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".

Zamyatin, Huxley and Orwell: Science in Dystopian Fiction

In dystopian literature, one of the principle themes is technology. The soulless, miserable worlds depicted in the books are often soundtracked by the unthinking hum of machines. Listening to my computer hum right now, instant parallels suggest themselves; but did Huxley, Orwell and Zamyatin really have a point when they implied that the fruits of technology will lead us to a dystopian world?

Just before George Orwell was born, the first radio receiver had received its first transmission. To think, that was just over a century ago, and since then, the speed of scientific advance has, well, rocketed. The Wright brothers came along with their plane in 1903; Einstein thought up his theory of relativity in 1905, a year after the first tractor was patented. In 1908, the first Model T car was sold, followed in 1910 by Edison's Kinetoscope, an early film projector. Then of course there were tanks, zippers, gas masks and stainless steel, toasters, circuits and early robots - and all before 1920.

New inventions were flooding the market, making daily chores easier, entertainment easier, warfare easier. With this speed of advance, the average person had barely a moment to rest between buying the newest time-savers. Governments trialled their newest weapons during the destructive First World War, and at the same time, plied their people with all the most inventive methods of propaganda. It was certainly a time of great change, but with any change, there comes a backlash.

Dystopian literature can be seen, partly, as the backlash to this rapid technological change. Added to this, developments in political ideology that came with Marx's socialism and developments in economics that came with mass production and importation also had to have their backlash. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells had brought us the first recognisably modern European Science Fiction in the 19th century, but nothing quite rivalled the explosion of dystopian concepts in the early 20th century: suddenly, writers were clamouring to portray unpleasant worlds as a comment on their rapidly changing reality. A global disregard for human life during the First and then the Second World War was bound to leave the individual feeling marginalised, and with emotionless technology increasingly favoured over human hard work, there was nothing for it but to speak up.

One of the earlier texts I am studying came from Russian-born author Yevgeny Zamyatin. A student of naval engineering and a Bolshevik, Zamyatin took part in the Russian socialist revolution of 1905, and so experienced immense political change first-hand. His novel We was written in 1921, after he had witnessed the devastating effects of World War One. The book depicted a world in which no individuality was permitted, with numbers instead of names, propaganda keeping people in line and the whole world governed by One State. This is a clear precursor of books such as Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984.

Aldous Huxley, born in the UK in 1894, claims that he had not so much as heard of We when he wrote his career-defining Brave New World (1932), though satirical writer Kurt Vonnegut insisted that its plot must have been "cheerfully ripped off" from Zamyatin's work. Huxley's book is perhaps more confused in its intentions than We, because in many ways, the reality of the World State is utopian. There is no illness, misery or suffering. Yet, one cannot help but feel that its restrictive, unchanging blandness is grotesque. The world he portrays is defined by its technological advances - all the drugs and entertainment and synthetic materials - and yet it restricts all future development to maintain the new social equilibrium.

George Orwell, by contrast, cannot be said to have created any sort of utopia in 1984 (1949). Orwell proved himself a critic of a whole host of ideologies across his writing, but 1984 is one of his most disturbing and lastingly relevant novels. Airstrip One, or England, is a dirty, miserable world of paranoia and unending war. People are 'vaporised' and erased from history if they overstep any of the government's many lines. Thinking anything unorthodox is punishable by death. Through the use of constant surveillance technology and perpetual revision of history, freedom has become slavery.

These are the three texts I am going to focus on during my study, though Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, This Perfect Day by Ira Levin, Anthem by Ayn Rand and The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster are all useful references as far as technological advance is concerned. Since that radio received that first transmission in 1901, how much closer to an Orwellian dystopia has science brought us? Medicine, computer, AI and war technology have advanced beyond those authors' wildest dreams, but were their predictions about the effects correct? Are we living in a scientific dystopia?