Literary dystopias are a very young genre. And he was born exactly a century ago, in 1920, when the novel "We" was written by the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. Later, other well-known dystopias appeared: "The Pit" (1930) by Andrei Platonov, "Brave New World" (1932) by Aldous Huxley, "The War with the Salamanders" (1936) by Karel Čapek, "Animal Farm" (1945) and "1984 "(1948) by George Orwell," 451 degrees Fahrenheit "(1953) by Ray Bradbury et al.
In my reader's opinion, all literary works can be divided into two parts. The first is those that age, like wine that turns into vinegar over time. The second is those that become more and more relevant over time. Relatively speaking, the first - 99 percent, the second - 1 percent. So, Zamyatin's novel "We" belongs precisely to the second category.
Zamyatin failed to publish his novel at home. The authorities saw in the work a hidden criticism of the existing system. Ultimately, We was published in New York in English in 1925, followed by Czech (1927) and French (1929). The full text of the novel "We" was first published in Russian in 1952 by the American publishing house named after Chekhov (New York), in Russia - only in 1988.
The novel shows the events of the distant future - approximately 32 centuries. The novel consists of 40 diary entries of the protagonist - a mathematician and engineer, one of the main creators of the INTEGRAL spacecraft. From his notes, we learn that in the twentieth century, the Great Bicentennial War began in the world. As a result, “only 0.2 of the world's population survived. But then - cleared of millennial dirt - how radiant the face of the earth has become. And then these zero point and two tenths - tasted bliss in the halls of the One State. The main chief of the One State (EG) is a hero named Benefactor. The main institutions of the EG are the Guardians' Bureau (police and special services) and the Medical Bureau (which monitors the physical health of citizens and their mental and psychological state).
The United State may seem like a dictatorship to a modern person, before which all revolutionary experiments fade. However, from the point of view of the leaders and ordinary citizens of the One State, it is a highly organized society with strict discipline and order. Here everyone lives like ants in an anthill or bees in a hive. Just as an ant cannot live outside the anthill, so a citizen of the One State cannot be outside the collective. The main dogma of every citizen of the One State is:
"I" - from the devil, "We" - from God."
Hence the name of the novel - "We". EG is an example of the model of a totalitarian state, in which a small top manages an obedient herd, and each member of this herd feels happy, feeling gratitude to his bosses. The United State, from the point of view of its leaders, although totalitarian, is not cruel. Moreover, it is humane. For his main goal is the happiness of all citizens. Two basic needs of a citizen are being successfully satisfied - food and sex. All food products are made from oil, and the citizens of EG read about bread only in ancient books. Sexual needs are met through state-controlled contacts of representatives of different sexes, while contacts should not lead to the formation of such an archaic institution as a family and to the accidental birth of children. An individual man should not belong to an individual woman and vice versa. They must belong to the "we" society. As well as children born with the permission of the authorities must belong to the One State. Satisfaction of basic needs should be in excess, and if in excess, then the corresponding desires disappear or become insignificant. Isn't that happiness? One of the heroines concludes: “Desires are painful, aren't they? And it is clear: happiness - when there are no longer any desires, there is not a single one … "Isn't that happiness? One of the heroines concludes: “Desires are painful, aren't they? And it is clear: happiness - when there are no longer any desires, there is not a single one … "Isn't that happiness? One of the heroines concludes: “Desires are painful, aren't they? And it is clear: happiness - when there are no longer any desires, there is not a single one …"
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Some citizens, however, in addition to basic needs, have some other strange needs and desires that are by no means physiological. To avoid unnecessary needs and desires, it is necessary to "edit" the person, remove the unnecessary from him that interferes with life. For example, conscience, feelings, fantasy. EG has a Medical Bureau that helps citizens get rid of the rudiments of wild ancestors. So, in EG, the Great Operation is being carried out to extract the center of fantasy from the human brain.
The protagonist of the novel, being a mathematician, perfectly understands how to maximize happiness. He defines happiness as a fraction with bliss in the numerator and envy in the denominator. To maximize the amount of happiness in the EG, you need to minimize envy. And the easiest way to minimize is to make everyone exactly the same, equal. In all senses - material, social and even physiological. The Bureau of Medicine works to ensure that everyone is the same, using genetics for this, regulating the process of childbirth.
The United State functions flawlessly. The ancient people, as they believed, also had their own states. But how could one speak of them as states if crises, unrest, civil wars, revolutions periodically arose there? It was a parody of states! And the EG works like a flawless mechanism. Another name for the One State is "Machine". The work of the Machine is provided with the help of the Hourly Tablet - a clear timetable for the life of each member of the EG and the entire anthill as a whole. The main character never ceases to be amazed at the savagery of ancient people: they lived as they pleased; the state regulation of life was extremely primitive.
True, the protagonist admits, even a perfect Machine has minor glitches: “Fortunately, only occasionally. Fortunately, these are only minor accidents of parts: they are easy to repair without stopping the eternal, great course of the entire Machine. And in order to throw out the bent bolt - we have the skillful, heavy hand of the Benefactor, we have the experienced eye of the Guardians …”“The skillful, heavy hand of the Benefactor”sometimes presses the button of the Benefactor's Machine - a special technical means of execution. From the executed, only a puddle of distilled water remains. Dispose of those who are very different from the EG standards.
So far, science has not yet been able to achieve complete unification of the EG members. But strong deviations from the "arithmetic mean" are not allowed. In the notes of the main character we read: "We are the happiest arithmetic mean …" There is uniformity everywhere - everyone wears the same unif (uniform), everyone shaves their head smoothly (which sometimes makes it difficult to understand who it is - a man or a woman). The living conditions of all members of the anthill are also the same. So, all apartments are exactly the same with their glass walls and an ascetic set of furniture. All members of the EG anthill are stripped of their names, instead they are assigned numerical values. The main character (who keeps records) has the designation D-503. His main girlfriends have codes: O-90 and I-330. In the novel, a person is called a number. A vowel or consonant letter at the beginning of the number indicates whether it is female or male.
The development of technology is at an incredibly high level in the United State. So, the creation of the spaceship "INTEGRAL", which should go on a journey to the most distant planets, ends. To move around the territory of the EG, citizens use flying vehicles ("aero"). Numbers have radiotelephones. In schools, children are taught by robots. The machines make music. Food is a product of the distillation of oil (each ant is given the same rate in the form of several cubes of such "food"). Technique allows you to control people. In particular, citizens are monitored through hidden microphones ("membranes"). The Medical Bureau has in its arsenal the latest technologies for diagnostics and correction of the mental state of numbers. Note that all these technical attributes of "civilization" were absent or exotic at the time,when Zamyatin wrote the novel. Taylorism, as the protagonist admits, is one of the few sciences that the United State borrowed from its wild ancestors. But it seems that the ancient people did not appreciate this science very well: "… how could they write entire libraries about some kind of Kant - and barely notice Taylor - this prophet who managed to look ten centuries ahead." But then the protagonist says condescendingly that Taylor did not use his system at full capacity: “Yes, this Taylor was undoubtedly the most brilliant of the ancients. True, he did not think of extending his method throughout his life, at every step, around the clock - he was unable to integrate his system from an hour to 24”.ancient people did not appreciate this science very well: "… how could they write entire libraries about some kind of Kant - and barely notice Taylor - this prophet who managed to look ten centuries ahead." But then the protagonist says condescendingly that Taylor did not use his system at full capacity: “Yes, this Taylor was undoubtedly the most brilliant of the ancients. True, he did not think of extending his method throughout his life, at every step, around the clock - he was unable to integrate his system from an hour to 24”.ancient people did not appreciate this science very well: "… how could they write entire libraries about some kind of Kant - and barely notice Taylor - this prophet who managed to look ten centuries ahead". But then the protagonist says condescendingly that Taylor did not use his system at full capacity: “Yes, this Taylor was undoubtedly the most brilliant of the ancients. True, he did not think of extending his method throughout his life, at every step, around the clock - he was unable to integrate his system from an hour to 24”.the most ingenious of the ancients. True, he did not think of extending his method throughout his life, at every step, around the clock - he was unable to integrate his system from an hour to 24”.the most ingenious of the ancients. True, he did not think of extending his method throughout his life, at every step, around the clock - he was unable to integrate his system from an hour to 24”.
The protagonist praises mathematics and numbers in the One State: “The multiplication table is wiser, more absolute than the ancient God: it never - you understand: it never - never makes mistakes. And there is no happier than numbers living according to the harmonious eternal laws of the multiplication table. No hesitation, no delusion. Truth is one, and the true path is one; and this truth is twice two, and this true way is four. And wouldn't it be absurd if these happily, ideally multiplied twos - began to think about some kind of freedom, that is, clearly - about a mistake? " And the fact that the citizens of the One State have long been deprived of names, replacing them with numbers, seems correct to the protagonist. The protagonist is accustomed to adjusting everything that comes into his field of vision to fit the formulas known to him, “digitizing”. When he first met his friend I-330, he found himself thinking that he could not "digitize" her:"But I don't know - in the eyes or in the eyebrows - there is some strange annoying X, and I just can't catch it, give it a digital expression." In full measure, the ability of digital perception of the world around him returns to him only after he went through the Great Operation, which removed the rudiments of the soul from him. D-503 again becomes a full-fledged member of the anthill, a biorobot.
The authorities of Soviet Russia banned the publication of the novel "We", seeing in it a caricature of the Bolshevik regime. Someone saw Lenin in the guise of the Benefactor; ten years later, it began to seem to many that the Benefactor was Stalin. Vladimir Mayakovsky immediately grasped that the caricature of the State Poet R-13 is him.
But George Orwell, in his review of the novel "We" (1946), noted that Zamyatin "did not even think of choosing the Soviet regime as the main target of his satire." Some readers and critics believed that the novel reflected to a greater extent the realities of the then England. After all, Zamyatin spent a lot of time in Foggy Albion, became closely acquainted with the life of British workers (he came to England at a shipyard as an engineer from Russia, on whose order ships were built there). In 1917, Evgeny Zamyatin wrote the story "The Islanders" - about the British. Some of the contours of the future We are already visible in it. The hero of the story, Vicar Dewley, composes the book The Testament of Forced Salvation, which became the prototype of the Hourly Tablet from the novel We. The British saw themselves in the story and banned it from publication.
A few years after the first edition of the novel was published in the United States in 1925, Zamyatin remarked: "The Americans who wrote a lot about the New York edition of my novel several years ago, rightly saw it as a criticism of Fordism."
In short, the novel turned out to be universal. Even then, a hundred years ago, each state could see something familiar and unpleasant for itself in the novel. And Yevgeny Zamyatin himself said about the novel We: “Short-sighted reviewers saw in this thing nothing more than a political pamphlet. This, of course, is not true: this novel is a signal of the danger that threatens man, mankind from the hypertrophied power of machines and the power of the state - no matter what”(interview to French historian Georges Lefert in April 1932).
I repeat once again: the novel "We" belongs to the category of works of art that over the years are becoming more and more relevant. Many contemporaries of Zamyatin attributed this novel to the genre of caricature or grotesque, believing that the writer's infinitely distant future served only as a cover for the disgusting present (Soviet, English, American, or whatever). However, now it seems to me that the novel is more universal, it can be called an allegory, parable, allegory. About what? About the degradation of man and humanity. The only question is: will the next generations appreciate this work? Or will they, like the protagonist of the novel D-503, condescendingly and arrogantly believe that the novel "We" is the fruit of the wild people of ancient times?
Author: VALENTIN KATASONOV