Zamyatin: Why Not?

My vigilant audience of about three may have noticed that my initial post stated I was going to study primarily Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's 1984 and Zamyatin's We, but then the posts following made no mention of We at all. I decided that Fahrenheit 451 was to replace We just before I started reading it, for the following reasons:


• Zamyatin was Russian-born. One of the issues with this project is that I am covering both literature and Sociology, and loosely, I am studying in connection with an English qualification, so a text in translation is already a grey area for suitability. However, there are more problems with We's provenance too: if it was written in Russia, primarily reflecting on Zamyatin's experience as a Bolshevik, how useful and relevant will it be to compare with the Western modern day? The theme of technology is definitely covered in the book, but the ideas are a product of Socialist Russia, and though I could technically use it to comment on Britain and the USA anyway, I cannot make any suggestion that Zamyatin was predicting anything about the West if the context was radically different.

• We is quite long. Practical reasons only: it's about the same length as Orwell, only I've never read it before, so it would be a sacrifice of time which I may not be able to make.

• It is not as widely recognised as Orwell and Huxley for being canonical dystopian fiction. There are suggestions that Huxley and Orwell may have stolen segments of their plots from We, but the triad of 1984, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 are more widely considered the core reading in the genre, and are simply more well-known than Zamyatin's title.

• If it inspired Brave New World, I might end up studying the same ideas twice. I want to widen my scope as much as I can in this, get together as many ideas as possible, and I might just be re-treading old ground with We.

For those reasons, I will study We if I find I have a dearth of information and a surplus of time, but as it stands, I don't really think it will be necessary. Other books on my shortlist have had to be relegated or knocked off too, including a Swedish title called Kallocain, which is incredibly relevant, but a translation and very difficult to get hold of, and The Republic of the Future, which is very old and out of print. It's also a scathing comment on socialism, possibly skewing its usefulness to my technological focus.

I think the language of dystopian worlds would have been an interesting thing to study too: the language created by the authors, with their invented swearwords, new slang and governmental taglines and propaganda. I'm finding there may be too much to say for Technology in 5000 words, but I've got this far and it would be a shame to waste all that and change focus, so I may just have to chop out some of the more irrelevant or sparsely filled headings like "Technology for Transport".