Comment by mcavoybn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcavoybn | Hacker News Reader

>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)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com