visits a doctor, seeking help against this terrifying malady. The doctor gravely tells him he is seriously ill—he has developed a soul. “Is it dangerous?” he asks. “Incurable,” the doctor replies. But, alas, it turns out to be curable in the end. The Benefactor’s men have found a remedy for individuality, for rebellion, for humanity: a simple operation to excise the seat of all infection—imagination—and reduce all citizens of the One State to grinning semi-morons.
We is more multifaceted, less hopeless than Orwell’s 1984, written more than twenty-five years later and directly influenced by Zamyatin’s novel. Despite its tragic ending, We still carries a note of hope. Despite the rout of the rebellion, “there is still fighting in the western parts of the city.” Many “numbers” have escaped beyond the Wall. Those who died were not destroyed as human beings—they died fighting and unsubmissive. And though the hero is reduced to an obedient automaton, certain that “Reason” and static order will prevail, though the woman he loved briefly and was forced into betraying dies (as do the poets and rebels she led), the woman who loves him, who is gentle and tender, is safe beyond the Wall. She will bear his child in freedom. And the Wall itself has been proved vulnerable after all. It has been breached—and surely will be breached again.
In We, Zamyatin says: This is where we are going. Stop while there is still time. Throughout the poetry and the mockery, there is great warmth— for Russia, for man—and profound grief over the particularly intense ordeals they were to suffer in our century of terror, so uncannily foreseen in the novel, and so proudly faced. For Zamyatin, himself to such an extreme degree a victim of these ordeals, is remarkable in his utter lack of cynicism or bitterness. Anger, mockery, rebellion—but no self-pity and no bitterness. He seems to be saying to all the dogmatists, all who attempt to force life into a rigid mold: You will not, you cannot prevail. Man will not be destroyed.
Zamyatin called We “my most jesting and most serious work.” And, though it speaks on many levels and of many things, its political message is unmistakable. It is a warning, and a challenge, and a call to action. It is perhaps the fullest statement of Zamyatin’s intellectual philosophy and emotional concerns.
Significantly enough, the hounding of Zamyatin rose to fever pitch in the late 1920s, when the present had become too uncomfortably like the prophecy, when the Benefactor and his Machine had become too recognizable as living, immediate realities. In 1929 full power in the literary field was placed in the hands of the RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) which became the instrument for the extirpation of all that was still independent in Russian literature. By campaigns of vilification, by pressure on journals and publishers, by calls for police methods, it sought to bend everyone to the requisite line—service to the party. The RAPP plunged into the role of executioner with gusto, and the results were quickly apparent. Many journals and publishing houses were closed. There was a wave of suicides among writers and poets. Recantations became epidemic. Endless nonparty writers, their spirits broken, publicly repented of their sins and came into the fold, repudiating and rewriting then- own works.
A particularly vicious campaign was launched against Zamyatin and Pilnyak. The latter was pilloried for the publication abroad of his novel Mahogany. We, which had been written almost ten years earlier and never published in the Soviet Union, was used as the immediate pretext for Zamyatin’s destruction. While its first translation into English (in 1924) and Czech (in 1927) had not provoked any noticeable response by Soviet authorities, its publication in 1927 in Volya Rossii, a Russian emigre journal published in Czechoslovakia, without the author’s knowledge or consent, was used, two years later, as a convenient excuse for bringing the full weight of official pressure upon its author. The matter was discussed at a meeting of the Writers’ Union in the summer of 1929, when Zamyatin was away on a summer journey. One after another, his frightened and subservient colleagues rose to denounce him. Zamyatin replied with an indignant and courageous letter, resigning from the Union. “I find it impossible,” he wrote, “to belong to a literary organization which… takes part in the persecution of a fellow member.”
Pilnyak was unable to withstand the pressure and recanted. Zamyatin’s former pupils and admirers—Ivanov, Katayev, Kaverin—sacrificed their talents to become hacks, manufacturing whatever was required in the shape and style demanded. Those with stronger backbones, like Isaac Babel, turned silent. And only isolated giants like Zamyatin and Bulgakov refused to submit Denied access to publication, their plays withdrawn from the stage despite enormous popular success, and their books withdrawn from stores and libraries, they wrote to Stalin requesting permission to leave Russia. Both spoke of the ban on their work as a literary death sentence.