In addition to real dystopias, the 20th century created fictional dystopias, the most well-known being George Orwell’s dystopias. 1984 – comes from liberal democracy. But everything owes a lot to a novel from one of the real dystopias. weby Evgeny Zamyatin of the USSR.
Born in 1887, Zamyatin became a Bolshevik as a student, was arrested during the 1905 revolution, twice expelled from St. Petersburg, and put on trial for “defaming the Russian officer corps” for satirizing military life. . His hopes that the 1917 revolution would bring artistic freedom were quickly dashed. The revolution did not liberate artists. Instead, artists had to create art in the service of the revolution. In 1921 he wrote:
Many have talked about the imperfection of the universe…its astonishing lack of monism: water and fire, mountains and abyss, saints and sinners. What absolute simplicity, what happiness there would have been if (God) had created a single fire-water from the beginning and spared the first man a state of barbarous freedom! …We are definitely living in a cosmic age, an age of creation of a new heaven and a new earth. And of course we will not repeat (his) mistakes. There is no more polyphony or dissonance. There will only be a majestic, monumental, all-encompassing unity.
in wewritten in 1920-1921, Zamyatin explored these fears.
The story is set in One State in the far future, and the main character, D-503, writes:
Every morning, with six-wheel precision, we, millions of people, wake up as one, at the same time, at the same moment. At the same time, a million heads start work all at once. And a million heads will end it all at once. And, uniting with the body of a million hands, at the same moment specified in the table, we lift the spoon to our mouth. At the same moment specified at the table, we lift the spoon to our mouth. At the same moment we go for a walk, go to the auditorium, go to the hall for Taylor’s exercises and fall asleep…
Shading from “right” down:
…Allowed only on sex days. At other times, we live behind transparent walls that seem to be woven from shimmering air. We are always visible and always washed by light. We have nothing to hide from each other. Moreover, this makes the Guardian’s difficult and noble mission much easier. Because if you don’t, who knows what will happen? Perhaps it was the strange and opaque dwellings of the ancients that gave rise to their boring cage mentality. “My (sic!) home is my castle.” What an idea!
In fact, D-503 is horrified by “a time when people still lived in freedom, in a state of unorganized savagery.” In the early days of the Soviet Union, Zamyatin had been watching Edward Bellamy’s socialist utopia since 1999. Looking back: 2000-1887 noticed and hated.
Like Adam and Winston Smith, D-503 is lured into a fateful rebellion. “The two men in paradise were given the choice of happiness without freedom or freedom without happiness,” he says. Zamyatin assumes that the system works on its own terms. can Guaranteed happiness. As history shows, he was wrong and these systems produced neither happiness nor freedom. When Orwell was told by a supporter of Soviet repression, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” he replied, “Where’s the omelet?”
we The book was refused publication and was first published in English in 1924, but came under attack from Zamyatin’s fellow writers during a reading at the Writers’ Union in 1923. Throughout the 1920s, the state-sponsored Russian Association of Proletarian Writers accused him of “inconsistency with the revolution” and “slander and slander” of revolutionary beliefs. He was “slandering” again. Struggling with his own destructive rebellion, Zamyatin wrote of his fellow writers in 1926: “The revolution does not need dogs ‘sitting’ expecting alms or fearing the whip.” Nevertheless, that’s what you get. The flowering of Russian literature that began with Pushkin ended, at least for the writers who remained in Russia. Exhausted, Zamyatin left the Soviet Union in 1931 for Paris, where he died in 1937.
In 1962, Isaac Asimov wrote: American science fiction went through three stages: “adventure-dominant,” “technology-dominant,” and “sociology-dominant,” while Soviet science fiction remained in the second stage. “The Soviet people were told, and perhaps believed, that they were building a new society that could become the dominant society throughout the world, through the sheer allure of superior processability,” he wrote. “Therefore, for a Soviet writer to suggest that other societies might exist in the future or to look too closely at the present society would be almost tantamount to lack of patriotism.” Asimov points out wasn’t completely correct. we is a third stage novel and one of the greatest novels of this century.
John Phelan is an economist. American Experiment Center.
