Yevgeny Zamyatin Research Articles

Human Machines and the Pains of Penmanship in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s <i>We</i>

Human Machines and the Pains of Penmanship in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We Julia Vaingurt (bio) Man loves creating and the making of roads, that is indisputable. But why does he so passionately love destruction and chaos as well? . . . In short, man is comically arranged, there is apparently a joke in all this. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground Shortly after the nascent Soviet government consolidated its power and launched a program of rapid industrialization, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We (1920) scandalously questioned the validity of techno-scientific instrumentality, a central principle of societal transformation in Soviet Russia. The first major work of fiction to be censored by the new regime, the novel was smuggled to the West, translated into English, and became an ur-text of twentieth-century science fiction, in particular standing, alongside Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984, as progenitor of a new anti-utopian subgenre warning of the mass cultural homogenization of humanity in the name of progress. Set in a future totalitarian OneState, the novel records the internal conflict and gradual self-awakening of the initially robotlike rocket engineer D-503, torn between his faith in state orthodoxy and yearning for perfect order, on the one hand, and, on the other, his growing awareness of his own disorderly, irrepressible, idiosyncratic subjectivity. The catalyst of this subversive development is the act of writing—paradoxical insofar as this act functions, in the totalitarian system envisioned by the novel, as one of the instruments of the state’s all-pervasive control. In this essay, I will discuss how Zamyatin, in the process of critiquing the man-machine ideal espoused in Soviet political culture, reconceptualizes the very meaning of technology in human life.1 [End Page 108] The “Question Concerning Technology” and Its Soviet Context Broadly speaking, twentieth-century cultural responses to the power and expansion of technology foregrounded either the utopia of peaceful human coexistence with and benefit from machines or the dystopia of machine-wrought destruction. In Soviet Russia, intent on quickly overcoming its backwardness and marginal status vis-à-vis the West with the help of machinery at times conceived almost as magical, the predominant mode of relating to technology was emphatically utopic. The wishful thinking of utopian writers was counterbalanced by the paranoid prophesies of dystopians, who envisioned machines turning their power against humanity in a struggle for autonomy. One of the most influential of the technological dystopias, the Czech writer Karel Capek’s drama R.U.R. (1921), left an ominous stamp on Western culture in the form of the word “robot.” Here robots, work machines with an uncanny likeness to humans, in the spirit of rational self-interest they embody, rebel against their subservient status and destroy humanity.2 The vicissitudes of Capek’s plot, however, rely upon the same conception of technology as that of the “dreamer in the Kremlin” Lenin in his utopian aspirations for the Soviet future;3 in either case, it is a tool for political-industrial transformation, for ill or good.4 Zamyatin’s anti-utopian novel establishes a counterpoint to the purely instrumental technologies conceived by technophiles and tech-nophobes alike insofar as the author consistently deprives technology of its defining characteristic in Industrial Age culture, namely, its functionality.5 In its place, We imbues technology with various human traits, transforming machines into great vehicles for reflection. As opposed to the aspirations of Soviet “new men” to become machines, Zamyatin’s text features “reflexive technologies” in which pure instrumentality is marred by human idiosyncrasies.6 In this effort to aesthetically reassess technological potential, to view technology as a medium for contemplation rather than societal change, Zamyatin’s We takes its place within a canon of artistic works that responded to technological advancement with an urge not to exploit but to explore. In the Russian context, for example, Valentin Kataev’s The Sovereign of Iron (1924) features machines that exercise their newly acquired independence from humans by resisting violence, refusing to participate [End Page 109] in mankind’s wars; Velimir Khlebnikov’s “Ourselves and Our Buildings: Creators of Streetsteads” (1914) and other futurist manifestos espouse organic technologies starkly contrasting with the aesthetics of mechanized humanity; and...

Revolutions from the Waist Downwards: Desire as Rebellion In Yevgeny Zamyatin's We , George Orwell's 1984 , and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

Revolutions from the Waist Downwards: Desire as Rebellion In Yevgeny Zamyatin's <i>We</i> , George Orwell's <i>1984</i> , and Aldous Huxley's <i>Brave New World</i>

The Handmaid's Detail: Notes on the Novel and Opera

When Margaret Atwood's dystopia or 'speculative fiction,' as she terms it, The Handmaid's Tale first appeared in 1985, it aroused considerable interest because of the topicality of its theme and the wealth of supporting detail. In a recent interview, Atwood made this remark: 'What inspired The Handmaid's Tale? I've often been asked. General observation, I might have said. Poking my nose into books. Reading newspapers. World history. One of my rules was that I couldn't put anything into the novel that human beings hadn't actually done' ('For God'). The Atwood papers in the Fisher Rare Books Library of the University of Toronto provide ample evidence of her newspaper reading (box 96). Events both in Iran and Afghanistan (which Atwood had visited) showed only too clearly the repression of women and girls in matters relating to education, dress, and sex. What was striking about this novel, however, was the presentation of a similar tyranny arising in the United States in the closing years of the twentieth century. This totalitarian regime is called the Republic of Gilead, a name derived from part of the Promised Land shown to Moses by the Lord (Deuteron- omy: 34:1-4). This positive image represents the one that the new theocracy wishes to project. In fact, however, by abolishing the Constitution along with the title of the United States, the authorities have conveniently abandoned the former separation of church and state. A religious minority directs a police state with arbitrary powers of arrest and public execution. The true face of Gilead stands revealed in another biblical quotation: Gilead is a city of them that work iniquity, and is polluted with blood. And as troops of robbers wait for a man, so the company of priests murder in the way by consent: for they commit lewdness. (Hosea 6:8-9) This is the religiously depraved spirit that informs this dystopia. Atwood herself has drawn attention to the work's lineage ('For God'), citing The Republic, Utopia, book 4 of Gulliver's Travels, and Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1920 ). Nearer to home are Brave New World (1932) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), to which I shall return. She engages also in a dialogue with the Old Testament, especially Genesis, and indeed with the English language itself. The fact that the heroine, Offred, was formerly a xxxxxxxx

The Laws of Hospitality: Liberty, Generosity, and the Limits of Dissent in William Morris's 'The Tables Turned' and 'News from Nowhere'

This article scrutinizes recent critical claims that William Morris's The Tables Turned (1887) and News from Nowhere (1890) constitute exceptionally tolerant and accommodating visions of the ideal society. The first section provides evidence in support of Morris's liberalistic concern for the rights of minorities. The second and third sections complicate this analysis, stressing Morris's parallel commitment to informal regulatory methods. Particular attention is directed towards the role of hospitality in these utopias, a form of generosity whose combination of freedom and control is comparable to the operation of gift-exchanges as understood by Marcel Mauss. ********** In the postscript to his revised edition of William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1) E. P. Thompson considers M.M.-H. Abensour's now influential reading of News from Nowhere (1890). (2) Referring primarily to Abensour's guiding conception of an 'education of desire', he identifies the French critic's approach as a useful and productive way of reappraising Morris's utopianism. Thompson's enthusiasm for Abensour has not been uncontroversial. Perry Anderson, for one, notoriously characterized it as a brief insinuation of that 'Parisian irrationalism' which favours 'metaphysical vacancy' over 'clear and observable meaning'. (3) Among the more receptive responses to Thompson's postscript has been that of Ruth Levitas, who takes into account the views of both Thompson and Anderson, and synthesizes them: Morris's utopianism, Levitas argues, is no vague expression of frustrated desire, but rather a disciplined, politically effective, form of dream. (4) Most critics have adopted a less guarded approach in accounting for the imaginative processes that inform this vision of the ideal society. In recent discussions of News from Nowhere one hears less of discipline than of Morris's exceptional openness, receptivity, and pluralism. (5) William Morris @ News from Nowhere (1990), a collection of essays issued to mark the centenary year of the work's publication, is typical in this respect. Morris is presented here as a kind of anarcho-communist forebear of recent trends. The views of the volume's editor, Stephen Coleman, are especially germane. He suggests, first, that 'in Nowhere cohesion is not the product of compulsion', and second, that our recurrent failure to endorse Morris's insistence on the achievability of political liberty is merely 'a reflection of the intensity of the modern fear of freedom' (p. 89). (6) What limits Morris may have placed on the scope of these freedoms, or more specifically on the conduct of his utopians, have received far less attention. Of course the troubled history of utopian experimentation in the twentieth century makes this emphasis unsurprising. It is now a precondition of any favourable appraisal of Morris's work that it echo A. L. Morton's assertion that 'Morris' is the first Utopia which is not utopian'. (7) All the same, it is my purpose in this article to insist on the limited nature of Nowhere's openness. This does not mean that I dispute the common assertion that News from Nowhere constitutes a libertarian utopia. As the first part of this discussion should serve to demonstrate, much evidence exists to support such a reading. It has simply become necessary to register the fact that, in certain respects, Nowhere remains typically utopian, that it constitutes a vision of happiness achieved by means of an act of exclusion. Morris, this is to say, exercises his sovereignty as a utopist: he leaves out what displeases him. 'News from Nowhere': A Tolerant Utopia? In the first half of the twentieth century Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek began to express the view that the crimes of Fascism and Communism were directly attributable to the historicism latent in utopian thought. (8) The misgivings prompting such critiques were only strengthened by the publication of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1920-21), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), all three of them dystopias. …

EPILEPTIC By David B 2005. London: Jonathan Cape. Price £16.99 ISBN 0-22407502-0 SATURDAY By Ian McEwan 2005. London: Jonathan Cape. Price £17.99 ISBN 0-22407299-4 THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME By Mark Haddon 2004. London: Vintage. Price £6.99 Paperback ISBN 0-09945025-9

Depictions of neurological illnesses in literature prompt questions as to how such representations can inform lay readers about the realities of neurological disease and what relevance such books have for the neurologist. Medicine and literature make regular bedfellows. Characterizations of disease abound in fiction and serve either to embellish descriptive prose, to illustrate elements of the human condition or, perhaps more interestingly, to provide social or political allegory. A disease, after all, is a deviation from normality and may thus be a synonym for a whole manner of human struggles. A fictional plague in a mid-European town is the basis for political commentary in Albert Camus' The Plague . An unusual form of epidemic ‘white blindness’ allows Jose Saramago to study late twentieth century society in his novel Blindness in which chaos descends on a fictional community revealing the true nature of society's sightlessness. The disturbance of vision, one of the most fundamental of neurological functions, is perhaps the commonest of allegories used in literature. Neurology lends itself well to such tales for the brain is the seat of knowledge, the ‘soul’ and creativity. Many an author has written on how creativity and freedom of expression can be dulled by various forms of brain manipulation. In Yevgeny Zamyatin's futuristic novel, We , free will is suppressed by surgical removal of imagination; and in Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange , the Ludovico technique is used to ‘brainwash’ miscreant youths. Social faults are again highlighted in Mikhail Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog in which neuroendocrine tissue from a human is transferred into a dog that subsequently takes on a corrupt persona. Such illnesses and neurological treatments are fictitious, but what of the depiction of real illnesses in literature? Oliver Sacks popularized neurological science with descriptions of various disorders in The Man who …

Living Under the Bell Jar: Surveillance and Resistance in Yevgeny Zamyatin's We

Observation plays an increasingly significant role in twentieth-century society as a means of regulation. In this regulatory function, observation manifests itself in the ubiquitous CCTV, traffic cameras and other surveillance techniques used to monitor and record the activities of ordinary citizens. One of the more alarming recent manifestations of the potential for all-pervasive surveillance is the announcement of the development of an urban surveillance system by the United States military, which 'would use computers and thousands of cameras to track, record and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a foreign city,' and which could potentially be used by governments on their own citizens. The dramatic increase of surveillance in the twentieth-century has also been matched by an increase of voyeuristic entertainment, exemplified by the Orwellian titled television game show Big Brother. The entertainment value of voyeuristic surveillance has arguably rendered individuals more …accepting of regulatory surveillance in their personal lives. This trend towards increasing surveillance coupled with a citizenry inured to a constant invasion of its privacy has formed the basis for a number of twentieth-century dystopian novels and films, such as George Orwell's 1984 (1949), George Lucas's THX-1138 (1971), Stephen King's The Running Man (1982), Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998), Kurt Wimmer's Equilibrium (2002) and the Warchowski brothers' Matrix trilogy (1999-2003). The widely acknowledged forerunner of these works, however, was a novel, We, written in 1921 by the Russian author, Yevgeny Zamyatin.

Imaginary Numbers: an anthology of marvelous mathematical stories, diversions, poems, and musings, edited by William Frucht. Pp. 327. £12.50. 2000. ISBN 0 471 39341 X (John Wiley &amp; Sons).

Imaginary Numbers: an anthology of marvelous mathematical stories, diversions, poems, and musings, edited by William Frucht. Pp. 327. £12.50. 2000. ISBN 0 471 39341 X (John Wiley &amp; Sons). - Volume 85 Issue 504

Scraps of the untainted sky: science fiction, utopia, dystopia

Dystopian narrative is a product of the social ferment of the twentieth century. A hundred years of war, famine, disease, state terror, genocide, ecocide, and the depletion of humanity through the buying and selling of everyday life provided fertile ground for this fictive underside of the utopian imagination. From the classical works by E. M. Forster, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Margaret Atwood, through the new maps of hell in postwar science fiction, and most recently in the dystopian turn of the 1980s and 1990s, this narrative machine has produced challenging cognitive maps of the given historical situation by way of imaginary societies which are even worse than those that lie outside their authors' and readers' doors.In Scraps of the Untainted Sky , Tom Moylan offers a thorough investigation of the history and aesthetics of dystopia. To situate his study, Moylan sets out the methodological paradigm that developed within the interdisciplinary fields of science fiction studies and utopian studies as they grow out of the oppositional political culture of the 1960 and 1970s (the context that produced the project of cultural studies itself). He then presents a thorough account of the textual structure and formal operations of the dystopian text. From there, he focuses on the new science-fictional dystopias that emerged in the context of the economic, political, and cultural convulsions of the 1980s and 1990s, and he examines in detail three of these new critical dystopias: Kim Stanley Robinson's The Gold Coast, Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower , and Marge Piercy's He, She, and It .With its detailed, documented, and yet accessible presentation, Scraps of the Untainted Sky will be of interest to established scholars as well as students and general readers who are seeking an in-depth introduction to this important area of cultural production.

Imaginary numbers: an anthology of marvelous mathematical stories, diversions, poems, and musings

Italo Calvino: The Form of Space. Rudy Rucker: A New Golden Age. Lewis Carroll: A Serpent with Corners (from A Tangled Tale). J. A. Lindon: A Positive Reminder. Raymond Smullyan: How Kazir Won His Wife. Alan Lightman: 11 May 1905 (from Einstein's Dreams). Roald Hoffman: Why Does Disorder Increase in the Same Direction of Time as That in Which the Universe Expands? Philip K. Dick: The Golden Man. Hilbert Schenck: The Morphology of the Kirkham Wreck. Abner Shimony: Resolution of the Paradox: A Philosophical Puppet Play. Piet Hein: Parallelism. Douglas Hofstadter Prelude...(from Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid). Stanislaw Lem: The Third Sally, or The Dragons of Probability (from The Seven Sallies of Trurl and Klapaucius). Edwin Abbott Abbott: Concerning Irregular Figures (from Flatland). Andrew Marvell: The Definition of Love. A. K. Dewdney: On Fiddib Har (from The Planiverse: Computer Contact with a Two--Dimensional World). Martin Gardner: The Church of the Fourth Dimension. Stanislaw Lem: The Extraordinary Hotel, or the Thousand and First Journey of Ion the Quiet. Anonymous: Ten Weary, Footsore Travelers. Racter: From The Policeman's Beard Is Half--Constructed. William Gibson: Burning Chrome. Fritz Leiber: Gonna Roll the Bones. Wislawa Szymborska: A Word on Statistics. Tommaso Landolfi: Giovanni and His Wife. Joe Haldeman: The Private War of Private Jacob. Jorge Luis Borges: The Library of Babel. Christian Bok: Enantiomorphosis (A Natural History of Mirrors). Connie Willis: Schwarzschild Radius. Siv Cedering: Letter from Caroline Herschel (1750--1848). Yevgeny Zamyatin: From We. J. G. Ballard: The Garden of Time. Acknowledgments. Permission Acknowledgments.

&lt;i&gt;Vineland&lt;/i&gt; and Dystopian Fiction

Pynchon's <em>Vineland </em>(1990) presents a vivid and chilling picture of contemporary America as a land of lost hopes and broken dreams, a place where huge, impersonal forces have subtly gained the power to dictate the courses of individual lives. It therefore has much in common with the modern tradition of dystopian fiction, as its setting in 1984 indicates, including, in addition to George Orwell's 1984 (1949), Yevgeny Zamyatin's <em>We </em>(1924) and Aldous Huxley's <em>Brave New World </em>(1932). All these dystopian fictions involve an opposition between rationality (usually the cold rationality of official control) and irrationality (typically the irrational passion of human feeling). This conflict between society and individual, or reason and passion, figures in dystopian fictions in a variety of ways. For example, the authoritarian governments depicted by authors of dystopian fiction tend to regard sexuality as a focus for social control of individual lives, just as those who rebel against such governments often consider sexual emancipation an important part of their rebellions. Dystopian governments also frequently proscribe practices (like the taking of mind-altering drugs) that might lead to alternative states of consciousness or ways of viewing reality. The treatment of the rationality-irrationality and society-individual oppositions by Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell and Pynchon can be usefully illuminated within the framework of theories of modern culture like those proposed by Michel Foucault. Indeed, the treatment of this issue in dystopian fiction resonates with a number of modern theoretical debates concerning the merits of reason as the paradigm of modern society.

Einstein and the Art of Yevgeny Zamyatin

Einstein and the Art of Yevgeny Zamyatin

Yevgeny Zamyatin: The Essential, the Superfluous, and Textual Noise

Revolution and heresy have become synonymous with the name of Yevgeny Zamyatin. These terms, employed frequently throughout Zamyatin's writings-in essays like Scythians? I Am Afraid, and On Literature, Revolution, and Entropy, and in the dystopian novel Wehave been picked up by readers as critical catch-phrases. D. J. Richards's work is entitled Zamyatin: A Soviet Alex M. Shane calls the biographical section of his Life and Works ofEvgenij Zamjatin The Biography of a Heretic'; and Mirra Ginsburg's collection of Zamyatin's essays also bears the title A Soviet Heretic.3 As these titles suggest, revolution and heresy have been seen to be central issues in the works of this Soviet writer. And indeed they are. But their pervasive presence in Zamyatin's writings does not mean that they completely control those writings, or that they offer no problems for the critical reader. For to speak of revolution and heresy is to speak of a certain relationship with law, and it is the ambiguity of this relationship-of the interdependence of revolution and law, heresy and dogma-that interferes with any simple and unproblematic understanding of these two terms. It is an interference that often clouds the transparent clarity of the Zamyatin text. Such clouding obscures even such a seminal essay as On Literature, Revolution, and Entropy, the piece that perhaps more than any other earns Zamyatin his revolutionary and heretical reputation. Revolution in this essay does not seem to be a problem, with Zamyatin going one stage beyond the alphabet to articulate our to the question, What is revolution?4 answer is given in terms of construction and destruction; in terms of the melting of solidified dogma by the fires of heresy: When (in science, religion, social life, art) a flaming, seething sphere grows cold, the fiery molten rock becomes covered with dogma-with a

Pynchon's "Entropy": A Russian Connection

In 1923, Russian naval engineer Yevgeny Zamyatin published an essay which antagonized the Soviet government, an annoyance that increased greatly when Zamyatin's dystopian novel We, a satire on the Russian Revolution never yet published in the Soviet Union, appeared in Russian in Prague. The 1923 essay is titled lion Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters. In it, Zamyatin argues against complacency in government and art and for a continuing revolution, for a continual changing of forms and for a continuous receptivity to new ideas, however distasteful. I think that Thomas Pynchon was aware of Zamyatin's essay when he wrote his own story "Entropy" in 1958-59, but I must create a Kekulean chain to establish the connection.

Book Reviews

Abstract Abstract Duras, Marguerite, “The Malady of Death,” Trans. Yara Milos, The Evergreen Review, No. 98 (1984): 79–89– Reviewed by Suzanne Hecht Frances Mossiker. Madame de Sévigné: A Life and Letters. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983. 538 pp. $22.95. From the original French, primarily: Correspondance [de Madame de Sévigné]. Ed. Roger Duchěne, 3 vols. Paris: Editions Gallimard. 1972, 1974, 1978. Reviewed by Elena B. Odio Sibilla Aleramo. A Woman. Trans. Rosalind Delmar, with an Introduction by Richard Drake. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980. 219 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Rina Ferrarelli Märta Tikkanen. Love Story of the Century. Trans. Stina Katchadourian. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1984. 132 pp. $7.50. From the original Swedish text: Århundradets kärlekssaga. Stockholm. Bokförlaget Trevi AB. 1978. Reviewed by Robert E. Bjork Nathalie Sarraute. Childhood. Trans. Barbara Wright. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1984. 246 pp. $14.95. From the original French text: Enfance. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1983. Reviewed by Laura Hinderks Thompson Yevgeny Zamyatin. We. Trans. Mirra Ginsburg. New York: Avon, 1983. 232 pp. $3.95. From the original Russian text, MbI. New York: Chekhov Publishing House, 1952. Reviewed by Mary Maddock Carmen Martín Gaite. The Back Room. Trans. Helen R. Lane. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. 210 pp. $17.95. Reviewed by Joseph Schraibman Géza Csáth. Opium and Other Stories. Trans. Jascha Kessler and Charlotte Rogers. New York: Penguin Books, 1983. 206 pp. $4.95. Reprint. Originally published: The Magician's Garden and Other Stories. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Reviewed by Clara Gyorgyey Ilse Aichinger. Selected Poetry and Prose. Trans, and ed. Allen H. Chappel, intro. by Lawrence L. Langer. Colorado: Logbridge-Rhodes, 1983. 141 pp. $6.50. Reviewed by Sharon Sloan

The Dragon: Fifteen Stories. By Yevgeny Zamyatin. Translated and edited by Mirra Ginsburg. New York: Random House, 1967. xx, 291 pp. $5.95.

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