Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial by Erika Gottlieb

Abstract

REVIEWS Erika Gottlieb. Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Uni­ versity Press, 2001. 323. $12.95 paper, $75.00 cloth. In September 1945, Isaiah Berlin visited Moscow. It was the first time he had been in Russia since he had fled to England with his family in the face of secret police persecution in 1920. His Russian was still fluent, and in the brief thaw immediately after the end of World War II, he was able to meet and talk with some of the major Russian writers and intellectuals. He found them all gripped by fear. As Berlin’s biographer Michael Ignatieff relates: From his first night in Moscow [...] Isaiah was exposed to the atmosphere of gloom, shame and terror among ‘the scared’ ones who had managed to survive the Yezhovshchina, the whole-scale extermination of the Russian intelligentsia in 1937. In addition to the millions of ordinary people sent to labour camps or simply shot, the regime had exterminated the cultural élite [...]. By the time the killing and deporta­ tion were done, there was a vacant stillness in Russian culture, like a forest after an all-consuming fire. (136-37) The thaw soon ended, and Soviet writers were plunged back into isolation from the West until the Cold War was over. This is the climate in which the Eastern dystopian fiction that Erika Gottlieb discusses was written. As she points out, this litera­ ture is quite different from Western dystopias. Orwell, Huxley, Atwood, and the others were writing their books as a warn­ ing; Koestler, Grossman, Ribakov, and many others were writ­ ing about a fait accompli, with little hope that things would improve. More than half of Gottlieb’s book is devoted to the East­ ern writers — largely because most of those whom she discuss­ es are unknown to most Western readers. She has, necessarily, to devote a good deal of space to plot summary. This some­ times makes for heavy and, often, gloomy going. The atm o­ sphere of terror under which most of these novels were writ­ ten does not make for pleasant reading, particularly since the reader is haunted by the fact that the writers — often with great courage — wrote with the knowledge that their work could lead 761 ESC 28, 2002 to arrest, summ ary conviction, and either death or long impris­ onment in the Gulags Gottlieb claims that dystopian fiction “is a post Christian genre” and th at the hell on earth of dystopian societies “is not that far removed from Dante’s medieval dream-vision of Dis, the city of hell” (3). The purpose of both Dante and Western dystopian fiction writers is to warn readers against the sin of giving in to tem ptation — of sin on the one hand and totalitari­ anism on the other. Dystopian fiction, of course, moves beyond Dante’s hell to a state in which the core of individual mind and personality is destroyed by the elimination of love and family ties. “Ultimately,” Gottlieb writes, “by being relentlessly bom­ barded by state propaganda while also being deprived of pri­ vacy, and intim ate relationships, we may be deprived of the core of our being, our personal memory of the past” (12). After a brief survey of nineteenth-century precursors to mod­ ern dystopian fiction — especially the Grand Inquisitor section of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov — Gottlieb moves to an analysis of Zam iatin’s We, the precursor of all the Western novels that Gottlieb deals with: Huxley’s Brave New World, Or­ well’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Vonnegut ’s Player Piano, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. We was one of the earliest attacks on the cult of the machine and technology that was adopted by Lenin after the Bolsheviks came to power. Henry Ford’s production line and Taylor’s time and motion studies became the bases of Lenin’s desire to trans­ form the Soviet Union into an efficient industrial state. D-503, the protagonist of We, is a m athematician and space-ship de­ signer who is perfectly content in his subservience to this ma­ chine state until...