45 pages • 1 hour read
Yevgeny ZamyatinWe
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1921A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Genre Context: Dystopian Science Fiction
Literary scholars claim that Zamyatin’s We inspired Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949). Regardless of this claim’s truth, We, like these more famous novels, is a seminal work of science fiction and dystopian literature. It is a paradigmatic meld of these related genres, which both fall under the umbrella of speculative literature. Science fiction differs from other types of literature because its primary feature is to showcase the effects of science and technology on characters. Science fiction extrapolates from contemporary developments and imagines the effect of new technologies on human behavior and consciousness. This focus pervades the narrative in We. From “petroleum food” to “street membranes” and glass cities, Zamyatin envisages how future technologies will allow for a society that is more controlled and conformist. Technology that destroys private space facilitates constant surveillance. The citizens in We live a life where existence is universally and inextricably collective. This reaches its apotheosis with the operation to remove the imagination at the novel’s end. The One State removes the last place where difference or non-conformist thought is possible.
The socio-political element of the authoritarian state in We makes the novel dystopian. While sci-fi is not automatically dystopian, in this instance, like in 1984, its technological innovations enable a future society to oppress its citizenry in new ways. For example, synthetic “petroleum food” allows the One State to cut its citizens off entirely from nature and the land. The “musicometer” achieves similar ends. This device creates perfect scores and simultaneously robs musical creations of individuality and human elements. We demonstrates that dystopian literature is not simply about imagining a nightmarish or unjust future. As 1984 and Brave New World depict, dystopias are horrific because they are attempted utopias. The One State claims to have found a scientific formula for happiness with the “rules tables,” and its inability to countenance deviance from these constitutes its true horror. The idea that the state should maximize happiness, and knows best how to do this, “justifies” limits on individual freedom which begets numberless atrocities.
Socio-Historical Context: The Russian Revolution and Civil War
We was written during a tumultuous period in Russian history. The October 1917 revolution, following Russia’s involvement in World War I, had just swept the Bolsheviks to power, initiating the world’s first Socialist state. Meanwhile, the Russian Civil War (1917-1922), which claimed ten million lives and devastated the country, was still ongoing. Both events exercise a deep influence on Zamyatin’s novel despite the fact its setting is a non-specific location 1,000 years in the future. The narrative references the “Two Hundred Years War,” which is inspired by the events and character of Russia’s Civil War. Like that conflict, the fictional one in We is cataclysmic: D-503’s journals report that only one in five humans survived it. Like the Russian Civil War, the war in the novel also vies for a nation’s soul. The war in We mirrors the Russian Civil War’s existential struggle between a new urban and an old rural way of life.
Anticipating the victory of the “Red” Bolshevik forces in the Russian Civil War, the novel imagines a society where industrial urban culture crushes traditional rural ones. The culture of the One State fetishizes technology and machines. Machines alone, not humans, produce food and music. Life itself is organized around a relentless mechanical rhythm which reduces human beings to mechanisms. The predominant image of the One State is that of a perfectly functioning machine in which citizens are cogs. At the same time, We satirizes the Bolshevik’s socialist ideals. Along with modernizing Russia, the Bolsheviks sought to establish a classless society where reason and collective endeavor solved all problems. We highlights the danger of such social engineering. For example, the desire to eliminate the strife of romantic love leads to the enforcement of a sterile and oppressive system where citizens must apply to have sex. Likewise, the idea of a mathematically perfect way to live leads to mass enforcement of rules about when to sleep, eat, and go for walks. We highlights the threats to freedom and individuality posed by industrial modernity and state control of these forces for egalitarian and utopian ends.
