The novel “We” by E. Zamyatin: issues

4.6

Average rating: 4.6

Total ratings received: 143.

4.6

Average rating: 4.6

Total ratings received: 143.

Zamyatin’s work “We,” which is called a dystopia, depicts a world that is absurd, but terribly similar to the one in which we live. The writer touched not only on the problems of Bolshevik politics, but also on the absorption of the spiritual side of life by technological progress. Analysis of the novel “We” allows us to conclude that it is still relevant and absolutely original. A complete analysis of the work, which you can find in our article, will be useful for 11th grade students to prepare for a literature lesson, testing, or creative work.

The material was prepared jointly with a teacher of the highest category, Kuchmina Nadezhda Vladimirovna.

Experience as a teacher of Russian language and literature - 27 years.

History of creation

Evgeny Zamyatin believed that the revolution changed the lives of many people, and therefore we now need to write about them differently. What was written before talks about times that have already passed; now realism and symbolism must be replaced by a new literary movement - neo-realism. Zamyatin in his work tried to explain that the mechanization of life and the totalitarian regime lead to the depersonalization of everyone, to the unification of individual opinion and thinking, which will ultimately lead to the destruction of human society as such. It will be replaced by a single mechanism, and people will be only its faceless and weak-willed components, acting on the basis of automatism and a built-in program.

Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote the novel “We” in 1920; a year later he sent the manuscript to a Berlin publishing house, since he could not publish it in his homeland, Russia. The dystopia was translated into English and published in 1924 in New York. The work was published in the author’s native language only in 1952 in the same city; Russia became acquainted with it closer to the end of the century in two issues of the Znamya publication.

Due to the fact that the dystopia “We” saw the light, albeit abroad, the writer began to be hounded, refused to publish, and was not allowed to stage plays until Zamyatin went abroad with Stalin’s permission.

Zamyatin’s novel “We”: problematics and artistic originality.

Evgeniy Ivanovich Zamyatin (1884-1937) was born in 1884 in the Tambov district city of Lebedyan (now Lipetsk region). Education: Lebedyanskaya gymnasium, Voronezh gymnasium, St. Petersburg Polytechnic (ship building). He was arrested for Bolshevik agitation, but released. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s literary debut took place in the fall of 1908; the story “Alone” was published in the magazine “Obrazovanie.” Wrote a satirical story “In the middle of nowhere”. The story revealed the unsightly face of the tsarist army and society. By decision of the St. Petersburg District Court, the issue of the magazine “Zavety” with the story was arrested, and the writer was exiled to the North. Based on northern impressions, the story “North” and the stories “Africa” and “Ela” were written. In March 1916, Zamyatin left for England and worked in shipyards. Having learned about the revolution, Zamyatin hurries home. Post-October events brought gloomy colors to the tragicomic, but generally cheerful coloring of his works. In Zamyatin’s work there appears a call for the salvation of the human personality from impending decay and “levelling.” An event in literature was 1920, the year Zamyatin wrote the novel “We.” The first dystopian novel in world literature subsequently played a fatal role in the fate of the author. In the 20s, Zamyatin worked a lot, along with short stories and novellas, he created a number of dramatic works: “The Society of Honorary Bell Ringers”, “The Flea”, “Atilla”. For official Soviet criticism of that period, Zamyatin was “an opponent of the revolution and a representative of reactionary ideas, preaching petty-bourgeois peace and quiet life as the ideal of existence.” In the scandalous story of the publication of the novel “We,” Zamyatin was not helped by the intercession of major writers, including Gorky. The writer decides to temporarily leave the USSR. Since February 1932, Zamyatin lived in Paris without changing his Soviet citizenship. He actively worked as a promoter of Russian literature, cinema, and theater abroad. The main work that Zamyatin created abroad was the novel “The Scourge of God,” published posthumously in Paris in 1938. Separated from his homeland, the writer closely followed the life of Russia. He tried to give his works into “Russian hands”, but on principle did not publish them in the emigrant press. Attitudes towards him in his homeland began to warm up. In May 1934, Zamyatin was accepted in absentia into the USSR Writers' Union. Evgeniy Ivanovich Zamyatin died on March 10, 1937 and was buried in the suburbs of Paris in the cemetery in Thieu. Time has put everything in its place and Zamyatin’s works have firmly entered the history of world and domestic literature.

"WE". Yevgeny Zamyatin’s work “We” was not known to the mass Soviet reader, since it was first published abroad, and its printing in the Soviet Union was generally prohibited. The novel was first published in Russian in New York in 1952, and its first publication in the USSR took place in 1988 in the magazine Znamya. Despite the persecution and “persecution” of the authorities, the work is the “ancestor” of the dystopia of the twentieth century. Relevance of the topic: Evgeny Zamyatin, when writing the novel “We,” tried to look into the future and show us what technological progress can lead to. And, although the text also traces the theme of the possible consequences of socialist power, we are still closer to the first of them, moreover, in the work both themes are considered as one whole. Dystopia, dystopia, negative utopia, a depiction (usually in fiction) of dangerous, harmful and unforeseen consequences associated with building a society corresponding to a particular social ideal. A. originates and develops as utopianism takes hold. traditions of general thought, often fulfilling the role of a necessary dynamic in its own way. a corrective to a utopia that is always somewhat static and closed. Observations of a totalitarian society were artistically embodied in a dystopian science fiction novel. The novel was conceived as a parody of the utopia written by Proletkult ideologists A. Bogdanov and A. Gastev. The main idea of ​​the Proletcult utopia was proclaimed to be a global reorganization of the world based on “the destruction of the soul and the feeling of love in man.” So, why exactly “We”? Why not the “United State”, not the “Tablet”, but rather “We”? This is important to know, since a lot depends on the correct interpretation of the title of the work, including understanding the content. Below is an explanation that most accurately conveys the meaning of the title of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopia: “It was said that the author exposed himself by calling the book “We” and thereby implies the people who carried out the revolution, which is shown in a distorting mirror. But it was just a rough overexposure. For Zamyatin, “we” is not a mass, but a social quality. In the One State, any individuality is excluded. The very possibility of becoming “I”, in one way or another separated from “we”, is suppressed. There is only an impersonal enthusiastic crowd that easily succumbs to the iron will of the Benefactor. The cherished idea of ​​Stalinism - not a person, but a “cog” in a gigantic state mechanism, which is subordinate to the firm hand of the driver - is shown to be realized in Zamyatin. This alone was enough to recognize “We” as a truly prophetic book.” E.I. Zamyatin showed the danger of turning a person into a “normalized worker”, who should devote all his strength only to the team and serving higher goals - the conquest of the universe with the help of science and technology. In his novel, the author talks about the state of the future, “where all human material needs have been resolved and where it has been possible to develop universal mathematically verified happiness through the abolition of freedom, human individuality itself, the right to independence of will and thought. This is a single state where one people lives. Where everyone is a cog in one great mechanism. And, following the “requirements” of dystopia, this is precisely the society “in which negative development trends have prevailed.”

Problems of the novel

The two main problems that are raised in this work are the impact of technological development on humanity, as well as the problem of “totalitarianism”. The remaining problems are already a product, a consequence of these two.

In this society, everyone is guided only by reason, emotions are suppressed, and what emotions can we even talk about if the soul itself is considered a “relic”?

The work also raises the problem of family. There can be no talk of any love. There is only room here for pink “love” tickets, which are really only used to satisfy physical needs. Children are given to the state for upbringing and are “common property.” In some ways this is reminiscent of a hyperbole about the Soviet Union - “collectivization of children.”

The novel also contains the eternal question: what is happiness? The policy of power of the One State is aimed at making everyone happy, convincing them of this, even if someone doubts their happiness. “The cult of reason, which demands the unfreedom of each and everyone as the first guarantee of happiness, is the basis of this policy. And indeed, no one tries to doubt their serene existence - an ideal society has been created. Does D-503 become happier, receiving back all his human feelings and emotions? He is constantly haunted by fear, uncertainty, suspicion... Is he happy? Maybe a person really just needs to be forced to be happy?

The question of the sole power of the Benefactor (very reminiscent of Stalin), the question of an isolated society, the question of literature (only “geometric” poems are written, incomprehensible to readers of our time), the question of human relations, even the question of unrequited love and many other questions and problems are raised in the novel “We” .

When reading the interpretation of the term “dystopia”, all its features can be traced in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel “We”: it is both an image of a totalitarian state and an acute conflict (“For artistry to arise, a novel conflict is needed. And it is created in the most natural way: the character must experience doubt in the logical premises of the system, which strives, as the designers of the United State dreamed, to make a person completely “machine-like.” He must experience this doubt as the culmination of his life, even if the denouement turns out to be tragic, apparently hopeless, like Zamyatin’s.).

“We” is a brief artistic summary of the possible distant future prepared for humanity, a bold dystopia, a warning novel. “The novel grew out of Zamyatin’s denial of global philistinism, stagnation, inertia, which acquire a totalitarian character in the conditions of, as we would now say, a computer society.<…> This is a reminder about the possible consequences of thoughtless technical progress, which ultimately turns people into numbered ants, this a warning about where science, divorced from the moral and spiritual principles, can lead in the conditions of a global “superstate” and the triumph of technocrats.”

Orwell wrote: “It is quite likely, however, that Zamyatin did not even think of choosing the Soviet regime as the main target of his satire. <…> Zamyatin’s goal, apparently, is not to depict a specific country, but to show what machine civilization threatens us with.”

Studying various sources describing what Zamyatin wanted to convey to the reader, one can notice their inconsistency. And not only to each other, but also to ourselves. But one thing is clear: the novel, at one level, develops warnings about the consequences of both “barracks communism” and technological progress.

Genre

The genre of the novel “We” is a social dystopia. It provided a fulcrum for the birth of a new layer of fantastic literature of the twentieth century, which was dedicated to gloomy forecasts for the future. The main problem in these books is totalitarianism in the state and the place of man in it. Among them, such masterpieces stand out as Huxley's novels Brave New World and Orwell's 1984 , with which Zamyatin's novel is often compared.

Dystopia is a reaction to changes in society and a kind of response to utopian biographies, where the authors talk about imaginary countries like Voltaire’s Eldorado, where everything is ideal. It often happens that writers predict social relationships that have not yet been formed. But it cannot be said that Zamyatin foresaw something; as the basis for his novel, he took ideas from the works of Bogdanov, Gastev and More, who advocated the mechanization of life and thought. These were the ideals of the representatives of the Proletcult. In addition to them, he ironically played on the statements of Khlebnikov, Chernyshevsky, Mayakovsky, Platonov.

Zamyatin ridicules their confidence that science is omnipotent and unlimited in its capabilities, and that everything in the world can be conquered by communist and socialist ideas. “We” is taking the idea of ​​socialism to the grotesque in order to make people think about what blind worship of ideology leads to.

Direction and genre

“We” can be attributed to the literary movement of modernism. The author, using innovative tools, strives to reflect not reality itself, but to build the expected future of humanity, for which non-standard images and new forms of storytelling are actively used.

Zamyatin's work is a dystopian novel. The basis is the distant and unsightly future of humanity, the atmosphere of which is disassembled to the bones through numerous details and characters. The author strives to tell a full-fledged story unfolding against the backdrop of large-scale and important events.

The dystopian genre emerged as a polemical response from modernists to writers of the past. For a long time, humanity has known the genre of utopia - a sweet fairy tale where people finally united, fell in love with each other and began to live happily. A striking example is Voltaire's El Dorado, where jewels are scattered right under people's feet and everyone lives in wealth. But the 20th century, with its wars, crises and revolutions, showed the pittance of these dreams. Therefore, dystopia was born - a scenario of a dark future where changes for the better have led us to the worst of all possible things.

About what?

The work describes what is happening a thousand years after the end of the Two Hundred Years War, which was the most recent revolution in the world. The narration is told in the first person. The main character is an engineer by profession at Integral, a mechanism that is set up to popularize the ideas of the One State, the integration of the universe and its depersonalization, deprivation of individuality. The essence of the novel lies in the gradual insight of D-503. More and more doubts arise in him, he discovers shortcomings in the system, the soul awakens in him and takes him out of the general mechanism. But at the end of the work, the operation turns it again into an insensitive number, devoid of individuality.

The entire novel is forty entries in the protagonist's diary, which begin with glorification of the State and end with truthful descriptions of oppression. Citizens do not have names and surnames, but they have numbers and letters - women have vowels, men have consonants. They have the same rooms with glass walls and the same clothes.

All the needs and natural desires of citizens are satisfied according to a schedule, and the schedule is determined by the Tablet of Hours. There are two hours set aside specifically for personal time: you can take walks, study at a desk, or engage in “pleasantly useful bodily functions.”

The world of Integral is fenced off from wild lands by the Green Wall, behind which natural people have been preserved, whose free way of life is opposed to the harsh orders of the United State.

The main characters and their characteristics

Zamyatin considers the ideal person number I-330, which demonstrates the author’s philosophy: revolutions are endless, life is about differences, and if they don’t exist, then someone will definitely create them.

The main character is an Integral engineer, D-503. He is thirty-two years old, and what we read are entries from his diary, in which he either supports or opposes the ideas of the United State. His life consists of mathematics, calculations and formulas, which is very close to the writer. But he is not devoid of imagination and notices that many numbers also do not carve out this skill for themselves - which means that even a thousand years of such a regime did not defeat the primacy of the soul in man. He is sincere and capable of feeling, but comes to a betrayal of love due to an operation that deprives him of his imagination.

There are two main female characters in the work. O-90, whose soul blooms and lives, is pink and round, she is ten centimeters short of the Maternal norm, but, nevertheless, she asks the main character to give her a child. At the end of the novel, O-90 and the child find themselves on the other side of the wall, and this child symbolizes a glimmer of hope. The second female image is I-330. This is a sharp and flexible girl with white teeth who loves secrets and challenges, violates regimes and guidelines, and who later dies defending the ideas of fighting the United State.

Basically, the numbers are true to the State regime. Number Yu, for example, accompanies the pupils during operations, reports the offense to the guardians - remains true to her duty.

Problems of the novel “We” by E. I. Zamyatin

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel “We” was written in 1921. The time was difficult, and therefore, probably, the work was written in the unusual genre of “utopian book”, fashionable during this period. The novel “We” played an important role in the life and work of E. Zamyatin. The fact is that this novel could not be published in Russia. It was published in both Czech and English. Only in 1988 did Russian readers get the opportunity to read Zamyatin’s novel. He worked on this novel during the Civil War.

By the title of the novel “We,” the author understood the collectivism of the Bolsheviks in Russia, in which the value of the individual was reduced to a minimum. Apparently, out of fear for the fate of the fatherland, Zamyatin moved Russia a thousand years into the future in his novel. The leading theme of this novel is the dramatic fate of the individual in a totalitarian social order. The novel “We” is written in the form of diary entries of one engineer under the number D-503. In the novel, Zamyatin managed to clearly raise the most important problems of human life.

The main problem is a person’s search for happiness. It is this search for happiness that leads humanity to the form of existence depicted in the novel. But even this form of universal happiness turns out to be imperfect, since this happiness is grown by incubation, contrary to the laws of organic development. The world conceived by the author, it seemed, should be perfect and absolutely suit all the people who live in it. But this is a world of technocracy, where a person is a cog in a huge mechanism. The whole life of a person in this world is subject to mathematical laws and clock schedules. A person in this world is an absolutely impersonal substance. People here don’t even have their own names (D-503, 1-330, O-90, K-13). It would seem that this life suits them, they are accustomed to it, to its order. The author gives, in my opinion, a vivid idea of ​​this life: everything is made of glass, and no one hides anything from each other, there is nothing alive and natural. But behind the wall of the United State, life is blooming in full force. Even wild people live there who did not want forced happiness. The second problem of the novel “We” is the problem of power. Zamyatin wrote a very interesting chapter about the Day of Unanimity, about the choice of a Benefactor. The most interesting thing is that people do not even think about choosing someone else for the position of Benefactor, except for the Benefactor himself.

They find it funny that among ancient people the election results were not known in advance. For them, the Benefactor is God who came to earth. The Benefactor is the only being who is allowed to think. For him, the concepts of love and cruelty are inseparable. He is harsh, unfair and enjoys the unlimited trust of the inhabitants of the United State. The climax of the novel is the conversation between the protagonist D-503 and the Benefactor, who told him the formula of happiness: “True algebraic love for a person is certainly inhuman, and an indispensable sign of truth is its cruelty.”

To finally solve the problem, the author introduces a revolutionary situation into the plot of the novel. There is a part of the workers who do not want to put up with their slave position. These people in such “machine machines” have not turned into cogs, have not lost their human appearance and are ready to fight the Benefactor in order to free people from the power of technocracy. They decide to capture the spaceship using the capabilities of D-503, the builder of the Integral. To this end, 1-330 seduces him, D-503 falls in love and, having learned about their plans, is at first frightened, and then agrees to help them. After visiting the Ancient House and communicating with living nature, the hero gains a soul, which is compared to a serious illness. As a result, the Green Wall explodes, and from there “everything rushed and overwhelmed our city, cleared of the lower world.”

At the end of the novel, the protagonist’s beloved woman dies in the Gas Bell, and after an operation to remove his fantasy, he regains his lost balance and happiness. I found the novel “We” interesting and easy to read. The writer put into it the main problems that worried him.

The author predicted the gradual development of totalitarianism in the world. "We" is a novel warning about the dire consequences of abandoning one's own self, even in the name of the most beautiful theories. Zamyatin showed how tragic and destructive the lives of people in such a totalitarian state can turn.

“The future is bright and wonderful,” he wrote in his well-known novel “What is to be done?” ideologist of the Russian revolution N. G. Chernyshevsky. Many Russian writers of the last century agreed with him, who created their own versions of social utopias, namely: L. N. Tolstoy and N. A. Nekrasov,”

F. M. Dostoevsky and N. S. Leskov. The 20th century introduced its own adjustments to this chorus of literary voices: what came to be known as the era of totalitarianism entered our history. Having decorated itself with slogans about a socialist paradise on earth, the revolutionary government proclaimed the primacy of politics over art, science, over the human personality with its unique spiritual world. In this regard, literature was viewed as merely an obedient instrument of the political regime. But even in such difficult conditions, a true artist reserved the right to impartial judgment over time and people. An example of this is Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin’s novel “We,” which was published back in 1925.

Already in the above-mentioned novel by N. G. Chernyshevsky, the future “city of the sun” is depicted, embodying joy and harmony on earth. Zamyatin largely repeats the description of this classic literary utopia: we see “glass domes of auditoriums,” “glass, electric, fire-breathing “Integral,” “divine parallelepipeds of transparent dwellings.” What is the author’s attitude to all this splendor? The writer is interested not so much in signs of material well-being and progress, but in the spiritual state of the future society and, above all, the relationship between the individual and the state. In this sense, the novel “We” is not a fantastic dream of an artist of the era of socialism, but rather a test of the Bolshevik dream for its consistency, “humanity.” It is with this that the idea of ​​the work is connected, arising from the author’s observations of the fate of those who make up the population of the crystal-aluminum paradise of the future.

The narration in the novel is told on behalf of the narrator, whose personality deserves special attention. This is a man without a name, D-503 - one of the mathematicians of the United State. He idolizes the "square harmony" of a social order that carefully ensures "mathematically infallible happiness" for everyone living on this earth. In a society of submissive “numbers”, everyone receives satiety, peace, appropriate occupation and complete satisfaction of physical needs. And what in return? Just “a little”: you need to give up everything that distinguishes you from others, get rid of your individuality and become a faceless “number”. By accepting these conditions, you can get a “full” existence: this is life according to the laws of the Tablet of Hours, fenced off from the world by the Green Wall, constant surveillance by the Guardians from the security service. In such a society, everything is controlled and subject to strict accounting: music is replaced by the Music Factory, literature by the Institute of State Poets and Writers, the press by the State Newspaper, and so on. The most important event in the life of the United State is the Day of Unanimity, when people blessed by the power of the Benefactor confirm the joy of their slave state.

But even such a well-oiled state machine fails: human nature stubbornly resists the idea of ​​a faceless, dull existence. In this contradiction lies the main conflict of the work, which is directly related to the fate of the main character. D-503 suddenly begins to feel in himself those very forbidden feelings that violate the harmony of the United State. The hero falls in love, unclear thoughts and mixed feelings begin to visit him. Similar processes occur with thousands of other “numbers” that discover something unique in themselves, different from others. For the all-powerful state System, this means an unheard-of conspiracy, a most dangerous rebellion! And indeed, the ripening discontent develops into an uprising of the lower classes, which is headed by the beloved of the protagonist - 1-330. What goals do the rebels pursue? This is a return to normal, natural, truly human life, gaining the right to love, creativity, and free expression of one’s thoughts. But the forces in this struggle are clearly not equal: the ruthless state machine suppresses this impulse of the “unreliable”. In the very method of suppression, the truly “higher mind” of the United State is manifested: it develops and puts into practice an operation to remove “extra” emotions and fantasies, that is, everything human in a person. D-503 himself is subjected to such a monstrous experiment: his “fantasy center” is removed by cauterizing the “pathetic brain nodule” with X-rays. And here is the result of the operation: “No nonsense, no ridiculous metaphors, no feelings: just facts.”

When reading these pages of the novel, you experience a feeling of sadness and hopelessness: the very principle of the soulless organization of society takes root inside a person, completely killing his consciousness. We are witnessing the intervention of the state in the innermost world of the individual, in his most subtle spheres. All this is reflected in the personal fate of D-503: the hero-narrator loses his “I” and again faithfully serves the United State, betraying his beloved (1-330 dies under torture without betraying anyone). As a result, the idea of ​​a mechanized world, devoid of any poetry, triumphs: “With eyes closed, the balls of the regulators were spinning selflessly; the bloodworms, sparkling, bent to the right and left; the balance beam proudly shook its shoulders; the chisel of the slotting machine squatted to the beat of inaudible music. I suddenly saw all the beauty of this grandiose machine ballet...” This observation of the monotonous, uniform work of the machine is a kind of apotheosis of unfreedom inherent in the foundation of the United State, turning a separate “I” into a faceless “we”.

The ending of the novel returns us to its title, which has a special meaning.

“To admit that the “I” can have some “rights” in relation to the State, and to admit that a gram can balance a ton, is exactly the same thing. Hence the distribution: ton - rights, gram - responsibilities; and the natural path from insignificance to greatness: forget that you are a gram, and feel like a millionth part of a ton...” These reasonings of the hero are fully consistent with the author’s conclusions: a totalitarian state is based not on the sum of individual “I”s, but on millionths of a huge and monolithic whole, called "we". Such a society is destined for an unenviable future, which will doom people to a faceless existence devoid of vital brightness. The idea of ​​solidarity, equality, brotherhood, proclaimed at one time by the Bolsheviks, in Zamyatin takes on the character of a dystopia, which determines the genre originality of the work. This is truly a dystopia, depicting the harmful and unforeseen consequences of blindly following a social ideal as a dogma that claims absolute truth.

The peculiarities of the genre required a special method of depiction from the writer. Zamyatin develops his own method, consonant with the style of the era - “neorealism”, understood as a combination of reality and fantasy. The society of transparent walls, the gigantic super-powerful space machine “Integral”, the unprecedented miracles of the technology of the future are fantastic. Human characters and destinies, their thoughts and feelings are real, not obscured by the will of the supreme ruler - the Benefactor. This artistic fusion creates a “presence effect” and makes the story exciting and vivid.

Due to the peculiarities of the method, attention should be paid to Zamyatin’s style. First of all, this is an ironic and sometimes satirical coloring of the main character’s monologues, revealing the author’s attitude towards them. Here is D-503’s reasoning about “backward” ancestors: “Isn’t it funny: to know gardening, chicken breeding, fishing (we have accurate data that they knew all this) and not be able to reach the last step of this logical ladder: child rearing.” To this we must add the special dynamics of the narrative: the novel contains many purely cinematic depiction techniques (suffice it to recall the already cited “machine ballet” scene). The dynamism of the style corresponds to the process of modernization and industrialization that covered the country that experienced a social revolution. This style makes it possible to capture life in its movement, development, and makes it possible to unfold pictures of the future in the intense dynamics of everyday life of the United State.

The originality of Zamyatin's style also left its mark on the selection of linguistic means in the narrative. Noteworthy is the abundance of scientific and technical terms: tangent asymptote, fnolector, numberer, piston rod, and the like. All this perfectly conveys the atmosphere that reigns in a technocratic society, devoid of genuine ideas about beauty. Let us recall the reasoning of D-503 in the 12th entry: “I thought: how could it happen that the ancients were not struck by the absurdity of their literature and poetry. The enormous, magnificent power of the artistic word was wasted completely in vain. It’s just funny: everyone wrote whatever they wanted. It’s just as funny and absurd as the fact that among the ancients the sea beat against the shore around the clock, and the millions of kilograms contained in the waves were spent only on warming up the feelings of lovers.” The hero-narrator constantly proves, substantiates, explains something to himself, being absolutely confident in the highest harmony of the new time. Hence, there are many rhetorical emotional constructions that make monologues lively and polemical. As a result, despite the falsity of many of the main character’s arguments, you always feel him as a living person, unhappy in his blind faith in the miracles of totalitarian progress (“The heart beat inside me - huge, and with every beat it poured out such a violent, hot, such a joyful wave "). The poetic principle awakened in the nameless “number” creates a sharp contrast with the motionless world of technology: “I am alone. Evening. Light fog. The sky is covered with a milky-golden fabric, if only you knew what was there above? Thus, the language and style of the novel are closely related to its problematics and figurative system.

Observations of the text of the dystopian novel lead to the conclusion about the high artistic merits of the work. In addition, the language and the very problems of the novel are perceived today no less acutely than in the twenties. Unfortunately, many of Zamyatin’s guesses and fantasies have become a harsh reality in our history: this is the cult of personality, and the notorious “free elections”, and the almighty and terrible Gulag Archipelago, and prisoner Shch-854 from A. Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Today” We argue a lot about the fate of Russia, about possible paths of reform, about the necessity or unnecessaryness of an “iron hand” in governing the state. In this sense, Zamyatin’s novel was and remains a book of warning, a powerful argument in the modern struggle of ideas. Reading “We”, you understand how important it is to be able to discern the essence of what is happening in society behind the loud slogans and beautiful promises. It is important to always and everywhere remain an individual, not to follow dubious “trends of the times”, and reserve the right to doubt. In this sense, Zamyatin’s fiction for us is and remains the reality of today’s largely “numbered world.”

State in dystopia

Only a few percent of the total mass of people live in the United State - in the revolution, the city won a victory over the countryside. The government provides them with housing, safety, and comfort. For ideal conditions, citizens are deprived of their individuality and given numbers instead of names.

Life in a state is a mechanism. Freedom and happiness are incompatible here. Ideal unfreedom is that all the needs and natural desires of citizens are satisfied according to a schedule, except that spiritual needs are not taken into account. Art is replaced by numbers, the state has a mathematical ethic: ten dead is nothing compared to the many.

The city itself is surrounded by a Green Wall made of glass, behind which there is a forest about which no one knows anything. The main character one day accidentally finds out that ancestors covered with wool live on the other side.

The rooms live in identical rooms with glass walls, as if to prove that the state regime is absolutely transparent. All the needs and natural desires of citizens are satisfied according to a schedule, the schedule is determined by the Tablet of Hours.

There is no love, since it gives rise to jealousy and envy, so there is a rule that each number has equal rights to the other number. For citizens, there are certain days on which you can make love, and you can do this exclusively with pink coupons, which are issued depending on physical needs.

In the United State there are Guardians who are responsible for ensuring security and enforcing the rules. It is an honor for citizens to report violations to the Guardian Bureau. Criminals are punished by being placed in the Benefactor Machine, where the number is split into atoms and turned into distilled water. Before execution, their number is taken away, which is the highest punishment for a citizen of the state.

• Author: E. I. Zamyatin
• Work:
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Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel “We” was written in 1921 and became an attempt to capture the cyclical nature of history, to find similar things in the past and future, to see today through the reflection of thoughts about it. The author turns to a fundamentally new genre form of the dystopian novel in order to show the mechanisms of time and history. At the beginning of the century, the ideal of a happy world began to become reality and appeared in a totalitarian-technical embodiment.

One of the determining factors for E. Zamyatin’s work is his attitude towards the revolution. The writer did not leave Russia after 1917. In the revolution he saw not only horrors and cruelty, but also the element of freedom, confirmation of his own vision of the world order. Zamyatin's ideal was constant movement forward; he did not tolerate inertia and stagnation. In this regard, it was difficult for Zamyatin to accept Berdyaev’s point of view about the state of culture in critical times. The philosopher believed that during the revolution there could be no developed culture. In “Philosophy of Inequality” he wrote: “The revolutionary principle is essentially hostile to culture, anti-cultural... The revolutionary spirit wants to arm itself with civilization, to appropriate its utilitarian gains, but it does not want culture, it does not need culture.” Shocked by the changes in the country, Zamyatin reveals in his works the problem of creating a perfect society and thinks about the ideas that unite people.

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel “We” has long been called a pamphlet on the existing political system. For Zamyatin himself, this was, first of all, a way to express his thoughts and feelings about the course of history. Naturally, the United State described in his book is in many ways similar to the communist one. The writer could not ignore the reality around him, could not help but analyze it.

Zamyatin in his work reflected dangerous trends that could lead humanity to life in a totalitarian state, where the individual will not be able to develop. Making everyone the same and giving up individuality has serious consequences. In the United State, everyone thinks alike, goes for walks in formation, wears a uniform and lives in the same type of houses. “Liberation? It’s amazing how tenacious criminal instincts are in the human race. I deliberately say: “criminal”. Freedom and crime are as inseparably linked as... speed and movement...” says the hero of D-503.

In the dystopia “We,” Zamyatin showed how a person’s life can be organized, turned into an obedient machine that will do any job and agree to various absurdities. Moreover, such a life suits the residents of the United State quite well. They are happy that they live in some kind of “ideal” community, where there is no need to think or decide anything. Even the election of the head of state has been brought to the point of absurdity. For several years now, they have been choosing one of the same people, confirming the credentials of the “Benefactor”. The state was able to do the worst thing - kill the soul in people. They lost it along with their names. Now only numbers distinguish one of them from another.

Unexpectedly for him, love enters the life of the First Builder of Integral. Enters with Scriabin's music. It sounds like a negative example, meant to show that there can be nothing higher than modern “mathematical compositions”. On the stage of the Auditorium there is a piano from the past. Woman in ancient costume. “She sat down and started playing. Wild, convulsive, motley, like their whole life at that time - not a shadow of reasonable mechanicalness. And, of course, those around me are right: everyone laughs. Only a few... but why me too?”

D-503 perceives his revival as a disaster and illness, when the doctor tells him: “Your business is bad! Apparently, you have formed a soul.” For a while, D-503 tries to break out of the everyday circle and finds himself among the rebels. But the habit of living according to a long-established order turns out to be stronger than love, affection, and curiosity. In the end, the fear of change and the habit of obedience overcome the reborn, but not yet strengthened soul. It’s calmer to live as before, without shocks, without thoughts about tomorrow, without worrying about anything at all. Everything is fine again: “No nonsense, no ridiculous metaphors, no feelings: just facts. Because I’m healthy, I’m completely, absolutely healthy... Some kind of splinter was pulled out of my head, my head is light, empty..."

Zamyatin clearly and convincingly showed how a conflict arises between the human personality and the inhuman social order, a conflict that sharply contrasts dystopia with idyllic, descriptive utopia.

The fantastic story of the Great Operation from the novel “We” is indicative, telling about the forcible removal of fantasy from all “numbers” - citizens of the United State. In a conditionally deformed form, this story reflects Zamyatin’s rejection of the leveling, lack of freedom, and leveling of the individual that he saw in the life of the young Soviet society. The ending of the novel shows the triumph of the totalitarian system, but the Wall, behind which all those dissatisfied with the regime flee, has not yet been restored.

E. Zamyatin wrote his great work in the form of a diary, which contains forty entries. The novel is characterized by a confessional style of narration, which contrasts with the laconic and precise style of the State Newspaper. Incomplete sentences and expressive constructions indicate that the United State still consists of living people capable of emotions and feelings.

In the model of an ideal society that Zamyatin constructed, there is no place for the irrational principle, the square root of -1 or love. The writer argues that the state structure should be a direct consequence of human nature and not contradict it.

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Problems

The problematic of the novel “We” is related to the fact that freedom in the United State is equated with torment and the inability to live happily, causing pain. Accordingly, a lot of problems arise due to the fact that a person, along with freedom of choice, loses his essence and turns into a biorobot designed for a certain functionality. Yes, his life is indeed becoming calmer, but the word “happiness” is no longer applicable to him, because it is an emotion, and their numbers are deprived.

Therefore, a person, as a rule, like the main character of the work, chooses pain, feelings and independence instead of an idealized system of coercion. And his particular problem is confrontation with totalitarian power, rebellion against it. But behind this conflict lies something larger, global and relevant to all of us: problems of happiness, freedom, moral choice, etc.

The novel describes a social problem: a person who becomes only one part of the system of a totalitarian state is devalued. No one values ​​his rights, feelings and opinions. For example, the heroine O loves one man, but she has to “belong” to everyone who wants to. We are talking about the devaluation of personality to the point of impossibility: in the work, numbers die either physically, punished by the Machine, or morally, losing their souls.

The meaning of the novel

The dystopia “We” is a confrontation between ideology and reality. Zamyatin portrays people who deny with all their might that they are people. They decided to get rid of all their problems by getting rid of themselves. Everything that is dear to us, that makes up and shapes us, is taken away from the heroes of the book. In reality, they would never allow coupons to be issued to them, would not agree to live in glass houses, and would not sacrifice their individuality. But they critically assessed this reality, full of contradictions due to diversity and abundance, and went against it, against their nature, against the natural world, fencing themselves off with a wall of illusions. They came up with an abstract meaning of existence (the construction of the Integral, as once the construction of socialism), absurd laws and rules that contradict morality and feelings, and a new person - a number devoid of his “I”. Their script is not life at all, it is the largest theatrical production in which all the characters pretend that there are no problems or desires to behave differently. But inequality is inevitable, it will always be, because people are different from birth. Someone sincerely and blindly believes the propaganda and plays their role without thinking about its artificiality. Someone begins to think and reason, sees or feels the falseness and pretense of what is happening. This is how execution victims or cowardly hypocrites appear, trying to slowly disrupt the established order and steal a piece of individuality from it for themselves. Already in their presence, the collapse of the Unified State system is obvious: it is impossible to equalize people, they are still different from each other, and this is their humanity. They cannot be just a wheel in a car, they are individual.

The author polemicizes with the Soviet ideology of “freedom, equality and brotherhood,” which turned into slavery, strict social hierarchy and hostility, since these lofty principles do not correspond to human nature.

Criticism

Y. Annenkov writes that Yevgeny Zamyatin is guilty before the regime only in that he knew how to think differently and did not fit the same brush with society. According to him, the ideas included in his dystopia were his own ideas - that it is impossible to artificially fit a person into the system, because, among other things, there is an irrational principle in him.

J. Orwell compares Zamyatin’s work with Aldous Huxley’s novel “Brave New World.” Both novels speak of nature's protest against mechanization in the future. The Russian author, according to the writer, has a more clearly readable political subtext, but the book itself is poorly constructed. Orwell criticizes the weak and fragmentary plot, which cannot be described in a few sentences.

E. Brown wrote that “We” is one of the most daring and promising modern utopias because it is more fun. Yu. N. Tynyanov, in his article “Literary Today,” considered Zamyatin’s fantastic plot convincing, because he himself went to the writer because of his style. The inertia of style gave rise to fantasy. At the end, Tynyanov calls the novel a success, a work oscillating between utopia and the Petersburg of that time.

Author: Ekaterina Chunenkova
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Applied eugenics

Skull measurement. Engraving. 1905 © Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine / Flickr
In the United State of Zamyatin, there is a restriction on reproduction and there is such a scientific discipline as “child breeding” (by analogy with gardening, chicken farming and fish farming). If a woman does not reach the Maternal Norm - say, in height, like the main character's first girlfriend - she is not destined to become a mother. The situation is similar with the Fatherly Norm. Thus, differences are smoothed out not only in behavior, but also in the appearance of people of the future, their phenotype. Eugenic methods that curb the appearance of unwanted offspring are also the basis of Aldous Huxley’s dystopia.

“The most important “Manhattan Projects” of the future will be the great government-sponsored studies of what politicians and outside scientists will call the “happiness problem,” meaning the problem of making people love slavery. <…> Love for slavery can only be established as a result of a deep, intrapersonal revolution in human souls and bodies. To bring about this revolution, we require, among others, the following discoveries and inventions. <…> ...A reliable system of eugenics designed to standardize man and thereby make the task of administrators easier. In Brave New World this standardization of manufactured people is taken to fantastic—though perhaps feasible—extremes.”

Aldous Huxley, from the Preface to Brave New World