How Yevgeny Zamyatin shaped dystopian fiction | Hacker News Reader

How Yevgeny Zamyatin shaped dystopian fiction

newstatesman.com

96 pointsrutenspitz24 comments

"We" by Zamyatin is one of the best books I read all of last year. It's out of copy right, so freely downloadable too. Found it much more compelling than either a brave new world or 1984, even though both those books are also great. "We" seemed much more coherent and thought through.

Reading his back story makes this even more interesting, given that he was living in a totalitarian state. I'd recommend reading his Wikipedia entry too.

In short: highly recommended reading.

I read it in college for a science fiction class. It was amazing. Orwell also thought so(https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/jun/08/geor...).

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61963

Yes, one of my all time favorites.

Is there any specific translation you'd recommend?

Natasha Randall's is the best I've found. She's thoughtful in how she approaches grey areas of translation.

In a nicely formatted version by Standard eBooks here:

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/yevgeny-zamyatin/we/gregor...

I've never heard Platonov mentioned in the West when it comes to Russian/USSR literature dealing with ideological totality. Probably Platonov's language is very hard to translate in the way preserving his sound. To me his https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Foundation_Pit is if one removed all the fictional elements from "We", removed even any [anti] glory of "dystopia" and any color, got down to the very ground, and what raw core left would be it. On some plane it is close, though much more brutal on the reader, to the Strugatskis' "Snail on the Slope".

I deeply hated Котлован (The Foundation Pit) at school. To this day I can't understand why this on is even in school program.

Deep consolations to your fate :) It must have been real torture. Putting it on school program is worse than putting Dostoevsky there. While i was able to read Dostoevsky again later at University, and that time i was enjoying it and started to understand him (at least it was my impression that i was understanding him), i was able to start reading Platonov only when i was doing heavy physical labor 12-14 hours/day 7 days a week while working in summer construction in Siberia ("stroyotryad") - that puts you into the state of mind suitable for Platonov :)

Does anyone know of a good Kindle version?

This one [1] purports to be the Clarence Brown translation. But it bears no semblance to Brown's translation published in paperback by Penguin [2], and looks in fact to be the old version by Zilboorg.

From what I can tell, the Brown version is much better. But it's not available on Kindle?

There's a whole bunch of Kindle versions that all have terrible typography (even worse than most Kindle books, I mean).

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08CKCHMV6

[2] https://www.amazon.com/We-Yevgeny-Zamyatin/dp/0140185852

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/yevgeny-zamyatin/we/gregor...

That's the public domain Zilboorg translation.

"We" is amazing. Have read it several times because there is so much to the text. Nothing is accidental, even down to the numbers he picks for the characters (many are related through mathematical formulas). I love gifting copies.

LeGuin had a great essay called The Stalin in The Soul regarding Zamyatin and We, I first read it in her book The Language of The Night about 40 years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Language_of_the_Night

Haven't found it online, but did find this description of it http://jesseabrahamlucas.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-stalin-in-... - for some reason I remembered it as the Stalin of The Soul.

on edit: Note the description is anti-LeGuin, and her conclusions of the essay, but is still worth reading I think.

"We" can be easily considered a prequel to the "Equilibrium" movie

>While Wells, Huxley and Orwell invented flawed worlds, the Soviet writer was living in one.

Forgive me if I am reading too much into this, but the tagline for this article feels weird to me. It feels weird because it implies that the "worlds" of Wells, Huxley, and Orwell were without flaw. Was western civilization in the early 20th century really without flaw? Isn't every great dystopian work essentially a thought experiment where the author analytically deducts the endgame of the most pathological tendencies of the society they belong to? I get where they are coming from, but I think this idea that America was perfect in the earth 20th century really needs to be fought against. Don't get me wrong, there were many great things that happened during that period of time, but implying that it was without flaw makes the dystopian conversation about nationality rather than the universality of human imperfection and how that is reflected in the greater society, often insidiously.

Anyways, I'm definitely going to pick up a copy of 'We' after reading this. I love dystopian novels and had no idea 'We' was the originator. I think the idea of dystopia is closely related to science fiction, both could be considered a subset of stories that project what the future or some alternate timeline might be like. I think the really cool thing about dystopian stories is that they can act as a sort of crystal ball where humanity can glimpse a gestalt of its potential future and make decisions based on that. For example, in Lord of the Rings, Frodo is shown visions of the Shire should he fail his mission. These visions provide a deep sense of motivation for Frodo's grueling mission to Mount Doom, and without the memory of his love for the Shire (which was reinforced by Samwise towards the end) it's likely that Frodo would have succumbed to the power of the ring and failed to destroy it. I think that 1984, Brave New World, War of the Worlds, We, and novels like this perform a similar function for the collective conscious of humanity. The only difference is that we are all collectively Frodo's and Sam's, the one ring is our own self-destructive pathology, and the Shire is the purity of conscious creation from which we originally emerged.

I think a better way of phrasing this would be "While Wells, Huxley and Orwell invented totalitarian worlds, the Soviet writer was living in one." Of course Western society had flaws, and that was part of the point of Wells, Huxley, and Orwell writing their dystopias, but Zamyatin was living in the sort of society British authors could only imagine in their dystopias.

But that is a very simple-minded take. You just have to read "Down and out in Paris and London" to notice people suffered and suffer a lot in the "perfect" western world, so Orwell didnt have to "imagine" material to describe a dystopia, London, Paris or Moscow would have worked just the same, although for different reasons. Sometimes a soviet writer had a way better life than a worker in the west. Zamyatin was part of the soviet intelligentsia, and wrote "We" as a 36 year old writer in 1920 when the USSR was barely 3 years old. And yes he did it against what he perceived was an alarmingly increase in the totalitarianism of the new regime, but it is not like he had passed 10 years in the Gulag by then.

People in the west dont know how to calibrate the experience of people in other societies, for the man in the street what really sucked was the economy, not the totalitarianism, because an argument for the same lack of control of ACTUAL political and economical power can be made for the citizens in western countries.

By the way, Zamyatin also wrote "Islanders" where he satirized, and criticized all the hypocrisy, frivolities and arrogance of the English middle classes which he apparently detested, but you rarely see that work lionized in The Guardian or here, I wonder why.

While Zamyatin satirized both sides, you seem to be quite certain of your ideology when you say that it's all about the economy and not totalitarianism. I guess you've never met high-ranking members of communist regimes who emigrated for ideological reasons, leaving behind relatively comfortable lives to start from scratch in the west. I'm sure you would twist their experience into a greed thing.

In the West people suffered from their peers' indifference, in Stalin's USSR they suffered because it was the plan.

I wouldn't like to starve to death, but if I had to choose, I'd rather risk hunger from unemployment in 1930s England than dig the Belomor Canal in 1930s Russia.

The USSR didn’t exist in 1920: the civil war was ongoing (until 1922).

> Forgive me if I am reading too much into this, but the tagline for this article feels weird to me. It feels weird because it implies that the "worlds" of Wells, Huxley, and Orwell were without flaw.

Quite. Orwell was shot trying to save free Spain from a fascist dictatorship tacitly supported by the Western powers, lived through WW II, and before the rise of the modern welfare state experienced the poverty of being a waiter in Paris, and a tramp in England.

in Soviet Russia/Union you had radical Utopia gone wrong as the governing ideology, an ideology that could wipe anyone out just like that, without any constraints whatsoever; (talking here about the Utopia of Thomas Moore that is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_%28book%29 - You didn't have as much power in the hands of the state in rest of Europe, until the damned nazis)

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