Mathematical Imagery in Musil's Young Torless and Zamyatin's We

Abstract

VGENII ZAMYATIN's We (My, 1920), was written in U.S.S.R. but has never appeared there because of its anti-utopian sentiments. It was first published in an English translation by Gregory Zilboorg.1 With its description of a future world, work has often been seen as a forerunner of both George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and in many ways an influence on them. Orwell was familiar with We and had written a review praising it prior to writing 1984.2 The scene of We is Single State nine hundred years from now. Life is controlled by Benefactor, Big Brother's antecedent, in interests of rationally governed happiness. It is because Zamyatin's novel, like those of Huxley and Orwell, so clearly prefigures many of ills of modern totalitarianism, indeed of life in any twentieth-century society, that criticism of We has mainly been concerned with its place in history of ideas and has discussed it in context of utopian, or rather anti-utopian, novels alone. Edward J. Brown's Zamyatin and English Literature3 rightly remarks that the novel My has many predecessors and contemporary relatives in genre of anti-utopia, among them Jack London's The Iron Heel. He goes on to draw analogies between We and H. G. Wells' writings of period between The