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[ 267 •12• zamyatin and the niGhtmare oF teChnoloGy PatriCk a. mCCarthy The futuristic novel We by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin is a powerful portrayal of how a repressive totalitarian state can dehumanize its citizens. Completed in 1921 but first published (in English translation) in 1924,We influenced George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and serves as a classic prototype for all modern psycho-political dystopias.The following essay analyzes We in the context of Zamyatin’s other writings, explores the role of technology and machine imagery in the novel, and demonstrates how the author makes use of the Prometheus myth to depict how the products of human imagination can paradoxically be both the source of our freedom and the means of its destruction. This essay originally appeared in SFS 11, no. 2 (July 1984): 122–29. In a 1918 essay entitled “Scythians?” Yevgeny Zamyatin set forth his belief that the reach of the true revolutionary should exceed his grasp.1 The question mark in his title signifies that Zamyatin doubted that the ideologue Ivanov-Razumnik and other “Scythians” (Skify) were upholding the romantic ideals of the nomadic tribe from which this association of writers and intellectuals took its name. Reasserting the belief in perpetual revolution that the Scythians embraced before the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, Zamyatin defined the Scythian as “an eternal nomad” whose being revolts against the constraints of civilized existence. Thus, for Zamyatin, the Scythian is “the spiritual revolutionary, the romantic”; like the crucified Christ, he is the emblem of freedom. His enemy or antitype, however, is the oppressive, institutionalized Christ, “the grand inquisitor” whose mission is to stamp out freedom wherever it arises. Challenging the judgment 268 ] PatriCk a. mCCarthy of Ivanov-Razumnik, Zamyatin cites the writer Alexey Remizov as an example of a Scythian; as the grand inquisitor, we have N. V. Krylenko, a public prosecutor and a type of the people who, Zamyatin says, “have covered Russia with a pile of carcasses, who are dreaming of socialist-Napoleonic wars in Europe—throughout the world, throughout the universe!” For Zamyatin, the true writer must be a Scythian, that is, a heretic and revolutionary constantly in revolt against the Krylenkos of the world. Inevitably, as Alex Shane observes, Zamyatin regarded the fate of the writer-prophet as “a Faust’s eternal dissatisfaction with the present and the attainable” (52). Similar ideas appear in a 1923 essay entitled “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters,” where the Krylenko types are recognizable in what Zamyatin there calls the “dead-alive” people, those who are like machines in that they “make no mistakes” and “produce only dead things.” The heretics, on the other hand, are like the Scythians: they are “alive-alive” people, “constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.” Errors, Zamyatin asserts, “are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive.” Truth, however, can never really be fixed and mechanical, for “today’s truths become errors of tomorrow; there is no final number.”2 Between these two essays, Zamyatin wrote, but was denied permission to publish, his anti-utopian novel We, which made its first appearance, in English translation, in 1924.3 Several ideas in these essays figure prominently in We: the reference to people who dream of socialist wars “throughout the universe” foreshadows the building of the spaceship Integral, whose mission is to help spread the gospel of Reason to other planets in order to release their inhabitants from the primitive state of freedom; the dichotomy of energy and entropy, introduced in the later essay, had already been developed as an important theme in We; and the declaration that “there is no final number” is logically derived from the conversation of I-330 and D-503 in chapter 30 of the novel. Such connections are obvious; less obvious, I believe, are the ways in which the essays might help us to reconcile the political and technological levels of meaning in Zamyatin’s futuristic nightmare fantasy, a novel that Zamyatin described as “a warning against the twofold danger which threatens humanity: the hypertrophic power of the machines and the hypertrophic power of the State” (qtd. in Shane 145). The logic behind that dual warning seems to be implied by the machine imagery used throughout We, and by the Promethean sequence in the novel that apparently developed out of Zamyatin’s involvement with the Scythian writers during the early years of the Soviet state. Criticism of We has tended to focus on...

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