About one month ago, precisely on 1st of February, the Russian writer with the anglicized name of Eugene Zamyatin would complete 140 years old. This post is a tribute to him. He was one of the first authors to write against totalitarianism and its bad consequences for the people, including mass surveillance to control every aspect of the life of the people. This post is a summary of two articles. The first was published at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Zamyatin. The second is a review of the book written in 1946 by the famous writer George Orwell author of another dystopian novel with the title of "1984" at https://www.orwell.ru/library/reviews/zamyatin/english/e_zamy
Eugene Zamyatin (1884-1937) was a Russian author of science fiction, philosophy, literary criticism and political satire. The son of an Orthodox priest, Zamyatin lost his faith in religion at an early age and became a Bolshevik. As a member of the Party Revolutionary, Zamyatin was repeatedly arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and exiled. However, Zamyatin was deeply disturbed by the policies pursued by the Communist Party following the Revolution as he had been by Tsarist policy. Due to his use of literature to both satirize and criticize the Soviet Union's enforced conformity and increasing totalitarianism, Zamyatin is now considered one of the first Soviet dissidents. He is most famous for his highly influential and widely imitated book published in 1921, dystopian novel "We", which is set in a futuristic surveillance state. In the same year, "We" became the first work banned by the Soviet Union and Zamyatin arranged for the book to be smuggled to the west for publication. The outrage this sparked within the Party led directly to the state-organized defamation and blacklisting of Zamyatin and his request for permission from Stalin to leave his homeland. He died in 1937 in Paris and after his death continued to inspire multiple generations of Soviet dissidents. Zamyatin was born in Lebedyan, 300km south of Moscow, he studied naval engineering in Saint Petersburg, from 1902 until 1908. In March 1916, he was sent to the U.K. to supervise the construction of icebreakers at the shipyards in Wallsend. In 1917 he returned to Petersburg and plunged into the seething literary activity that was one of the most astonishing by-products of the revolution in ruined and hungry Russia. He wrote stories, plays and criticism, he lectured on literature. And very soon he came under fire from the newly proletarian writers who sought to impose on all art the sole criterion of 'usefulness to the revolution.' But, as the Russian Civil War of 1917-1923 continued, Zamyatin's writings became increasingly critical toward the Bolshevik party. Even though he was an old Bolshevik and accepted the revolution, he believed that independent speech and thought are necessary to any healthy society and opposed the party's increasing suppression of freedom of speech and the censorship of literature, media and arts. Zamyatin's vision was too far-reaching, too noncorformist and too openly expressed to be tolerated by the purveyors of official and compulsory dogma. He was attacked as a bourgeois intellectual. All the instruments of power were brought into use in the campaign for conformity. Faced with grim alternatives, most of Zamyatin's colleagues yielded to pressure, recanted publicly, in many cases rewrote their works to communist construction demanded by the dictatorship. Others writers, like Babel and Olesha, chose silence. Many committed suicide. Zamyatin's destruction took a different form, he became the object of a frenzied campaign of vilification. He was, in effect, presented with the choice of repudiating his work and his views, or total expulsion from literature. Instead of surrendering, Zamyatin, whom Mirra Ginsburg has dubbed "a man of incorruptible and uncompromising courage," He and his wive left Soviet Union in 1931 and settled in Paris. Zamyatin's novel "We", which he wrote between 1920 and 1921, is set many centuries in the future. D-503, a mathematician, lives in the One State, a society constructed almost entirely of glass apartment-buildings, which assist mass surveillance. People march in step with each other and are uniformed. There is no way of referring to people except by numbers. The individuals's behaviour is outlined by the State. Like all other citizens of One State, D-503 lives in a glass apartment and is carefully watched by the government. D-503's lover, O-90 has been assigned by the State to visit him on certain nights. She is forbid to have children and is deeply grieved by her state in life. O-90's other lover and D-503's best friend is R-13, a State poet who reads his verse at public executions. While on an assigned with O-90, D-503 meets a woman named I-330. I-330 smokes cigarettes, drinks vodka and flirts with D-503 instead of applying for a ticket sex-visit, all these acts are illegal according to the laws of One State. Slowly, I-330 reveals that she is a member of an organization of rebels against the One State. The novel does not end happily for I-330 and D-503, it also ends with a general uprising by the rebels and with the One State's survival in doubt. Unsurprisingly, the Soviet Government refused to allow the publication of "We". The first thing anyone would notice about "We" is the fact, I believe that Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" must be partly derived from it. Both books deal with the rebellion of the human spirit against a rationalised and mechanised world. Though Huxley's book shows less political awareness and is more influenced by biological and psychological theories. In the twenty-sixth century, in Zamyatin's vision of it, the inhabitants have completely lost their individuality as to be known only by numbers. They live in glass houses and apartments, which enables the political police to supervise them more easily. They all wear identical uniforms. They live on synthetic food, and their usual recreation is to march in fours while the anthem of the One State is played through loudspeakers. They are allowed for one hour, known as the sex hour, to lower the curtain round their glass apartments. In spite of endocrination and the vigilance of the government, many of the human instinct are still there. The teller of the story, D-503 falls in love (this is a crime) with I-330 who is member of a resistance movement. There are many executions in Zamyatin's dystopia. The executions and the scene describing it is given of the slave civilisations of the ancient world. It is this intuitive grasp of the irrational totalitarianism, human sacrifice, cruelty and the worship of a leader who is credited with divine attributes.
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