ISignificance of the Study:
Yevgeny Zamyatin, born in 1884, was a Russian author and playwright known for his groundbreaking contributions to dystopian literature. Born in Lebedyan, Zamyatin studied naval engineering at St Petersburg, a background that heavily influenced his works. Zamyatin’s works often criticized the oppressive nature of the political regimes in his time, exploring themes of individualism and freedom against the backdrop of authoritarian control. Despite facing censorship and exile, Zamyatin left a lasting impact on Russian literature, with his best-known work, “We,” serving as a significant precursor to later dystopian novels.
Dystopia is the opposite of utopia: a state in which the conditions of human life are extremely bad as from deprivation or oppression or terror (or all three). A dystopian society is characterized by human misery in the form of squalor, oppression, disease, overcrowding, environmental destruction, or war.
Literature Review
We unfolds over the course of 40 “Records” written by the novella’s narrator, D-503. The action takes place in the distant future in the One State, a civilization ruled over by an authoritarian government. D-503 works as a mathematician and engineer, and is the lead designer of the Integral, a rocket ship the One State will use to travel to alien planets to spread the doctrine of complete subservience to the government and an absolute reliance on logic, mathematics, and rationality to govern public life. D-503 writes his records to be read by the conquered alien civilizations so that they might have a better understanding of the values and history of their new authoritarian overlords.
A God-like, cruel dictator known as the Benefactor rules over the One State. The Benefactor believes that the freedom of individuals is secondary to the welfare of the State. As such, citizens (called “ciphers”) live under the oppressive, hyper-watchful eye of government-appointed police offers called Guardians. The One State is cut off from the wild, free world by a massive barrier called the Green Wall. Ciphers live in transparent, glass houses. The government rips them of their individuality, forcing them to wear identical uniforms (“unifs”) and harshly condemning all acts of personal expression. Ciphers’ daily lives are precisely organized around a carefully controlled scheduled called the Table of Hours. Even their sex lives are not in their own hands: the State assigns ciphers sex partners, and they must request a “pink ticket” to engage in scheduled, passionless sex with their state-sanctioned partners. Should ciphers break any of the State’s strict laws, they are punished by execution via a mechanical contraption known as the Machine of the Benefactor.
In Yevgeny Zamyatin’s brilliant dystopian novel, We, readers are transported to the highly structured and oppressive future society known as OneState, where individuality and emotions are stifled, and conformity reigns supreme. As the protagonist, D-503, embarks on a transformational journey, his encounters challenge the very foundations of his existence. With poetic prose and haunting imagery, Zamyatin explores the fundamental human desire for freedom against the backdrop of a controlled and regimented world. We invites readers to question the nature of identity, the power of individuality, and the consequences of a society that seeks to erase all traces of humanity. Prepare to be enthralled by this thought-provoking and gripping exploration of the human spirit.
Through his thought-provoking writings, Zamyatin adeptly questioned societal norms and offered readers a unique perspective on the perils of an unfree world.
Shortly after the nascent Soviet government consolidated its power and launched a program of rapid industrialization, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We (1920) scandalously questioned the validity of techno-scientific instrumentality, a central principle of societal transformation in Soviet Russia. The first major work of fiction to be censored by the new regime, the novel was smuggled to the West, translated into English, and became an ur-text of twentieth-century science fiction, in particular standing, alongside Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984, as progenitor of a new anti-utopian subgenre warning of the mass cultural homogenization of humanity in the name of progress. Set in a future totalitarian OneState, the novel records the internal conflict and gradual self-awakening of the initially robotlike rocket engineer D-503, torn between his faith in state orthodoxy and yearning for perfect order, on the one hand, and, on the other, his growing awareness of his own disorderly, irrepressible, idiosyncratic subjectivity. The catalyst of this subversive development is the act of writing—paradoxical insofar as this act functions, in the totalitarian system envisioned by the novel, as one of the instruments of the state’s all-pervasive control. In this essay, I will discuss how Zamyatin, in the process of critiquing the man-machine ideal espoused in Soviet political culture, reconceptualizes the very meaning of technology in human life.1 [End Page 108]
The “Question Concerning Technology” and Its Soviet Context
Broadly speaking, twentieth-century cultural responses to the power and expansion of technology foregrounded either the utopia of peaceful human coexistence with and benefit from machines or the dystopia of machine-wrought destruction. In Soviet Russia, intent on quickly overcoming its backwardness and marginal status vis-à-vis the West with the help of machinery at times conceived almost as magical, the predominant mode of relating to technology was emphatically utopic. The wishful thinking of utopian writers was counterbalanced by the paranoid prophesies of dystopians, who envisioned machines turning their power against humanity in a struggle for autonomy. One of the most influential of the technological dystopias, the Czech writer Karel Capek’s drama R.U.R. (1921), left an ominous stamp on Western culture in the form of the word “robot.” Here robots, work machines with an uncanny likeness to humans, in the spirit of rational self-interest they embody, rebel against their subservient status and destroy humanity.2 The vicissitudes of Capek’s plot, however, rely upon the same conception of technology as that of the “dreamer in the Kremlin” Lenin in his utopian aspirations for the Soviet future;3 in either case, it is a tool for political-industrial transformation, for ill or good.4
Zamyatin’s anti-utopian novel establishes a counterpoint to the purely instrumental technologies conceived by technophiles and tech-nophobes alike insofar as the author consistently deprives technology of its defining characteristic in Industrial Age culture, namely, its functionality.5 In its place, We imbues technology with various human traits, transforming machines into great vehicles for reflection. As opposed to the aspirations of Soviet “new men” to become machines, Zamyatin’s text features “reflexive technologies” in which pure instrumentality is marred by human idiosyncrasies.6 In this effort to aesthetically reassess technological potential, to view technology as a medium for contemplation rather than societal change, Zamyatin’s We takes its place within a canon of artistic works that responded to technological advancement with an urge not to exploit but to explore. In the Russian context, for example, Valentin Kataev’s The Sovereign of Iron (1924) features machines that exercise their newly acquired independence from humans by resisting violence, refusing to participate [End Page 109] in mankind’s wars; Velimir Khlebnikov’s “Ourselves and Our Buildings: Creators of Streetsteads” (1914) and other futurist manifestos espouse organic technologies starkly contrasting with the aesthetics of mechanized humanity.
He wrote We in 1920, amid the transformation of Russia after the Revolution: “1920 was perched at the dawn of film, radio, and the automobile. It was also the year 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.” (Natasha Randall, Introduction to We, 2006)
An engineer himself, Zamyatin observed technological advances and transformed them in his vision of a highly efficient society, 600 years in the future, in which the authorities sacrifice citizens using “the fission of the atoms of the human body”. His workers’ lives reflect experiments that were happening at the Soviet Central Institute of Labour in 1920 – attempts to turn workers into human robots.
In the twenty-sixth century, in Zamyatin’s vision of it, the inhabitants of Utopia have so completely lost their individuality as to be known only by numbers. They live in glass houses (this was written before television was invented), which enables the political police, known as the ‘Guardians,’ to supervise them more easily. They all wear identical uniforms, and a human being is commonly referred to either as ‘a number’ or ‘a unif’ (uniform). They live on synthetic food, and their usual recreation is to march in fours while the anthem of the Single State is played through loudspeakers. At stated intervals they are allowed for one hour (known as ‘the sex hour’) to lower the curtains round their glass apartments. There is, of course, no marriage, though sex life does not appear to be completely promiscuous. For purposes of love-making everyone has a sort of ration book of pink tickets, and the partner with whom he spends one of his allotted sex hours signs the counterfoil. The Single State is ruled over by a personage known as The Benefactor, who is annually re-elected by the entire population, the vote being always unanimous. The guiding principle of the State is that happiness and freedom are incompatible. In the Garden of Eden man was happy, but in his folly he demanded freedom and was driven out into t
he wilderness. Now the Single State has restored his happiness by removingWe is the story – and it is a proper story – of D-503. He lives a thousand years after OneState took over world government. The human population is not what it was. He is chief engineer on a project to build the mysterious INTEGRAL, and he writes a journal to record the process. All inhabitants live in a glass apartment and are watched by the Bureau of Guardians. D has an assigned lover (O-90) and they live their lives (work, recreation, etc) to precise prescribed timings. O is too short for reproduction which causes her anguish. O is allowed another partner, who is D’s friend, and state poet R-13. D meets I-330, a woman who appears to defy the OneState (she smokes, drinks and flirts with D). Flirtation is not allowed – applications for sex firsts must be pre-approved. The influence of I on D slowly infects his life and before long, he is unsure of his place in the new world. He begins to dream – a sign of mental illness in this future. His relationships with both O and I begin to alter. As each record in the journal maps his descent into chaos, they become increasing erratic. his freedom.
Our narrator, D-503, is writing down his thoughts before the launch of the Integral, a rocket ship that will go out to other planets and share the One State’s perfectly happy way of life to any alien life. D begins writing how contented and optimized everyone is, and describing their OneState life to aliens — AKA the reader — who can’t yet know the perfection of the OneState. It’s a world without privacy, individual choices or strong emotions, but D describes this with contentment.
The overall plot of We is the same as 1984, or I should say, the overall plot of 1984 is We. The male protag is a cog in the future machine before meeting a beautiful girl who shows him beautiful old-time things (AKA everyday things from the reader’s life), wears a sexy dress in a world of uniforms, and just shakes up his worldview in general. In a way, We‘s I-330 is the first manic pixie dream girl. D starts to have feelings for her, and he’s suddenly every sad-sack boyfriend who discovers the joy and beauty of the world through meeting a manic pixie and having feelings. Yes, ok, this is more about D discovering plants and sunlight and so forth in a sterile future, than about a boring boyfriend discovering quirky whimsy.
I-330 seems more like she’s using D for the rebellion than inviting him to join the rebellion, though. And her ending is even starker than Julia’s. At the end of 1984, Julia has her own Room 101 and returned to depressing Orwellian life, just like Winston is. But I-330 is executed without saying a word of the rebellion. (Although brave, this somehow doesn’t leave readers with a positive feeling about the future success of the rebellions, because the rest of the rebels were tortured into submission.) Then D gets caught and his imagination is surgically removed and he becomes an even more docile citizen of the OneState. He ends up loving the Benefactor, just as Winston’s final scene is about loving Big Brother.
“We” is set in a futuristic society called the One State. Every citizen —known only by a letter-and-number combination— lives in a rigidly organized glass city.
The Table of Hours, a strict daily schedule, controls everything from sleep to work. Citizens wear identical clothing and have no privacy from the watchful eye of the Benefactor, the regime’s all-powerful leader.
At the heart of the story is D-503, a mathematician and chief engineer of a spacecraft named the Integral. While preparing the Integral to carry the One State’s ideology to other worlds, D-503 meets I-330. Her nonconformist behavior and mysterious allure awaken doubts within him about the society he once admired.
Zamyatin’s imagined world is both intriguing and chilling, depicting a future stripped of freedom in the name of collective “happiness.”
D-503 begins as a loyal servant of the One State, representing the everyman in a futuristic tyranny. He slowly comes to question the system when he encounters I-330, whose rebellious nature challenges him to rethink everything he knows. This character arc follows a familiar science fiction pattern of an obedient citizen turned reluctant rebel.
Meanwhile, O-90, assigned to D-503 under the state’s controlled relationship system, struggles with her longing for motherhood and genuine affection. Her conflict highlights a traditional desire for family that resonates with our deeply held convictions about the value of life and lineage.
Although the characters may feel somewhat symbolic, they serve the story’s message well. Each figure embodies a facet of human personality under pressure.
D-503’s journey from a trusting believer in the One State to a man torn between duty and desire gives readers a clear sense of his moral and spiritual awakening.