A chic novel, which I read last in a series of dystopias. Went in reverse chronological order 🙂 The action takes place approximately in the thirty-second century. This novel describes a society of strict totalitarian control over the individual (names and surnames are replaced by letters and numbers, the state controls even intimate life), ideologically based on Taylorism, scientism and the denial of fantasy, controlled by the "Benefactor" "elected" on an uncontested basis. However, in many respects the situation is beginning to materialize.
“Real literature can exist only where it is made not by diligent and complacent officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, skeptics” (article “I am afraid”). This was Zamyatin's writing credo. And the novel "We", written in 1920, became its artistic embodiment.
At that time, the novel was not published in Soviet Russia: literary critics perceived it as an evil caricature of the socialist, communist society of the future. In addition, the novel contained allusions to some events of the civil war (“the war of the city against the countryside”). In the late 1920s, a campaign of persecution by the literary authorities fell upon Zamyatin. Literaturnaya Gazeta wrote: “E. Zamyatin must understand the simple idea that the country of socialism under construction can do without such a writer.
The novel "We", known to readers of America and Europe, returned to its homeland only in 1988. The novel influenced the work of George Orwell (the novel "", 1949), and Aldous Huxley (the novel "", 1932)
The novel “We” by Zamyatin can be downloaded without problems at the link:
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The novel is built as a diary of one of the key figures of a hypothetical society of the future. This is a brilliant mathematician and chief engineer of the latest achievement of technical thought - the INTEGRAL spacecraft. The State Newspaper called on everyone to contribute to writing a message to the inhabitants of distant planets, who should meet the future INTEGRAL crew. The message should contain agitation for the creation on their planet of the same brilliant, absolute and perfect society, which has already been created in the person of the One State on Earth. As a conscientious citizen, D-503 (there are no more names - people are called “numbers”, they shave their heads smoothly and wear “unif”, i.e. the same clothes, only the color of which indicates belonging to the male or female sex) intelligibly and in detail describes life under totalitarianism on the example of his own. At the beginning, he writes in the way a person usually thinks, who is blissfully ignorant of any other way of life and social order, except for the one established by the authorities in his country. It is obvious that the United State has existed in an unshakable form for more than one hundred years; and everything seems to be calibrated with unmistakable accuracy. The "Green Wall" separates the giant city-state from the surrounding nature; The “Table of the Hour” minute by minute regulates the regime of society; all apartments are exactly the same with their glass walls and an ascetic set of furniture; there is a law of “pink tickets” and “sexual hour”, which guarantees the right of everyone to everyone (so that no one has the slightest attachment to anyone); The "Guardians' Bureau" ensures state security and, in the event of execution, destroys the criminal with the help of a special machine instantly, by turning into a puddle of water; the all-powerful ruler, called the "Benefactor", is elected unanimously on a non-alternative basis.
From the very beginning, it is clear that the state still could not completely eradicate the human from people. So, there is still attachment to loved ones. In particular, the protagonist prefers to spend his "sexual hours" with O-90 - a rosy-cheeked, puffy and short girl who herself does not seek to apply for someone other than D-503. However, she also has another sexual partner - the poet R-13. But he and D-503 are friends, and in his diary, the Chief Builder calls O and R his family.
After meeting with the female number I-330 (thin, dry and wiry actress), D's life changes dramatically. From the first meeting with her, the hero feels an unconscious threat to his former life. I-330 is persistent, and their meetings occur more and more often - including at the wrong time (when everyone is at work). The hero, by magnetic will I, also violates other laws of the One State: in the "Ancient House" (an open-air museum - an apartment of the 20th century preserved in its original form), she gives him a taste of alcohol and tobacco (in the One State, any addictive substances are strictly prohibited) . In the course of further communication with her, the protagonist realizes that he fell in love absolutely in the "ancient" sense of the word - "cannot live without her", obeys her instructions, although their criminality is obvious to him (according to the laws of the One State). She admits that she works in the interests of the revolution. To the exclamation of the hero that the last revolution happened long ago and led to the formation of the United State, I ardently objects that there can be no last revolution, just like the last number. It turns out that not only the old woman - an employee of the museum, but also the doctor (and even some of the Guardians!) are covering for the revolutionaries. All these numbers in one way or another contribute to the meetings of D with I.
O suddenly comes to D without a ticket and demands to give her a child (in the United State - “child breeding”, children study in schools where teachers are robots; each adult must fulfill a certain “Mother and Father Norm”; it is obvious that O also defiantly transgresses law). O-90 becomes pregnant with D-503.
Shocked by recent seemingly unthinkable recent events, D-503 decides to be examined by doctors - and in the end it turns out that, according to a psychotherapist from the Medical Bureau, he "formed a soul." Moreover, the doctor notes that recently such cases are becoming more and more. Meanwhile, I-330 confides D in the secrets of the revolution. She leads him beyond the Green Wall, where, as it turns out, people also live - "savages" overgrown with unnaturally long hair. This happened as a result of the historical development of the Earth, when the establishment of the United State was preceded by the Great Bicentennial War. Back then, billions of people died of starvation, disease, and directly in the course of hostilities. The last few million have adapted to a fundamentally new life, when even food is a product of oil distillation and is distributed equally among everyone in the form of identical cubes. Races have ceased to exist, and only individual anthropological traits give out certain traits of ancestors in numbers. For example, D-503 has increased body hair, and his friend R-13 has thick, "Negro" lips. Millions of residents of the city-state firmly believed that, apart from them, there were no more people on Earth. Relying on the masses of "savages", the revolutionaries (self-name - "Mephi") want to undermine the Green Wall in many places and, as it were, throw nature itself into battle against the city-state that has become unaccustomed to the natural environment. But beforehand, on the "Day of Unanimity" (the main state holiday - the re-election of the Benefactor, on which everyone unanimously votes "For" the re-election, personifying this unity), I-330 and quite a lot of numbers vote against. Since this is the first time this has happened in centuries, panic sets in among the non-Mephi, but the Guardians manage to keep order. The hero sees how his friend, a poet, carries away I-330, knocked down and almost trampled down by a frightened crowd, in his arms, which may indicate that he is with Mephi ... When the Guardians go from apartment to apartment and arrest every suspicious person, D-503 almost was not a victim of his own diary, but the Guardians read only the top page, where the engineer managed to write several chaotic sentences to the glory of the Benefactor.
The revolutionaries are preparing an unheard of audacity plan - to seize the newly built "INTEGRAL", which is equipped with a powerful weapon capable of crushing the United State. D-503, obsessed with feelings for I, actively cooperates. However, during the first flight, when the INTEGRAL is supposed to fall into the hands of Mephi, several Guardians in hiding on board claim that the authorities are aware of the insidious plan. Once the Mephis see they can't catch the Enforcers by surprise, they cancel the operation. The protagonist decides that he was only used. However, later he visits apartment I for the first time and sees a lot of pink tickets there, as it seemed to him at the beginning, only with his number. But, seeing another one, not even remembering the numbers, only the letter "F", he runs out of the room in a rage.
Meanwhile, the One State strikes back - from now on, the entire population must undergo the "Great Operation", a psychosomatic procedure to remove (with the help of X-rays) the brain's "fantasy center". Those who underwent the operation actually become biological machines. In turn, the Mephis blow up the Green Wall and disable the invisible dome of the force field. Shocked by the widespread intrusion of wildlife, many numbers fall into a mass psychosis, an unimaginable euphoria. Many copulate without lowering their curtains (in contempt for the law of the Sexual Hour).
With the help of D-503 and I-330, in an atmosphere of general chaos, O-90, by this time already in late pregnancy, escapes behind the Green Wall; she did not undergo the Operation and is proud that her child will grow up "free".
Another female number is also found, in love with D-503, but hiding it for the time being. This is Yu, some kind of concierge at the entrance to the house where D's apartment is located. Yu also works in the field of "baby care". She always behaved with D as if he were one of her pupils, tried to warn him, as a child, from rash acts. She loves him as if unconsciously, but quite consciously (albeit with the best of intentions: to protect him from the criminal road!) informs the Guardians about him. When D, having learned about her deed, in a state of passion rushes at her, the elderly Yu throws off her unif and offers him her body. However, he is unable to kill her and leaves his apartment.
Unexpectedly, the Benefactor himself honors D-503 with his audience. Having communicated with the Benefactor for the first time, the hero sees that this is a rather elderly and tired life, but in principle not a very remarkable number. It is obvious that he is the same slave of the system of the United State, like any other, even if formally he is the head of the State. As the chief engineer, the hero is spared and limited to pictorial exhortation. At the same time, the Benefactor raises doubts in him: for I-330, he was used only as the chief engineer of INTEGRAL.
From I-330, he is last seen in his room: she came to find out what they were talking about with the Benefactor, and nothing more. After the meeting, she leaves. The main character is tormented by suffering: he does not understand what to do next. In frustration, he runs to the Guardians Bureau to repent. There he meets Guardian S-471, who has been following him throughout the events. D-503 begins to talk rather chaotically about what is eating him, but in response he sees only a smile. He realizes that S is also at one with the revolutionaries and hastily leaves the Bureau. In his tossing about in the midst of general panic, he meets a number who made a discovery: the universe is not infinite. This is from the number sitting on the toilet next to D in the public restroom. Grabbing pieces of paper from the hands of a neighbor, D-503 makes his last notes in his former mind. However, then everyone who was nearby is herded into the nearest auditorium with the painfully familiar number 112. There they are chained to tables and subjected to the Great Operation. Having lost his imagination, D-503 does his duty (which, in fact, he wanted and did not dare to do before the Operation) - he reports about the revolutionaries, their plans and whereabouts, and about his once so beloved I-330.
The end of the novel is:
... In the evening of the same day - at the same table with Him, with the Benefactor - I sat (for the first time) in the famous Gas Room. They brought that woman. In my presence, she had to give her testimony. This woman was stubbornly silent and smiling. I noticed that she had sharp and very white teeth and that it was beautiful. Then she was led under the Bell. Her face became very white, and since her eyes were dark and large, it was very beautiful. When air was pumped out from under the Bell - she threw back her head, half-closed her eyes, her lips were clenched - it reminded me of something. She looked at me, clutching the arms of the chair tightly, looking until her eyes were completely closed. Then they pulled her out, with the help of electrodes they quickly brought her to her senses and again put her under the Bell. This was repeated three times, and still she did not say a word. Others, brought along with this woman, turned out to be more honest: many of them began to speak from the first time. Tomorrow they will all climb the steps of the Benefactor's Machine.
It is impossible to postpone - because in the western quarters - there is still chaos, roar, corpses, animals and - unfortunately - a significant number of numbers that have betrayed reason.
But on the transverse, 40th Avenue, they managed to construct a temporary Wall from high-voltage waves. And I hope we win. More: I am sure - we will win. Because the mind must win.
The novel was created shortly after the author's return from England to revolutionary Russia in 1920 (according to some reports, work on the text continued into 1921). The first publication of the novel took place abroad in 1924. In 1929, the novel was used for massive criticism of E. Zamyatin, and the author was forced to defend himself, justify himself, explain himself, since the novel was regarded as his political mistake and "a manifestation of wrecking the interests of Soviet literature."
After another study at the next meeting of the writers' community, E. Zamyatin announced his withdrawal from the All-Russian Union of Writers. Witness and participant in the events K. Fedin wrote in this regard: “I was crushed by the flogging of writers that took place on September 22, my personality had never been so humiliated.” The discussion of Zamyatin's "case" was a signal for a toughening of the party's policy in the field of literature: the year was 1929 - the year of the Great Turning Point, the onset of Stalinism. It became meaningless and impossible for Zamyatin to work as a writer in Russia, and, with the permission of the government, he went abroad in 1931.
Explaining what happened to him, E. Zamyatin cites a Persian fable about a rooster, which had a bad habit of singing an hour earlier than others, because of which the owner fell into an absurd position. In the end, he cut off the rooster's head. “The novel “We,” the writer concludes bitterly, “turned out to be a Persian rooster: it was still too early to raise this question in this form.” In fact, the novel has not yet been read in the writer's homeland: the first publication of the novel in the USSR took place only in 1988 (Znamya magazine. 1988. No. 4-5).
"We" and the golden legend of mankind, or the archetype of the clan. The idea of ​​a joint happy human community, universal brotherhood has long attracted thinkers. This idea has been revisited over and over again throughout centuries of history. In the pre-Christian era - this is the philosophical work of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato "The State", in the Renaissance - "Utopia" by T. More and "City of the Sun" by T. Campanella. What is the secret of the amazing appeal of this idea?
In world mythology, there is a story about the "golden age of mankind", which is cited in his poem "Works and Days" by the ancient Greek poet Hesiod. In ancient times, the era of the existence of the clan, already a thing of the past, seemed to be a golden age, since there was no division into the rich and the poor, everyone was equal before nature and everyone found support and protection in the tribal community. This tribal (swarm) beginning, with the lack of formalization of personal qualities, helped to survive, to take part in the common cause of continuing life, remained as a golden legend in mythology.
The plot of the "golden age" can be called archetypal, because it was polished and remained in the memory - in the collective unconscious of mankind, manifesting itself in one way or another in philosophy, art in different eras. “One of the artistic images based on the archetype of the clan became a utopian state… This image, due to its deep significance and artistic universality, has remained relevant for artistic consciousness for two millennia” 2 .
However, it is quite obvious that in subsequent times the ideal of the genus had to come into conflict with the personal principle, which became a fact of social life, philosophy, art during the Christian Middle Ages, and then in the Renaissance.
And if before the history of world literature knew only "utopias" - i.e. description of an ideal joint human hostel, then in modern times the situation is changing. On the one hand, the human personality recognizes itself as equal to the whole world, and on the other hand, powerful dehumanizing factors appear and intensify, first of all, technological civilization, which introduces a mechanistic, hostile principle to man, since the means of influencing a technical civilization on a person, the means of manipulating his consciousness become ever more powerful, global.
At this time, in contrast to utopia, dystopia appears as an anti-genre aimed at revealing the negative meaning of utopia. According to modern researchers, the main difference between dystopia and utopia is that “utopians are looking for ways to create ... an ideal world that will be based on the synthesis of the postulates of goodness, justice, happiness and prosperity, wealth and harmony. And dystopians seek to understand how the human person would feel in this exemplary atmosphere.
The pronoun "We", as well as the pronoun "I", in itself does not contain negative content, but after the appearance of Zamyatin's novel, "We" sounds rather negative. What is its meaning, i.e. what is the community of people united by this single name? The “We” of the United State is not an association of free individuals, but a faceless “We”, mechanical, based on the simultaneous performance of public works, biological functions, etc. This is a non-reasoning mass of people, headed by the Benefactor, brought to a parody the idea of ​​collectivism.
Read also other articles on the work of E.I. Zamyatin and analysis of the novel "We":
- 1.1. The history of creation and the meaning of the title of the novel "We"
J. Orwell said in 1932 about E. Zamyatin's novel "We": "This novel is a signal of the danger threatening man, humanity from the hypertrophied power of machines and the power of the state - no matter what." This assessment of the ideological content of the novel is pre-. fairly true. But still, its meaning is not reduced only to criticism of machine civilization, and the denial of any kind of power.
Zamyatin's dystopia, written in 1920, contains a clear allusion to the realities of revolutionary transformations in Russia. With his characteristic gift of foresight, Zamyatin says in his novel that the path chosen by the new leadership of the country leads away from the bright ideas of socialism. The writer already in the first post-revolutionary years began to notice alarming trends in the “new” life: excessive cruelty of the authorities, the destruction of classical culture and other traditions in society, for example, in the field of family relations. Time has proved the validity of Zamyatin's controversy with the political practice of the first years of Soviet power - this is how the task of the author of the novel "We" can be defined.
The action in the novel is moved to the distant future. After the end of the Great Bicentennial War between the city and the countryside, mankind solved the problem of hunger - oil food was invented. At the same time, 0.2% of the world's population survived. These people became citizens of the United State. After the "victory" over hunger, the state "launched an offensive against another ruler of the world - against Love." The historical sexual law was proclaimed: "Each of the numbers has the right, as a sexual product, to any number." For the numbers, a suitable report card of sexual days was determined and a pink coupon book was issued.
About the life of the United State - "the highest peaks in human history" - tells in the novel a talented engineer D-503, who keeps records for posterity. His diaries reveal the features of politics, culture of the United State, the characteristic relationships between people. At the beginning of the novel, D-503 adheres to the views traditional for the people of the United State. Then, under the influence of acquaintance with the revolutionary J-300 and love for her, much in his worldview changes.
First, D-503 appears before us as an enthusiastic admirer of the Benefactor. He admires the equality achieved in the state: all numbers are dressed the same, live in the same conditions, have equal sexual rights. It is obvious that the author of the novel does not agree with the narrator. The fact that D-503 seems to be equal is regarded by Zamyatin as a terrifying similarity. This is how he describes the walk: “We walked as always, that is, as warriors are depicted on Assyrian monuments: a thousand heads - two integral integral legs, two integral ones in the span of an arm.” The same can be seen during the election of the head of state, the result of which is predetermined: "The history of the United State does not know the case that on this solemn day at least one voice dared to break the solemn unison." In the arguments of D-503 about the disorderliness of the "elections of the ancients", as if by contradiction, the position of the author is revealed. He considers democratic elections the only acceptable ones.
Zamyatin described with surprising perspicacity that parody of the elections, which for a long time in the Land of Soviets was passed off as the elections themselves. The candidate for the post of head of the United State is always the same - the Benefactor. At the same time, democracy was proclaimed in the state.
The novel shows the life of a typical totalitarian state, with all its attributes. Here and shadowing the numbers, and the persecution of dissidents. The interests of the people are completely subordinated to the interests of the state. Numbers cannot have individuality, that's why they are numbers, in order to differ only in their ordinal number. The collective is in the foreground in such a state: “We” are from God, and “I” are from the devil.” The family here is replaced by a coupon right: And the housing provided to the numbers can hardly be called a home. They live in high-rise buildings, in rooms with transparent walls, so that they can be easily monitored.
The United State found justice for the disobedient - as a result of the Great Operation, to which all numbers were forcibly subjected, a fantasy was cut out for them. Much more reliable protection from dissent! Zamyatin writes that as a result of this operation, the heroes become like "some kind of humanoid tractors." D-503 after the operation finally gives up the impudent thoughts that arose under the influence of J-330. Now he doesn't hesitate to go to the Guardian's Bureau and denounce the rebels. He becomes a "worthy citizen of the United State." Thus, the words of the Benefactor came true about paradise, as about a place where blissful, desireless people with a carved fantasy stay.
In the United State, experiments are carried out not only on people. We see what the natural environment is turning into. In the city where the action takes place, there is nothing alive. We do not hear the birds, the rustle of trees, we do not see the sun (the sun that shone in the world of the ancients seemed to D-503 "wild"). The technocratic city-state is contrasted in the novel with the world behind the Wall - Living Nature. There, behind the Wall, "natural" people lived - the descendants of those who left after the two-hundred-year war in the forests. In the life of these people there is freedom, they perceive the world around them emotionally. However, Zamyatin does not consider these people ideal - they are far from technological progress, therefore their society is in a primitive stage of development.
Thus, Evgeny Zamyatin advocates the formation of a harmonious person. Numbers and "natural" people are extremes. Zamyatin's dreams of a harmonious person can be found in D-503's reflections on "forest" people and numbers; "Who are they? The half we lost, H2 and O. need the halves to connect.”
The ideological meaning of the work is revealed in the scene of the uprising of members of the revolutionary organization "Mephi" and its supporters. The wall separating the totalitarian world of the city-state from the free world has been blown up. In the city, a bird's hubbub is immediately heard - life comes there. But the uprising in the novel is defeated, and the city is again separated from the outside world. The United State once again erected a wall that forever cut people off from a free life. But the end of the novel is not hopeless: the “illegal mother” O-90 managed to escape behind the Wall, to the “forest” people. Born in the natural world, her child from D-503, according to Zamyatin's plan, should become one of the first perfect people in which two broken halves will unite.
With his novel, Zamyatin solves a number of the most important universal and political problems. The main themes in the novel are the themes of freedom and happiness, the state and the individual, the clash of the individual and the collective. Zamyatin shows that there can be no prosperous society that does not take into account the needs and interests of its citizens, with their right to choose. The political significance of the novel “We” was precisely defined by the historian C. Walsh: “Zamiatin and other authors of anti-utopias warn us not about erroneous political theories, but about the monstrous things that an initially good political movement can result in if it is perverted.”
The fate of this work, which was first published in the author's homeland only after almost 70 years, in 1988, proves its acute problems and political orientation. No wonder the novel aroused great interest in Russia in the 1920s, although Zamyatin's contemporaries could not see it printed. This work will always be relevant - as a warning about how totalitarianism destroys the natural harmony of the world and the individual.
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See also "We"
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The novel was written in 1921, but reached its reader almost seven decades later. It was published in Russia in the Znamya magazine only in 1988 (No. 4-5). The novel was involved in a number of acute conflicts of its era.
During 1921-1924. Zamyatin is fighting for the right of his offspring to exist: at least six public readings of the novel are known. It has not been possible to achieve publication in the homeland.
The novel was first published in English in Silburg's translation in New York in 1924. In 1927, fragments of the novel appeared in Russian in the Prague magazine Volya Rossii. It was this publication that became the official reason for the persecution of Zamyatin in Russia.
In 1952, the book banned in the homeland was published in Russian in New York by the A.P. Chekhov. The appearance of “We” preceded the foreign publication of “Doctor Zhivago” by B. Pasternak (1945-1955) and the subsequent wave of “tamizdat”, i.e. illegal publication abroad of works by Russian authors.
For many years, Zamyatin's creative heritage was in spiritual oblivion. It entered our spiritual life in the late 1980s, when access to previously forbidden literature was opened, when the works of A. Solzhenitsyn, A. Platonov,
V. Shalamov, writers from Russian abroad came to the readers.
However, at first, Zamyatin's novel was perceived almost as a textbook, according to which one can study the essence of the totalitarian system created in the USSR, and in Evgeny Zamyatin they saw not so much a writer as a fighter against this system. Because of this, the work created by the writer lost its spiritual and moral meaning, its true historical and philosophical content. Let's try to overcome this one-sided interpretation.
GENRE OF THE WORK. It is customary to call “We” a dystopia.
Using the genre scheme of utopia, Zamyatin transfers the action of the novel a thousand years ahead into a conditional fantasy space. He creates the image of the United State, sheltered from the "wild" space by the Green Wall.
Zamyatin's work is a dystopia, i.e. parody of utopia. Its goal is to expose utopia to ridicule, to expose it.
The United State, which built a “glass paradise” on earth, is, first of all, a parody of the utopian state of Plato.
Plato, an ancient Greek philosopher (428 or 427-348 or 347 BC), was one of the first to propose a scheme for the ideal type of social organization.
The structure of the Unified State parodies the structure of Plato's utopian society with its strict hierarchical model, in which there are rulers (Plato's priests-philosophers endowed with the highest power and highest knowledge, Zamyatin's - the Benefactor); intermediaries between the highest power and the lowest hierarchical structures (for Plato - warrior guards, for Zamyatin - employees of the "Bureau of Guardians" and poets); and, finally, producers of goods (for Plato - artisans and farmers, for Zamyatin - numbers), who are "lower" in the hierarchy of a utopian society.
The bearer of supreme power in Zamyatin is endowed with the name of the Benefactor. The oxymoron definitions that accompany the concept of “good” (“beneficial nets of happiness”, “beneficial web”, “beneficial yoke”), in combination with the repressive functions of a higher person, give the concept of “benefactor” a sarcastic character.
Zamyatin takes the idea of ​​the “usefulness” of art to the point of absurdity. Mocking the ideas of extreme utilitarianism, he comes up with mocking titles of books that “accompany” the life of numbers: these are “Mathematical Nones”, which help to learn the four rules of arithmetic, the desktop book “Stanzas on Sexual Hygiene”, a sonnet praising the multiplication table, the immortal tragedy “Late to work”, etc.
Zamyatin populates the unified state with happy citizens - numbers - a new race of geometric bodies and atvomats. This time, Zamyatin uses the weapon of parody against the utopias of the proletarians, who saw the main obstacle to mathematically unmistakable happiness in man. They glorified the mythological Proletarian, the worker who will overcome the imperfection of nature in himself and turn into a social automaton.
Residents of the One State have no names, only a state number. They have “faces not clouded by madness”, they walk in thousands of “measured rows, four by four, enthusiastically beating time” in the same “bluish unifs, with gold plaques on their chests”, each of which has an individual “state number of each and every one”. The greatest happiness for them is to turn into reality “into a steel six-wheeled hero” from the poem about the Tablet, i.e. in the car. The rhythm of their life is also likened to the rhythm of machines. “With six-wheel precision, at the same hour and at the same minute” millions of numbers wake up, at the same hour, “one million” they start and finish work, at the same second they bring spoons to their mouths go for a walk, go to sleep. This is how the image of “We” appears - a community of “I”, supposedly having lost themselves. Ho depersonalization turns out to be a fiction. Already at the level of naming the characters, an idea arises of the indestructibility of the personal principle. The Russian reader perceives the letters of the Latin alphabet not so much as a designation of speech sounds, but as geometric figures, which in themselves become a sign of individuality: “thin, sharp, stubbornly flexible, like a whip I-330”, “all of the circles” O-90 , “Double-curved” S, etc.
The diabolical paradox lies in the fact that the consciousness of being included in a team of like-minded people can lead to a state of uplift, inspiration, a sense of one’s extraordinary capabilities, one’s creative potential, one’s equality with the Creator (“Ancient God and we are at the same table”; “defeated the ancient God”) . Zamyatin was one of the first to feel and convey this feature of the mass consciousness, making it clear what power it has over a person, how it elevates and enslaves him.
An indispensable attribute of the One State and its “unconditional” value is the Green Wall, which turns the space into a world City, where there are no parks, gardens, trees, dogs, where there is pollen, and flowers, and grass cover, and birds flying into the gap, formed in the wall, both clouds and fog are perceived as something “foreign”, bringing discord into the relationship of a person with the artificial environment in which he lives.
Having arisen as a reality of the image of the One State, its indispensable attribute, the Green Wall turns out to be included in the action: the narrator approaches it, goes beyond it; as events unfold, the conspirators destroy the Wall; its restoration narrows the space of the artificial world. But the image of the Wall not only enters into the plan of the subject representation of the novel and is an essential detail of the development of the action, but is also filled with an ambivalent symbolic meaning. On the one hand, the Wall is the unconditional value of the “new world”, since it has the meaning of the border between the organized and unorganized world and serves as a guarantor of the safety of the inhabitants of the One State, their protection from the infinity of space in front of which a person feels helpless. On the other hand, the Wall symbolizes the rupture of the United State with the world of Nature, with “born chaos”, the rejection of man from the foremother of the earth.
In this context, the image of “oil food” takes on a special meaning. In the world of Zamyatin, the gospel “miracle” happened: “stones” turned into “bread”. Turn to the Gospel (Gospel of Matthew, ch. 4). Read about the temptation of Christ by the devil in the wilderness.
Oil food is not only a sign of preference for the material to the spiritual, which, according to the Gospel, Christ refuses, it is a sign of a violation of a person’s natural connection with the earth and its fruits, a break with blood tradition, the personification of the status of a person that R. Galtseva and I. Rodnyanskaya call “principled fatherlessness” of the dystopian world, where “the traditional veneration of the earth as a common mother is deliberately forgotten and the cult of synthetic products, not generated either by its bowels or its fruitful cover, is affirmed.”
The image of the United State receives additional volume due to the introduction of the mythologeme “paradise”, which acquires a parodic coloring: for Zamyatin it is a “glass paradise”. Glass not only acts as an element of subject detail (glass houses, glass sidewalks, floors, a glass spaceship, a glass dome over the City). As the text develops, repeated and varied, it acquires a symbolic meaning.
The transparency characteristic of glass emphasizes the absence in the world of the Unified State of secrecy, the right to isolation, to solitude and expresses the idea of ​​the forced “cathedralism” of existence in the metropolis: “...among our transparent walls, as if woven from sparkling air, we always live in plain sight, forever bathed in light. We have nothing to hide from each other.”
But glass not only reveals the life of another to the eye, but also serves as an invisible border, a barrier - forced “publicity” does not mean kinship, even a simple acquaintance.
The image of the United State and the complex of ideas associated with it (regulation, order, etc.) has its own color determinant in the novel. The blue color acquires a special semantic content in the novel. It is associated with the measured, “correct” existence of the citizens of the United State. The blue color is repeated in the description of the city-state, the clothes of its citizens (“uni-fa”), the sky without a single cloud. The hero admires the blue eyes of O-90, the color of which, in his opinion, testifies to the clarity, “correctness” of her thoughts.
The motif of glass in combination with the motif of blue (blue sky, bluish-gray unifs, blue majolica of the sky, blue eyes, gray-blue ranks) excites the idea of ​​stiffness, immobility and serves to implement the metaphor “ice city” (“The city below is as if from blue blocks of ice ... and the ice is still worth it ... because there is no such icebreaker that could crack the most transparent and strongest crystal of our life”). The motif of the “ice city” symbolizes the idea of ​​abandoning the Faustian idea of ​​​​infinite development inherent in European culture, of the United State as a world that has fallen out of world history, an absurd world where the Machine has become God.
Blue is opposed to yellow, red, green - the colors into which the hero plunges, going beyond the Green Wall, which protects the city-state from wildlife. Falling asleep, D-503 sees “colored” dreams. Introducing the image of natural, living life into the novel, Zamyatin uses a variety of colors.
Zamyatin attaches special importance to “warm”, or - in the semantics of the novel - “hot”, fiery colors - red and yellow, which in him denote revolution, movement, passion, life. On I-330, seducing the hero, there is a yellow dress, in the Ancient House - “a large, mahogany bed”, “yellow bronze - candelabra, a statue of Buddha”.
Zamyatin ironically plays up the substitution of Christian values ​​taking place in the United State. The guardians who monitor the obedience of the numbers are compared with guardian angels and are likened to the ancient angels who have been guarding a person since childhood. The faces of the angels, in the representation of numbers, should be “gentle menacing”. And the faces of people who came with a denunciation glow like lamps: they go to the “Guardian Bureau” with denunciations, as if they were going to confession.
THE IMAGE OF THE INTEGRAL AND ITS PLOT-FORMING ROLE. On the first page of the novel, an image appears that will become central in it and acquire a special symbolic meaning. This is the image of the Integral.
The integral is an important detail belonging to the sci-fi plan of Zamyatin's work. This is a space projectile created by the writer’s fantasy, capable of escaping the near-Earth atmosphere, reaching other worlds, bringing the Good News about the existence of the One State there, and with the help of absolute knowledge that this man-made paradise has, re-create, “integrate” the Universe, which is still in a state of "wild freedom"
It is around the Integral that the main events are tied up, the adventurous, love, psychological plots of the novel are built. The novel begins with a message about the approach of the final stage of the construction of the Integral. The desire expressed in the appeal of the One State to its subjects - the numerals - to provide the space envoy with treatises, poems, odes “on the beauty and greatness of the One State” - prompts the main character to create “Records” - a poem in honor of the One State. Contrary to the initial plan of D-503 to glorify the new world, the center of the "Records" turns out to be a conspiracy of rebels, in whose plans the Integral plays a special role. That is why it is so important for them to attract the builder of the Integral to their side. This forces one of the masterminds of the conspiracy, I-330, to use her charms and experience as a connoisseur of the Ancient World to win the heart of D-503, who is not experienced in the “science of tender passion”, and with his help to master the Integral at the moment of its test. Contact with MEFI and love for I-330 cause a revolution in the mind of the author of the "Records".
The history of the Integral with its mission to “integrate” for the sake of people’s happiness the “infinite equation of the Universe”, coupled with various conditional realities (the construction of a spaceship, preparation of space travel, in particular ideological, mentioning the planets of the solar system that need to be conquered, bringing their inhabitants “mathematical unmistakable happiness”, the test of the Integral) creates an independent storyline of the novel.
But the image of the Integral not only produces plot dynamics, not only contributes to the emergence of a complex psychological plan in the work, but also introduces into the novel a discussion about the possibility of creating a “new world” and a “new man” - a discussion that began in Russia back in the 60s . XIX century, acquired a particularly acute character at the turn of the century and, having received an additional impetus in a revolutionary situation, did not subside throughout the 20s. 20th century and lasts, one might say, to this day.
The construction of the Integral - the “Common Cause” - should bring happiness to the inhabitants of “distant unknown planets” - those who belong to a moment in history that has already passed for the United State, i.e. past - "distant ancestors", - in fact, those who died before reaching the happiness that is now available to everyone, those whom the Integral must "resurrect" for a new, happy life together with their descendants - the numbers of the One State, to whom the consciousness of their participation in the Common Cause gives a feeling of omnipotence.
In Zamyatin's novel, as well as in the works of many of his contemporaries, one can feel the presence of the ideas of the famous philosopher Nikolai Fedorov (1828-1903), who put forward the project of the Common Cause. He set the task for humanity - to master the elemental forces outside and inside themselves, go into space for its exploration and transformation, gain immortality and engage in the "scientific resurrection" of their ancestors. “Philosophy of the common cause” - this was the name of the work of N. Fedorov.
The image of the Integral with its mission to “integrate the infinite equation of the Universe” acts as a symbol of the denial of the world created by God, the desire for a “new heaven” and “new earth”, personifies faith in the Mind and Will of man, in the possibility of a radical reorganization of the Universe, in the plasticity of the world, ready to submit to the dream of a proper order of life. The Russian philosopher N. Berdyaev called such a cosmic utopia "the philosophy of social titanism." Her ideas were in the air. The bearers of this idea were primarily the Bolsheviks. Ho Zamyatin did not write a political pamphlet. He was interested in the "organizers of human welfare" that existed everywhere and always. He was interested in the very phenomenon of “social titanism”, his readiness to solve the problem of human happiness in a rational way. In order to test these intentions, Zamyatin creates a conditional space and sets up an artistic experiment in this space.
FIGURE OF A HERO-NARRATOR. Although the figure of a guide through the “new world” is characteristic of the utopia/dystopia genre, the appearance of this figure in Zamyatin’s novel significantly complicates the genre of the novel, taking it beyond the boundaries of dystopia.
It should be noted that one of the important points that determine the appearance of the novel of the 20th century is the lack of “purity” of the genre. In the work of almost every writer of the New Age, whether it be A. Bely or Pilnyak, Bulgakov or Platonov, Nabokov or Bunin, we are dealing with the conjugation of different genre principles. So in Zamyatin's work, there are genre signs not only of utopia, or rather, dystopia, but also structural and meaningful signs of other genre forms: a novel about a novel, an adventurous, love, psychological, philosophical novel.
Zamyatin's work begins from the moment when the Builder of a fantastic spacecraft declares his intention to write a poem about the One State. Rather, one of his important storylines begins - the story of the creation of the novel and, at the same time, the story of the transformation of the builder of the Integral into a poet, i.e. a “novel about a novel” emerges.
A novel about a novel is a novel about the creation of a work of art, where the hero-narrator acts as the creator of the work, describes and comments on the course of the creative process, and discusses the text being created as it unfolds.
You have already encountered this kind of genre structure in the literature of the 19th century.
D-503 not only reproduces the life of the United State in his “Records”, but also creates a commentary on his work, expresses judgments about the genre, discusses unforeseen aspects of the image that arise in the course of the development of the narrative and unexpectedly emerging storylines.
The writer of the poem D-503 enters into a dialogue with the reader of past times (that is, with the inhabitants of the old worlds), to whom the Integral rushes.
The image of the text acquires an independent life in Zamyatin's novel. Being an important element of the subject detailing of the work (the manuscript lies on the table, it opens, a tear 0-90 falls on it, I throws his stockings on it, the hero is forced to hide what is written from prying eyes, etc.), the image of the text acquires a plot-forming role: it influences the fate of the actors, including the fate of the creator himself. The manuscript is read, reported about, it becomes the cause of the failure of the conspirators (adventurous line of the novel), the basis of I-330's assumptions about the betrayal of D-503 (love line), the metaphorical embodiment of the internal transformation of D-503 (the image of the fallen manuscript).
“Stockings - thrown on my table, on the open (193rd) page of my notes. In a hurry, I touched the manuscript, the pages fell apart and there was no way to put them in order, and most importantly - even if they were folded, it wouldn’t matter - there would be no real order, anyway - there would be some thresholds, pits, Xs.
The fall of the manuscript symbolically expresses the disorder, the irrationality of the universe. When falling, the manuscript breaks up into separate, unrelated fragments, thus losing its artistic integrity, but at the same time, the “fallen” manuscript begins to adequately reproduce the structure of the world that has disintegrated into chaotic fragments.
The author, the creator of the manuscript, changes his appearance twice in the novel: first he is spiritually resurrected, then he dies. After the appearance of an “incurable soul” in D-503, the tragic story of his “death” unfolds. The multi-dimensionality of his consciousness that had arisen is reduced to one-dimensionality with the help of the Great Operation, used in the United State as a radical method of “ideological” influence on the inhabitants. Anticipating this, D-503 says goodbye to readers: “I'm leaving - into the unknown. These are my last lines. Farewell - you, unknown, you, beloved, with whom I have lived so many pages, to whom I, who have fallen ill in soul, have shown myself to the last screw, to the last broken spring ... I'm leaving ”; “I can't write anymore - I don't want to anymore!”
After the operation, the relationship between the builder of the Integral and his manuscript changes. The writer does not recognize his own work: “Did I, D-503, write these two hundred and twenty pages? Have I ever felt - or imagined I feel it? The handwriting is mine. And then - the same handwriting, but, fortunately, only handwriting. No nonsense, no ridiculous metaphors, no feelings: just facts.” Now that some kind of thorn has been pulled out of D-503's head, he again returns to a “clear” view of the world, to the original type of text (“And I hope we will win. More: I am sure we will win. Because the mind must win").
The ring composition of the novel about the novel - the return of the narrator to the starting point - seems to cast doubt on the motive that sounded on many pages of the novel - the motive of the impossibility of defeating the spiritual principle.
Let us return, however, to the plot of the "novel about the novel" - the idea that D-503 is guided by, and its implementation.
Starting to create a novel, D-503 considers "reality" as "material" that is easily conceived.
As the text unfolds, a conflict arises between the idea of ​​D-503 and the possibilities of its implementation. So, at first, D-503 claims to create an odic poem, the very possibility of introducing an adventurous plot (a conspiracy, a clash between rebels and the United State) seems absurd to him (“nothing happens with us, it cannot happen”). Further, D-503 complains that instead of a poem, he “comes out some kind of fantastic adventure novel.” He has to prove to his readers that only "thick adventure syrup" will allow them to swallow "everything bitter" that he is going to offer them. The adventurous plot serves as the plot of a love story, which, as it seemed at first, also has no place in the story of a perfect world. Under the pressure of the natural course of events, the conceived poem turns into a novel (love, psychological and adventurous), into a lyrical poem. The history of this transformation, the history of the victory of the natural course of things over rational design, is one of the most important aspects of the novel about the novel, and most importantly, of the novel as a whole. The plot of the novel about the novel proves that the claims of the One State to change nature are untenable, that the world is not plastic and does not obey ideas, it can be destroyed, but cannot be changed, it develops according to its own laws both at the level of life and at the level of creativity.
“A novel about a novel” organically includes an adventurous plan, the introduction of which makes it possible to solve both formal and substantive problems.
The history of the MEFI rebellion against the ruling system allows Zamyatin to create a dynamic novel, an eventful novel that has its own mysteries, its own clues, intricacies of intrigue.
The introduction of an adventurous plot is important not only for enhancing the dynamism of the narrative, but also for the problems of the novel as a whole. Recall that the author of the "Records" proceeds from the fact that nothing happens in his "glass paradise". This is a kind of complete kingdom-state, a space in which nothing can simply happen, where the final “crystallization” of life has taken place.
So, the emergence of an adventure in a "crystallized" world is already a refutation of its stability.
But the main function of the adventurous plot is that it serves as an expression of the conflict between the priests of the One State, the defenders of the artificial world, order, and the conspirators, the champions of the natural principle, the symbol of which is Nature. On the one hand, it is “mathematical-infallible happiness”. A system of images derived from the concept of “mathematics” “grows” through the entire text. This happiness has its own geometric expression - “straight”, “square harmony”, “equality”, “general formula”. The very concept of “happiness” is expressed as a mathematical fraction, where “bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator”. Beauty finds expression in “mathematical composition”, in the beauty of “square, cube, straight”, in the beauty of “machine ballet”.
The music of the United State in the language of mathematics is “the summing chords of the formulas of Taylor, Maclaurin; whole-ton, square-weight passages of the Pythagorean pants; sad melodies of fading oscillatory motion; bright beats alternating by Fraunhofer lines of pauses - spectral analysis of planets...”.
The mechanized world opposes to Kant's ethics a system of "scientific ethics... based on subtraction, addition, division, multiplication", with the help of which the "mathematical-moral problem" of "reducing the sum of human lives" is simply solved.
Such concepts as freedom, crime, hunger are also reduced to mathematical formulas. Freedom and crime are correlated like speed and movement: “human freedom = 0, and he does not commit crimes”, i.e. does not move. This is how peace and entropy reign.
What do members of MEFI oppose to rest, entropy? Energy, human desire for endless movement, for endless struggle, when there is no “last revolution”, when all “revolutions are endless”.
In the name of what are the members of MEFI fighting? I-330, the exponent of their ideas in the novel, explains that in order for the people of the One State to learn anew “to tremble with fear, with joy, with furious anger, with cold” (“let them pray to fire”), i.e. returned to the state from which they left. As an example, she cites people living beyond the Green Wall, who “have saved hot red blood under their wool.”
Both the priests of the One State and MEFI consider themselves to be the benefactors of mankind, its Saviors.
The “official role” of the Savior in the novel “We” is played by the Benefactor. Its prototype is an image from the poem “The Grand Inquisitor”, composed by Ivan Karamazov, the hero of the novel by F.M. Dostoevsky "The Brothers Karamazov".
The action takes place in Spain during the Inquisition, when bonfires are burning, on which heretics are burned. At this moment, He comes to earth. The Grand Inquisitor is trying to convince Him of his right to arrange a paradise on earth - to provide people with "bread", material benefits in exchange for people's obedience. It is impossible to do otherwise, since a person is weak and, having remained free, he himself is looking for someone to submit to. Without answering the Grand Inquisitor, He retires.
The problem of the "Grand Inquisitor" appears twice in Zamyatin's novel. The first time - in the rhyming presentation of R-13, which sets out the biblical legend about Adam and Eve, about the eternal incompatibility of happiness and freedom, about man's longing for fetters.
For the second time, the theme of the Grand Inquisitor arises in a conversation between D-503 and the Benefactor, when the latter declares the mission he has undertaken to “correct the feat” of Jesus - about the cruelty necessary for people who only dream of “for someone to tell them once and for all what happiness is - and then chained them to this happiness on a chain.
But not only the Benefactor, but also the Zamyatin “demons”, opponents of the One State, also claim the role of the saviors of mankind, choosing a different patron than the one whom the Benefactor remembers.
I-330 calls themselves and their accomplices anti-Christians, because they refuse peace, a happy balance, preferring “painful-endless movement”, because they oppose the idea of ​​“We” to the idea of ​​“I” (“We” are from God, and "I" - from the devil").
The appearance of MEFI testifies that the Zamyatin Universe needs Satan. In an article about Wells, Zamyatin sympathetically quotes a scene from Wells' novel The Unquenchable Fire. After one irreverent remark from Satan, the archangel Michael wants to strike Satan with his sword. Ho God stops the zealous archangel:
What will we do without Satan?
Yes, says Satan, without me space and time would freeze into a kind of crystalline perfection. It is I who stir the water. It's me who worries you. I am the spirit of life. Without me, a person would still be the same useless gardener and in vain would take care of the Garden of Eden, which still cannot grow otherwise than correctly ... Just imagine: perfect flowers! perfect fruits! perfect animals! My God! How boring would a man be! How boring it would be! Instead, didn't I push him on the most amazing adventures? I gave him the story...
A similar understanding of the role played by the rebellious beginning in people's lives, Zamyatin himself formulated as follows:
“Mephistopheles is the world's greatest skeptic and at the same time the greatest romantic and idealist. With all his diabolical poisons - pathos, sarcasm, irony, tenderness - he destroys every achievement, everything today, not at all because he is amused by the fireworks of destruction, but because he secretly believes in the power of man to become divinely perfect.
Judging by this statement, Zamyatin departs from the Christian solution to the problem of good and evil. Good and evil in Zamyatin turn out to be the poles of the moral dialectic of history. And if good is static, then evil is dynamic, and the fight against evil can be waged by the forces of evil, provoking evil to even greater evil, bringing evil to the point of absurdity and leading it to self-destruction.
Let's try, however, to proceed not from the writer's policy statements, but from the text of the novel. In the space of the One State there is neither God nor Satan, but there are two false contenders for the role of the Saviors of mankind - the Benefactor and MEFI.
It would seem that MEFI and their inspirer I-330 embody the spirit of eternal unrest, the boundlessness of the revolutionary impulse, that “morbus rossica” - the Russian disease, about which Zamyatin wrote with such inspiration. But at the same time, the freedom that heretics prefer to the well-being of numbers, leads the world to disaster. “And if everywhere, throughout the universe, there are equally warm - or equally cool bodies ... They must be pushed together - so that fire, explosion, hell. And we will collide.” In other words, the fighters against the One State believe in the inevitability of a diabolical dilemma - happiness or freedom, stagnation or hellish explosion. And since the "glass paradise" does not suit them, they are ready to plunge the world into a catastrophe.
Zamyatin is usually regarded as a supporter of the revolutionary type of development of society. The American Slavist A. Fischer, who took part in a round table meeting in Literaturnaya Gazeta in 1988, argued that the significance of Zamyatin's novel is that it helps to understand what the revolutionary maximalism of the Russian intelligentsia is.
In the article "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Things" (1923), Zamyatin repeated the words of his heroine about the revolution, which "does not know the last date." By this he gave reason to identify their positions.
However, the image of a "revolution that does not know the last date" is a metaphor for protest against the mortification of life, but not a synonym for a coup d'état. Such a revolution appears in Zamyatin as a return to the cave, as a violation of the stability necessary for the construction of life, as a senseless waste of human strength (“Mamai”, “The Cave”). In the element of rebellion, an abyss opens up for the heroes of Zamyatin. And the revolution in “We” is just as cruel to dissidents and just as presupposes an absolute break with the past, just like the system of the One State. And the chaos caused by I-330 and her comrades is no less destructive for the individual than the unshakable order of the United State.
Freedom, which heretics prefer to "glass paradise", leads the world to disaster. The "liberators" not only do not exclude it, but are also ready to use it for their own purposes - "so that fire, explosion, hell...". If the Unified State gave rise to numbers, changing the nature of a person created in the image and likeness of God, then MEFI provoked further steps of the Unified State - the transformation of numbers into “machine-equal”, moving the Benefactor to a lobotomy, finally destroying the personality.
The heroine not only calls the hero out of his sleepy existence, but also betrays him, as she acts in the name of her Idea and is indifferent to the individual. I-330 manipulates D-503's feelings, just as the "glass paradise" manipulates his mind and his creative gift.
The introduction of three heroines, representing different types of love relationships, contributes to the development of the love plot and its originality.
The main character is I-330.
The love plot acquires a special semantic volume due to the fact that it is based on the development of the mythology of paradise, the story of Adam and Eve, the devilish temptation, the fall and expulsion from paradise.
I-330 is not only a seductive, charming woman. She is a member of the MEFI party. She uses her data to win her party. The unexpectedness that strikes the hero, the unpredictability of the behavior of I-330 is actually designed for the absolute emotional innocence of D-503 and is thought out to the last gesture.
Zamyatin seeks to make it clear that the MEFI party, which opposes the totalitarian regime, against the mechanization of man, itself seeks to subdue, conquer people for the sake of destroying the Green Wall and returning to the “cave”.
Another heroine whose presence in the novel contributes to the creation of another love line is O-90.
The look of the O-90 emphasizes childishness. And this is not only the infantilism of the heroine, but also a special state of mind - bright serenity, opposing the obsession of priests and opponents of the One State. If the childishness of the inhabitants of the “glass paradise” is achieved through violence and means the extinction of the spiritual strength of a person, then the childishness of O-90 is the personification of immediacy. The love plot, in which O-90 becomes a participant, is connected with the motif of conception - birth-motherhood. If I-330 carries a symbol of absolute rebellion, then O-90 acts as a symbol of the stability of life principles, a symbol of the creation of a new life.
Another storyline of a love character is introduced into the novel. This line is connected with Yu.
Thus, the heroines act in the novel either as the embodiment of the irrational element, or as individuals capable of awakening the irrational element in a man, and the love plot serves to incarnate the protagonist and a means of moral assessment of the two opposing systems.
The love plot, coupled with the adventurous one, serves as a motive for the emergence of a psychological plot that translates the external conflict into the inner space, into the spiritual world of D-503.
The builder of the Integral, the creator of the "Records", at first - the flesh of the flesh of the United State. He is a poet of his structure, which is inconceivable without the Benefactor, without the repressive and propaganda apparatus, without the numbers with their inherent complex of gratitude to the Benefactor, the consciousness of duty to the One State and the feeling of superiority over all who are outside the “One Church”.
The narrative in the transition to a psychological plot acquires an action-packed character, but at the same time it is built primarily as a monologue, in which the hero turns the description into a confession more and more. Confession gravitates toward the lyrical type: the image of experience is recreated with the help of metaphors, often expanded, denoting complex metaphysical concepts, psychological states. An extensive system of interrelated leitmotifs accompanies the awakening in D-503 of its “shaggy” counterpart.
The conditionality of the created model of reality only emphasizes the volume of the psychological characteristics. Zamyatin's desire to express a judgment about the complexity of human nature, the secrets of which are more difficult to penetrate than the secrets of the Universe; that no “social mechanism”, no matter how powerful it may be, can level the human “I” to the state of “molecule, atom, phagocyte”. And if the reading of the novel “We” is a truly exciting reading, then this is due primarily to the amazing in its psychological subtlety of the image of how in the number D-503 - a particle of “a single, powerful, million-celled organism” - the consciousness of one’s personality is born.
The pages that tell about the hero's painful attempt to break through ideological mirages to normal ideas about the individual and his rights, about love and humanity, are among the strongest in the novel.
In the mind of the hero, everything is woven into one ball. His desire to realize himself as a unique personality in a feeling for I is opposed by an equally strong desire to return to the line, to again feel like a part of a huge habitual whole, “to join the exact mechanical rhythm ... to sail along the mirror serene sea.” Each exit beyond the Wall generates - in the literal and figurative sense - a feeling of insecurity, fear of the "abyss". Each deviation from equality in insignificance causes in the soul of D-503 a feeling of lost stability, even the expectation of punishment, the motive of a sick conscience (a spot on the unif on the Day of Unanimity; a paraphrase of the biblical story about stones that fell from heaven on the heads of the enemies of Joshua). Most expressively, the duality of the state experienced by D-503, having discovered the “inner man” in himself, is conveyed with the help of the plot of the double.
The meeting with I reveals to the Builder a world unknown to him, incalculable, beyond the formulas, the world of mystery, “opacity”.
The theme of the irrational is introduced into the novel by the motif v-1 and the circle of details that characterize the unknown, the unknowable and attractive in the guise of the heroine (curtained eyes, "X" eyebrows, fire burning in the depths of the eyes), as well as the invasion of the sterile atmosphere of the United State of the realities of nature ( flower dust, the wind beating on the glass walls of houses, the cries of birds), details of the life and art of “wild ancestors”.
D-503 reveals the irrational not only outside, but also in oneself. His shaggy, monkey hands become a sign of his blood relationship with the world that is pushed beyond the Wall, the world of chaos and passion, prompting him to insane, inexplicable acts that cause D himself to feel horror.
The motive of horror before the irrational is associated with the motive of the deification of the Wall, the motive of the search for a number that can define the indefinable. This is how Zamyatin conveys the state of a person who has left the natural world, lost his original unity with it, lost God, opposed himself to this world, but cannot bear the burden of personal responsibility and is ready to cede the right of personal choice to someone who can guarantee him stability.
Two images - v-1 and the Wall - act as signs of the tragic controversy of human consciousness. An irrational beginning, before which the Builder is afraid and which attracts him to himself. And the “Wall” of the Mind is what protects it from the unorganized world, meets its need for order and stability.
Zamyatin projects the struggle between the internally antinomic aspirations of the human spirit onto the gospel plot.
There are 40 entries in the novel. 40 is a sacred number: the temptation of Christ in the desert continued for forty days; Great Lent lasts forty days on the eve of Easter; for forty days the soul of the deceased does not leave the earth - so much time is required for the transition from the earthly state to the astral. Forty days in the fate of Christ is the story of his overcoming the forces of earthly gravity. Forty days in the history of D-503 is the history of gaining and losing a living soul, his “I”, the history of his final assimilation to a machine. The travesty of the biblical story emphasizes Zamyatin's tragic perception of the possibility of the spiritual resurrection of the individual.
ARTISTIC INDIVIDUALITY OF THE NOVEL “WE”. The originality of the created Evg. Zamyatin's work is determined by the writer's belonging to the artistic reality of the 20th century. 19th century literature passed under the sign of romanticism and realism. 20th century was marked by radical shifts in the field of art, the formation and development of modernist movements and trends. Among them, a special place belongs to symbolism and the avant-garde.
Zamyatin managed to synthesize in his novel model the experience of two branches of the modernist aesthetics of this period - symbolist and avant-garde - with its inherent penchant for travesty and the use of the grotesque.
Famous essays by Zamyatin in the 1920s “On Synthetism”, “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Things” can be viewed as a whole as a manifesto, as a new aesthetic program.
“If you look for some word to define the point to which literature is now moving,” wrote Zamyatin in the article “New Russian Prose” (1923), “I would choose the word synthetism for myself ... where there will be both a microscope of realism and telescopic, leading to infinity, glass of symbolism.
1. Zamyatin associated the new possibilities of art with the consistent rejection of verisimilitude, the creation of a fantastic reality in which artistic experiments can be carried out. “In our days,” Zamyatin wrote, “the only fantasy is yesterday's life on strong whales. Today - the Apocalypse can be published in the form of a daily newspaper...”.
2. Following the Symbolists, Zamyatin brings prose closer to poetry. The small volume of the work (less than 10 printed sheets), the division of the text into small chapters increase the concentration of the narrative. A “tightness” is created, similar to the “tightness” of a verse. Each entry, and sometimes even a paragraph, turns into a small lyrical work.
In a lyrical context, the word acquires, as in a lyrical work, semantic multidimensionality, goes beyond the boundaries of its direct meaning. You have already seen how in the word “glass”, which appeared in the text as a definition of a building material, its additional meanings are activated: transparent, depriving of covers, devoid of color, icy, fragile, opaque, artificial. In combination with the word “paradise”, it acquires the meaning of a man-made, artificial world.
The influence of poetry affects not only the level of the word, but also the level of composition. In addition to the plot, the organizing principle in the novel is the system of leitmotifs. Any element of the text can act as a role - a word, a phrase, a detail, a scene, etc. Having arisen once, the motive is then repeated many times, while each time appearing in a new version, new outlines and in ever new combinations with other motives.
3. Zamyatin acts as the heir of the symbolists: he gives the status of an inherently valuable reality to the spiritual world of his character, introduces the narrative on his behalf, and thereby makes his consciousness a mirror in which an artificial world of happiness appears.
4. Like avant-garde figures, Zamyatin resorts to conscious deformation of reality, which, in his opinion, helped to come to the deep essence of phenomena, hidden from a superficial glance.
Zamyatin's perception of the D-503 becomes the focus of the image, obviously distorted by the "official" ideology, due to which a grotesque deformation occurs at the level of the narrative.
5. Zamyatin's psychologism is based on the use of both traditional artistic techniques and those that acquire special significance in “non-classical” prose. Confession, emotional unevenness of diary entries allows us to convey the confrontation of states and moods of the hero. Contrary to the narrator's adherence to the four rules of arithmetic, the aesthetics of cubes and parallelepipeds, a “verbal blizzard” (V. Erofeev) rages in the “Records” with its characteristic “flow” and the development of motives that convey a stream of swirling consciousness. Zamyatin's unique syntax: breaks in syntactic constructions, the frequency of unfinished sentences, the peculiar use of short and double long dashes, the constant introduction of colons - reproduces the stream of consciousness, blurs the rational structure of the narrative, introduces a third dimension into the seemingly two-dimensional structure of the novel.
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See also "We"
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The novel was written in 1921, but reached its reader almost seven decades later. It was published in Russia in the Znamya magazine only in 1988 (No. 4-5). The novel was involved in a number of acute conflicts of its era.
During 1921-1924. Zamyatin is fighting for the right of his offspring to exist: at least six public readings of the novel are known. It has not been possible to achieve publication in the homeland.
The novel was first published in English in Silburg's translation in New York in 1924. In 1927, fragments of the novel appeared in Russian in the Prague magazine Volya Rossii. It was this publication that became the official reason for the persecution of Zamyatin in Russia.
In 1952, the book banned in the homeland was published in Russian in New York by the A.P. Chekhov. The appearance of “We” preceded the foreign publication of “Doctor Zhivago” by B. Pasternak (1945-1955) and the subsequent wave of “tamizdat”, i.e. illegal publication abroad of works by Russian authors.
For many years, Zamyatin's creative heritage was in spiritual oblivion. It entered our spiritual life in the late 1980s, when access to previously forbidden literature was opened, when the works of A. Solzhenitsyn, A. Platonov,
V. Shalamov, writers from Russian abroad came to the readers.
However, at first, Zamyatin's novel was perceived almost as a textbook, according to which one can study the essence of the totalitarian system created in the USSR, and in Evgeny Zamyatin they saw not so much a writer as a fighter against this system. Because of this, the work created by the writer lost its spiritual and moral meaning, its true historical and philosophical content. Let's try to overcome this one-sided interpretation.
GENRE OF THE WORK. It is customary to call “We” a dystopia.
Using the genre scheme of utopia, Zamyatin transfers the action of the novel a thousand years ahead into a conditional fantasy space. He creates the image of the United State, sheltered from the "wild" space by the Green Wall.
Zamyatin's work is a dystopia, i.e. parody of utopia. Its goal is to expose utopia to ridicule, to expose it.
The United State, which built a “glass paradise” on earth, is, first of all, a parody of the utopian state of Plato.
Plato, an ancient Greek philosopher (428 or 427-348 or 347 BC), was one of the first to propose a scheme for the ideal type of social organization.
The structure of the Unified State parodies the structure of Plato's utopian society with its strict hierarchical model, in which there are rulers (Plato's priests-philosophers endowed with the highest power and highest knowledge, Zamyatin's - the Benefactor); intermediaries between the highest power and the lowest hierarchical structures (for Plato - warrior guards, for Zamyatin - employees of the "Bureau of Guardians" and poets); and, finally, producers of goods (for Plato - artisans and farmers, for Zamyatin - numbers), who are "lower" in the hierarchy of a utopian society.
The bearer of supreme power in Zamyatin is endowed with the name of the Benefactor. The oxymoron definitions that accompany the concept of “good” (“beneficial nets of happiness”, “beneficial web”, “beneficial yoke”), in combination with the repressive functions of a higher person, give the concept of “benefactor” a sarcastic character.
Zamyatin takes the idea of ​​the “usefulness” of art to the point of absurdity. Mocking the ideas of extreme utilitarianism, he comes up with mocking titles of books that “accompany” the life of numbers: these are “Mathematical Nones”, which help to learn the four rules of arithmetic, the desktop book “Stanzas on Sexual Hygiene”, a sonnet praising the multiplication table, the immortal tragedy “Late to work”, etc.
Zamyatin populates the unified state with happy citizens - numbers - a new race of geometric bodies and atvomats. This time, Zamyatin uses the weapon of parody against the utopias of the proletarians, who saw the main obstacle to mathematically unmistakable happiness in man. They glorified the mythological Proletarian, the worker who will overcome the imperfection of nature in himself and turn into a social automaton.
Residents of the One State have no names, only a state number. They have “faces not clouded by madness”, they walk in thousands of “measured rows, four by four, enthusiastically beating time” in the same “bluish unifs, with gold plaques on their chests”, each of which has an individual “state number of each and every one”. The greatest happiness for them is to turn into reality “into a steel six-wheeled hero” from the poem about the Tablet, i.e. in the car. The rhythm of their life is also likened to the rhythm of machines. “With six-wheel precision, at the same hour and at the same minute” millions of numbers wake up, at the same hour, “one million” they start and finish work, at the same second they bring spoons to their mouths go for a walk, go to sleep. This is how the image of “We” appears - a community of “I”, supposedly having lost themselves. Ho depersonalization turns out to be a fiction. Already at the level of naming the characters, an idea arises of the indestructibility of the personal principle. The Russian reader perceives the letters of the Latin alphabet not so much as a designation of speech sounds, but as geometric figures, which in themselves become a sign of individuality: “thin, sharp, stubbornly flexible, like a whip I-330”, “all of the circles” O-90 , “Double-curved” S, etc.
The diabolical paradox lies in the fact that the consciousness of being included in a team of like-minded people can lead to a state of uplift, inspiration, a sense of one’s extraordinary capabilities, one’s creative potential, one’s equality with the Creator (“Ancient God and we are at the same table”; “defeated the ancient God”) . Zamyatin was one of the first to feel and convey this feature of the mass consciousness, making it clear what power it has over a person, how it elevates and enslaves him.
An indispensable attribute of the One State and its “unconditional” value is the Green Wall, which turns the space into a world City, where there are no parks, gardens, trees, dogs, where there is pollen, and flowers, and grass cover, and birds flying into the gap, formed in the wall, both clouds and fog are perceived as something “foreign”, bringing discord into the relationship of a person with the artificial environment in which he lives.
Having arisen as a reality of the image of the One State, its indispensable attribute, the Green Wall turns out to be included in the action: the narrator approaches it, goes beyond it; as events unfold, the conspirators destroy the Wall; its restoration narrows the space of the artificial world. But the image of the Wall not only enters into the plan of the subject representation of the novel and is an essential detail of the development of the action, but is also filled with an ambivalent symbolic meaning. On the one hand, the Wall is the unconditional value of the “new world”, since it has the meaning of the border between the organized and unorganized world and serves as a guarantor of the safety of the inhabitants of the One State, their protection from the infinity of space in front of which a person feels helpless. On the other hand, the Wall symbolizes the rupture of the United State with the world of Nature, with “born chaos”, the rejection of man from the foremother of the earth.
In this context, the image of “oil food” takes on a special meaning. In the world of Zamyatin, the gospel “miracle” happened: “stones” turned into “bread”. Turn to the Gospel (Gospel of Matthew, ch. 4). Read about the temptation of Christ by the devil in the wilderness.
Oil food is not only a sign of preference for the material to the spiritual, which, according to the Gospel, Christ refuses, it is a sign of a violation of a person’s natural connection with the earth and its fruits, a break with blood tradition, the personification of the status of a person that R. Galtseva and I. Rodnyanskaya call “principled fatherlessness” of the dystopian world, where “the traditional veneration of the earth as a common mother is deliberately forgotten and the cult of synthetic products, not generated either by its bowels or its fruitful cover, is affirmed.”
The image of the United State receives additional volume due to the introduction of the mythologeme “paradise”, which acquires a parodic coloring: for Zamyatin it is a “glass paradise”. Glass not only acts as an element of subject detail (glass houses, glass sidewalks, floors, a glass spaceship, a glass dome over the City). As the text develops, repeated and varied, it acquires a symbolic meaning.
The transparency characteristic of glass emphasizes the absence in the world of the Unified State of secrecy, the right to isolation, to solitude and expresses the idea of ​​the forced “cathedralism” of existence in the metropolis: “...among our transparent walls, as if woven from sparkling air, we always live in plain sight, forever bathed in light. We have nothing to hide from each other.”
But glass not only reveals the life of another to the eye, but also serves as an invisible border, a barrier - forced “publicity” does not mean kinship, even a simple acquaintance.
The image of the United State and the complex of ideas associated with it (regulation, order, etc.) has its own color determinant in the novel. The blue color acquires a special semantic content in the novel. It is associated with the measured, “correct” existence of the citizens of the United State. The blue color is repeated in the description of the city-state, the clothes of its citizens (“uni-fa”), the sky without a single cloud. The hero admires the blue eyes of O-90, the color of which, in his opinion, testifies to the clarity, “correctness” of her thoughts.
The motif of glass in combination with the motif of blue (blue sky, bluish-gray unifs, blue majolica of the sky, blue eyes, gray-blue ranks) excites the idea of ​​stiffness, immobility and serves to implement the metaphor “ice city” (“The city below is as if from blue blocks of ice ... and the ice is still worth it ... because there is no such icebreaker that could crack the most transparent and strongest crystal of our life”). The motif of the “ice city” symbolizes the idea of ​​abandoning the Faustian idea of ​​​​infinite development inherent in European culture, of the United State as a world that has fallen out of world history, an absurd world where the Machine has become God.
Blue is opposed to yellow, red, green - the colors into which the hero plunges, going beyond the Green Wall, which protects the city-state from wildlife. Falling asleep, D-503 sees “colored” dreams. Introducing the image of natural, living life into the novel, Zamyatin uses a variety of colors.
Zamyatin attaches special importance to “warm”, or - in the semantics of the novel - “hot”, fiery colors - red and yellow, which in him denote revolution, movement, passion, life. On I-330, seducing the hero, there is a yellow dress, in the Ancient House - “a large, mahogany bed”, “yellow bronze - candelabra, a statue of Buddha”.
Zamyatin ironically plays up the substitution of Christian values ​​taking place in the United State. The guardians who monitor the obedience of the numbers are compared with guardian angels and are likened to the ancient angels who have been guarding a person since childhood. The faces of the angels, in the representation of numbers, should be “gentle menacing”. And the faces of people who came with a denunciation glow like lamps: they go to the “Guardian Bureau” with denunciations, as if they were going to confession.
THE IMAGE OF THE INTEGRAL AND ITS PLOT-FORMING ROLE. On the first page of the novel, an image appears that will become central in it and acquire a special symbolic meaning. This is the image of the Integral.
The integral is an important detail belonging to the sci-fi plan of Zamyatin's work. This is a space projectile created by the writer’s fantasy, capable of escaping the near-Earth atmosphere, reaching other worlds, bringing the Good News about the existence of the One State there, and with the help of absolute knowledge that this man-made paradise has, re-create, “integrate” the Universe, which is still in a state of "wild freedom"
It is around the Integral that the main events are tied up, the adventurous, love, psychological plots of the novel are built. The novel begins with a message about the approach of the final stage of the construction of the Integral. The desire expressed in the appeal of the One State to its subjects - the numerals - to provide the space envoy with treatises, poems, odes “on the beauty and greatness of the One State” - prompts the main character to create “Records” - a poem in honor of the One State. Contrary to the initial plan of D-503 to glorify the new world, the center of the "Records" turns out to be a conspiracy of rebels, in whose plans the Integral plays a special role. That is why it is so important for them to attract the builder of the Integral to their side. This forces one of the masterminds of the conspiracy, I-330, to use her charms and experience as a connoisseur of the Ancient World to win the heart of D-503, who is not experienced in the “science of tender passion”, and with his help to master the Integral at the moment of its test. Contact with MEFI and love for I-330 cause a revolution in the mind of the author of the "Records".
The history of the Integral with its mission to “integrate” for the sake of people’s happiness the “infinite equation of the Universe”, coupled with various conditional realities (the construction of a spaceship, preparation of space travel, in particular ideological, mentioning the planets of the solar system that need to be conquered, bringing their inhabitants “mathematical unmistakable happiness”, the test of the Integral) creates an independent storyline of the novel.
But the image of the Integral not only produces plot dynamics, not only contributes to the emergence of a complex psychological plan in the work, but also introduces into the novel a discussion about the possibility of creating a “new world” and a “new man” - a discussion that began in Russia back in the 60s . XIX century, acquired a particularly acute character at the turn of the century and, having received an additional impetus in a revolutionary situation, did not subside throughout the 20s. 20th century and lasts, one might say, to this day.
The construction of the Integral - the “Common Cause” - should bring happiness to the inhabitants of “distant unknown planets” - those who belong to a moment in history that has already passed for the United State, i.e. past - "distant ancestors", - in fact, those who died before reaching the happiness that is now available to everyone, those whom the Integral must "resurrect" for a new, happy life together with their descendants - the numbers of the One State, to whom the consciousness of their participation in the Common Cause gives a feeling of omnipotence.
In Zamyatin's novel, as well as in the works of many of his contemporaries, one can feel the presence of the ideas of the famous philosopher Nikolai Fedorov (1828-1903), who put forward the project of the Common Cause. He set the task for humanity - to master the elemental forces outside and inside themselves, go into space for its exploration and transformation, gain immortality and engage in the "scientific resurrection" of their ancestors. “Philosophy of the common cause” - this was the name of the work of N. Fedorov.
The image of the Integral with its mission to “integrate the infinite equation of the Universe” acts as a symbol of the denial of the world created by God, the desire for a “new heaven” and “new earth”, personifies faith in the Mind and Will of man, in the possibility of a radical reorganization of the Universe, in the plasticity of the world, ready to submit to the dream of a proper order of life. The Russian philosopher N. Berdyaev called such a cosmic utopia "the philosophy of social titanism." Her ideas were in the air. The bearers of this idea were primarily the Bolsheviks. Ho Zamyatin did not write a political pamphlet. He was interested in the "organizers of human welfare" that existed everywhere and always. He was interested in the very phenomenon of “social titanism”, his readiness to solve the problem of human happiness in a rational way. In order to test these intentions, Zamyatin creates a conditional space and sets up an artistic experiment in this space.
FIGURE OF A HERO-NARRATOR. Although the figure of a guide through the “new world” is characteristic of the utopia/dystopia genre, the appearance of this figure in Zamyatin’s novel significantly complicates the genre of the novel, taking it beyond the boundaries of dystopia.
It should be noted that one of the important points that determine the appearance of the novel of the 20th century is the lack of “purity” of the genre. In the work of almost every writer of the New Age, whether it be A. Bely or Pilnyak, Bulgakov or Platonov, Nabokov or Bunin, we are dealing with the conjugation of different genre principles. So in Zamyatin's work, there are genre signs not only of utopia, or rather, dystopia, but also structural and meaningful signs of other genre forms: a novel about a novel, an adventurous, love, psychological, philosophical novel.
Zamyatin's work begins from the moment when the Builder of a fantastic spacecraft declares his intention to write a poem about the One State. Rather, one of his important storylines begins - the story of the creation of the novel and, at the same time, the story of the transformation of the builder of the Integral into a poet, i.e. a “novel about a novel” emerges.
A novel about a novel is a novel about the creation of a work of art, where the hero-narrator acts as the creator of the work, describes and comments on the course of the creative process, and discusses the text being created as it unfolds.
You have already encountered this kind of genre structure in the literature of the 19th century.
D-503 not only reproduces the life of the United State in his “Records”, but also creates a commentary on his work, expresses judgments about the genre, discusses unforeseen aspects of the image that arise in the course of the development of the narrative and unexpectedly emerging storylines.
The writer of the poem D-503 enters into a dialogue with the reader of past times (that is, with the inhabitants of the old worlds), to whom the Integral rushes.
The image of the text acquires an independent life in Zamyatin's novel. Being an important element of the subject detailing of the work (the manuscript lies on the table, it opens, a tear 0-90 falls on it, I throws his stockings on it, the hero is forced to hide what is written from prying eyes, etc.), the image of the text acquires a plot-forming role: it influences the fate of the actors, including the fate of the creator himself. The manuscript is read, reported about, it becomes the cause of the failure of the conspirators (adventurous line of the novel), the basis of I-330's assumptions about the betrayal of D-503 (love line), the metaphorical embodiment of the internal transformation of D-503 (the image of the fallen manuscript).
“Stockings - thrown on my table, on the open (193rd) page of my notes. In a hurry, I touched the manuscript, the pages fell apart and there was no way to put them in order, and most importantly - even if they were folded, it wouldn’t matter - there would be no real order, anyway - there would be some thresholds, pits, Xs.
The fall of the manuscript symbolically expresses the disorder, the irrationality of the universe. When falling, the manuscript breaks up into separate, unrelated fragments, thus losing its artistic integrity, but at the same time, the “fallen” manuscript begins to adequately reproduce the structure of the world that has disintegrated into chaotic fragments.
The author, the creator of the manuscript, changes his appearance twice in the novel: first he is spiritually resurrected, then he dies. After the appearance of an “incurable soul” in D-503, the tragic story of his “death” unfolds. The multi-dimensionality of his consciousness that had arisen is reduced to one-dimensionality with the help of the Great Operation, used in the United State as a radical method of “ideological” influence on the inhabitants. Anticipating this, D-503 says goodbye to readers: “I'm leaving - into the unknown. These are my last lines. Farewell - you, unknown, you, beloved, with whom I have lived so many pages, to whom I, who have fallen ill in soul, have shown myself to the last screw, to the last broken spring ... I'm leaving ”; “I can't write anymore - I don't want to anymore!”
After the operation, the relationship between the builder of the Integral and his manuscript changes. The writer does not recognize his own work: “Did I, D-503, write these two hundred and twenty pages? Have I ever felt - or imagined I feel it? The handwriting is mine. And then - the same handwriting, but, fortunately, only handwriting. No nonsense, no ridiculous metaphors, no feelings: just facts.” Now that some kind of thorn has been pulled out of D-503's head, he again returns to a “clear” view of the world, to the original type of text (“And I hope we will win. More: I am sure we will win. Because the mind must win").
The ring composition of the novel about the novel - the return of the narrator to the starting point - seems to cast doubt on the motive that sounded on many pages of the novel - the motive of the impossibility of defeating the spiritual principle.
Let us return, however, to the plot of the "novel about the novel" - the idea that D-503 is guided by, and its implementation.
Starting to create a novel, D-503 considers "reality" as "material" that is easily conceived.
As the text unfolds, a conflict arises between the idea of ​​D-503 and the possibilities of its implementation. So, at first, D-503 claims to create an odic poem, the very possibility of introducing an adventurous plot (a conspiracy, a clash between rebels and the United State) seems absurd to him (“nothing happens with us, it cannot happen”). Further, D-503 complains that instead of a poem, he “comes out some kind of fantastic adventure novel.” He has to prove to his readers that only "thick adventure syrup" will allow them to swallow "everything bitter" that he is going to offer them. The adventurous plot serves as the plot of a love story, which, as it seemed at first, also has no place in the story of a perfect world. Under the pressure of the natural course of events, the conceived poem turns into a novel (love, psychological and adventurous), into a lyrical poem. The history of this transformation, the history of the victory of the natural course of things over rational design, is one of the most important aspects of the novel about the novel, and most importantly, of the novel as a whole. The plot of the novel about the novel proves that the claims of the One State to change nature are untenable, that the world is not plastic and does not obey ideas, it can be destroyed, but cannot be changed, it develops according to its own laws both at the level of life and at the level of creativity.
“A novel about a novel” organically includes an adventurous plan, the introduction of which makes it possible to solve both formal and substantive problems.
The history of the MEFI rebellion against the ruling system allows Zamyatin to create a dynamic novel, an eventful novel that has its own mysteries, its own clues, intricacies of intrigue.
The introduction of an adventurous plot is important not only for enhancing the dynamism of the narrative, but also for the problems of the novel as a whole. Recall that the author of the "Records" proceeds from the fact that nothing happens in his "glass paradise". This is a kind of complete kingdom-state, a space in which nothing can simply happen, where the final “crystallization” of life has taken place.
So, the emergence of an adventure in a "crystallized" world is already a refutation of its stability.
But the main function of the adventurous plot is that it serves as an expression of the conflict between the priests of the One State, the defenders of the artificial world, order, and the conspirators, the champions of the natural principle, the symbol of which is Nature. On the one hand, it is “mathematical-infallible happiness”. A system of images derived from the concept of “mathematics” “grows” through the entire text. This happiness has its own geometric expression - “straight”, “square harmony”, “equality”, “general formula”. The very concept of “happiness” is expressed as a mathematical fraction, where “bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator”. Beauty finds expression in “mathematical composition”, in the beauty of “square, cube, straight”, in the beauty of “machine ballet”.
The music of the United State in the language of mathematics is “the summing chords of the formulas of Taylor, Maclaurin; whole-ton, square-weight passages of the Pythagorean pants; sad melodies of fading oscillatory motion; bright beats alternating by Fraunhofer lines of pauses - spectral analysis of planets...”.
The mechanized world opposes to Kant's ethics a system of "scientific ethics... based on subtraction, addition, division, multiplication", with the help of which the "mathematical-moral problem" of "reducing the sum of human lives" is simply solved.
Such concepts as freedom, crime, hunger are also reduced to mathematical formulas. Freedom and crime are correlated like speed and movement: “human freedom = 0, and he does not commit crimes”, i.e. does not move. This is how peace and entropy reign.
What do members of MEFI oppose to rest, entropy? Energy, human desire for endless movement, for endless struggle, when there is no “last revolution”, when all “revolutions are endless”.
In the name of what are the members of MEFI fighting? I-330, the exponent of their ideas in the novel, explains that in order for the people of the One State to learn anew “to tremble with fear, with joy, with furious anger, with cold” (“let them pray to fire”), i.e. returned to the state from which they left. As an example, she cites people living beyond the Green Wall, who “have saved hot red blood under their wool.”
Both the priests of the One State and MEFI consider themselves to be the benefactors of mankind, its Saviors.
The “official role” of the Savior in the novel “We” is played by the Benefactor. Its prototype is an image from the poem “The Grand Inquisitor”, composed by Ivan Karamazov, the hero of the novel by F.M. Dostoevsky "The Brothers Karamazov".
The action takes place in Spain during the Inquisition, when bonfires are burning, on which heretics are burned. At this moment, He comes to earth. The Grand Inquisitor is trying to convince Him of his right to arrange a paradise on earth - to provide people with "bread", material benefits in exchange for people's obedience. It is impossible to do otherwise, since a person is weak and, having remained free, he himself is looking for someone to submit to. Without answering the Grand Inquisitor, He retires.
The problem of the "Grand Inquisitor" appears twice in Zamyatin's novel. The first time - in the rhyming presentation of R-13, which sets out the biblical legend about Adam and Eve, about the eternal incompatibility of happiness and freedom, about man's longing for fetters.
For the second time, the theme of the Grand Inquisitor arises in a conversation between D-503 and the Benefactor, when the latter declares the mission he has undertaken to “correct the feat” of Jesus - about the cruelty necessary for people who only dream of “for someone to tell them once and for all what happiness is - and then chained them to this happiness on a chain.
But not only the Benefactor, but also the Zamyatin “demons”, opponents of the One State, also claim the role of the saviors of mankind, choosing a different patron than the one whom the Benefactor remembers.
I-330 calls themselves and their accomplices anti-Christians, because they refuse peace, a happy balance, preferring “painful-endless movement”, because they oppose the idea of ​​“We” to the idea of ​​“I” (“We” are from God, and "I" - from the devil").
The appearance of MEFI testifies that the Zamyatin Universe needs Satan. In an article about Wells, Zamyatin sympathetically quotes a scene from Wells' novel The Unquenchable Fire. After one irreverent remark from Satan, the archangel Michael wants to strike Satan with his sword. Ho God stops the zealous archangel:
What will we do without Satan?
Yes, says Satan, without me space and time would freeze into a kind of crystalline perfection. It is I who stir the water. It's me who worries you. I am the spirit of life. Without me, a person would still be the same useless gardener and in vain would take care of the Garden of Eden, which still cannot grow otherwise than correctly ... Just imagine: perfect flowers! perfect fruits! perfect animals! My God! How boring would a man be! How boring it would be! Instead, didn't I push him on the most amazing adventures? I gave him the story...
A similar understanding of the role played by the rebellious beginning in people's lives, Zamyatin himself formulated as follows:
“Mephistopheles is the world's greatest skeptic and at the same time the greatest romantic and idealist. With all his diabolical poisons - pathos, sarcasm, irony, tenderness - he destroys every achievement, everything today, not at all because he is amused by the fireworks of destruction, but because he secretly believes in the power of man to become divinely perfect.
Judging by this statement, Zamyatin departs from the Christian solution to the problem of good and evil. Good and evil in Zamyatin turn out to be the poles of the moral dialectic of history. And if good is static, then evil is dynamic, and the fight against evil can be waged by the forces of evil, provoking evil to even greater evil, bringing evil to the point of absurdity and leading it to self-destruction.
Let's try, however, to proceed not from the writer's policy statements, but from the text of the novel. In the space of the One State there is neither God nor Satan, but there are two false contenders for the role of the Saviors of mankind - the Benefactor and MEFI.
It would seem that MEFI and their inspirer I-330 embody the spirit of eternal unrest, the boundlessness of the revolutionary impulse, that “morbus rossica” - the Russian disease, about which Zamyatin wrote with such inspiration. But at the same time, the freedom that heretics prefer to the well-being of numbers, leads the world to disaster. “And if everywhere, throughout the universe, there are equally warm - or equally cool bodies ... They must be pushed together - so that fire, explosion, hell. And we will collide.” In other words, the fighters against the One State believe in the inevitability of a diabolical dilemma - happiness or freedom, stagnation or hellish explosion. And since the "glass paradise" does not suit them, they are ready to plunge the world into a catastrophe.
Zamyatin is usually regarded as a supporter of the revolutionary type of development of society. The American Slavist A. Fischer, who took part in a round table meeting in Literaturnaya Gazeta in 1988, argued that the significance of Zamyatin's novel is that it helps to understand what the revolutionary maximalism of the Russian intelligentsia is.
In the article "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Things" (1923), Zamyatin repeated the words of his heroine about the revolution, which "does not know the last date." By this he gave reason to identify their positions.
However, the image of a "revolution that does not know the last date" is a metaphor for protest against the mortification of life, but not a synonym for a coup d'état. Such a revolution appears in Zamyatin as a return to the cave, as a violation of the stability necessary for the construction of life, as a senseless waste of human strength (“Mamai”, “The Cave”). In the element of rebellion, an abyss opens up for the heroes of Zamyatin. And the revolution in “We” is just as cruel to dissidents and just as presupposes an absolute break with the past, just like the system of the One State. And the chaos caused by I-330 and her comrades is no less destructive for the individual than the unshakable order of the United State.
Freedom, which heretics prefer to "glass paradise", leads the world to disaster. The "liberators" not only do not exclude it, but are also ready to use it for their own purposes - "so that fire, explosion, hell...". If the Unified State gave rise to numbers, changing the nature of a person created in the image and likeness of God, then MEFI provoked further steps of the Unified State - the transformation of numbers into “machine-equal”, moving the Benefactor to a lobotomy, finally destroying the personality.
The heroine not only calls the hero out of his sleepy existence, but also betrays him, as she acts in the name of her Idea and is indifferent to the individual. I-330 manipulates D-503's feelings, just as the "glass paradise" manipulates his mind and his creative gift.
The introduction of three heroines, representing different types of love relationships, contributes to the development of the love plot and its originality.
The main character is I-330.
The love plot acquires a special semantic volume due to the fact that it is based on the development of the mythology of paradise, the story of Adam and Eve, the devilish temptation, the fall and expulsion from paradise.
I-330 is not only a seductive, charming woman. She is a member of the MEFI party. She uses her data to win her party. The unexpectedness that strikes the hero, the unpredictability of the behavior of I-330 is actually designed for the absolute emotional innocence of D-503 and is thought out to the last gesture.
Zamyatin seeks to make it clear that the MEFI party, which opposes the totalitarian regime, against the mechanization of man, itself seeks to subdue, conquer people for the sake of destroying the Green Wall and returning to the “cave”.
Another heroine whose presence in the novel contributes to the creation of another love line is O-90.
The look of the O-90 emphasizes childishness. And this is not only the infantilism of the heroine, but also a special state of mind - bright serenity, opposing the obsession of priests and opponents of the One State. If the childishness of the inhabitants of the “glass paradise” is achieved through violence and means the extinction of the spiritual strength of a person, then the childishness of O-90 is the personification of immediacy. The love plot, in which O-90 becomes a participant, is connected with the motif of conception - birth-motherhood. If I-330 carries a symbol of absolute rebellion, then O-90 acts as a symbol of the stability of life principles, a symbol of the creation of a new life.
Another storyline of a love character is introduced into the novel. This line is connected with Yu.
Thus, the heroines act in the novel either as the embodiment of the irrational element, or as individuals capable of awakening the irrational element in a man, and the love plot serves to incarnate the protagonist and a means of moral assessment of the two opposing systems.
The love plot, coupled with the adventurous one, serves as a motive for the emergence of a psychological plot that translates the external conflict into the inner space, into the spiritual world of D-503.
The builder of the Integral, the creator of the "Records", at first - the flesh of the flesh of the United State. He is a poet of his structure, which is inconceivable without the Benefactor, without the repressive and propaganda apparatus, without the numbers with their inherent complex of gratitude to the Benefactor, the consciousness of duty to the One State and the feeling of superiority over all who are outside the “One Church”.
The narrative in the transition to a psychological plot acquires an action-packed character, but at the same time it is built primarily as a monologue, in which the hero turns the description into a confession more and more. Confession gravitates toward the lyrical type: the image of experience is recreated with the help of metaphors, often expanded, denoting complex metaphysical concepts, psychological states. An extensive system of interrelated leitmotifs accompanies the awakening in D-503 of its “shaggy” counterpart.
The conditionality of the created model of reality only emphasizes the volume of the psychological characteristics. Zamyatin's desire to express a judgment about the complexity of human nature, the secrets of which are more difficult to penetrate than the secrets of the Universe; that no “social mechanism”, no matter how powerful it may be, can level the human “I” to the state of “molecule, atom, phagocyte”. And if the reading of the novel “We” is a truly exciting reading, then this is due primarily to the amazing in its psychological subtlety of the image of how in the number D-503 - a particle of “a single, powerful, million-celled organism” - the consciousness of one’s personality is born.
The pages that tell about the hero's painful attempt to break through ideological mirages to normal ideas about the individual and his rights, about love and humanity, are among the strongest in the novel.
In the mind of the hero, everything is woven into one ball. His desire to realize himself as a unique personality in a feeling for I is opposed by an equally strong desire to return to the line, to again feel like a part of a huge habitual whole, “to join the exact mechanical rhythm ... to sail along the mirror serene sea.” Each exit beyond the Wall generates - in the literal and figurative sense - a feeling of insecurity, fear of the "abyss". Each deviation from equality in insignificance causes in the soul of D-503 a feeling of lost stability, even the expectation of punishment, the motive of a sick conscience (a spot on the unif on the Day of Unanimity; a paraphrase of the biblical story about stones that fell from heaven on the heads of the enemies of Joshua). Most expressively, the duality of the state experienced by D-503, having discovered the “inner man” in himself, is conveyed with the help of the plot of the double.
The meeting with I reveals to the Builder a world unknown to him, incalculable, beyond the formulas, the world of mystery, “opacity”.
The theme of the irrational is introduced into the novel by the motif v-1 and the circle of details that characterize the unknown, the unknowable and attractive in the guise of the heroine (curtained eyes, "X" eyebrows, fire burning in the depths of the eyes), as well as the invasion of the sterile atmosphere of the United State of the realities of nature ( flower dust, the wind beating on the glass walls of houses, the cries of birds), details of the life and art of “wild ancestors”.
D-503 reveals the irrational not only outside, but also in oneself. His shaggy, monkey hands become a sign of his blood relationship with the world that is pushed beyond the Wall, the world of chaos and passion, prompting him to insane, inexplicable acts that cause D himself to feel horror.
The motive of horror before the irrational is associated with the motive of the deification of the Wall, the motive of the search for a number that can define the indefinable. This is how Zamyatin conveys the state of a person who has left the natural world, lost his original unity with it, lost God, opposed himself to this world, but cannot bear the burden of personal responsibility and is ready to cede the right of personal choice to someone who can guarantee him stability.
Two images - v-1 and the Wall - act as signs of the tragic controversy of human consciousness. An irrational beginning, before which the Builder is afraid and which attracts him to himself. And the “Wall” of the Mind is what protects it from the unorganized world, meets its need for order and stability.
Zamyatin projects the struggle between the internally antinomic aspirations of the human spirit onto the gospel plot.
There are 40 entries in the novel. 40 is a sacred number: the temptation of Christ in the desert continued for forty days; Great Lent lasts forty days on the eve of Easter; for forty days the soul of the deceased does not leave the earth - so much time is required for the transition from the earthly state to the astral. Forty days in the fate of Christ is the story of his overcoming the forces of earthly gravity. Forty days in the history of D-503 is the history of gaining and losing a living soul, his “I”, the history of his final assimilation to a machine. The travesty of the biblical story emphasizes Zamyatin's tragic perception of the possibility of the spiritual resurrection of the individual.
ARTISTIC INDIVIDUALITY OF THE NOVEL “WE”. The originality of the created Evg. Zamyatin's work is determined by the writer's belonging to the artistic reality of the 20th century. 19th century literature passed under the sign of romanticism and realism. 20th century was marked by radical shifts in the field of art, the formation and development of modernist movements and trends. Among them, a special place belongs to symbolism and the avant-garde.
Zamyatin managed to synthesize in his novel model the experience of two branches of the modernist aesthetics of this period - symbolist and avant-garde - with its inherent penchant for travesty and the use of the grotesque.
Famous essays by Zamyatin in the 1920s “On Synthetism”, “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Things” can be viewed as a whole as a manifesto, as a new aesthetic program.
“If you look for some word to define the point to which literature is now moving,” wrote Zamyatin in the article “New Russian Prose” (1923), “I would choose the word synthetism for myself ... where there will be both a microscope of realism and telescopic, leading to infinity, glass of symbolism.
1. Zamyatin associated the new possibilities of art with the consistent rejection of verisimilitude, the creation of a fantastic reality in which artistic experiments can be carried out. “In our days,” Zamyatin wrote, “the only fantasy is yesterday's life on strong whales. Today - the Apocalypse can be published in the form of a daily newspaper...”.
2. Following the Symbolists, Zamyatin brings prose closer to poetry. The small volume of the work (less than 10 printed sheets), the division of the text into small chapters increase the concentration of the narrative. A “tightness” is created, similar to the “tightness” of a verse. Each entry, and sometimes even a paragraph, turns into a small lyrical work.
In a lyrical context, the word acquires, as in a lyrical work, semantic multidimensionality, goes beyond the boundaries of its direct meaning. You have already seen how in the word “glass”, which appeared in the text as a definition of a building material, its additional meanings are activated: transparent, depriving of covers, devoid of color, icy, fragile, opaque, artificial. In combination with the word “paradise”, it acquires the meaning of a man-made, artificial world.
The influence of poetry affects not only the level of the word, but also the level of composition. In addition to the plot, the organizing principle in the novel is the system of leitmotifs. Any element of the text can act as a role - a word, a phrase, a detail, a scene, etc. Having arisen once, the motive is then repeated many times, while each time appearing in a new version, new outlines and in ever new combinations with other motives.
3. Zamyatin acts as the heir of the symbolists: he gives the status of an inherently valuable reality to the spiritual world of his character, introduces the narrative on his behalf, and thereby makes his consciousness a mirror in which an artificial world of happiness appears.
4. Like avant-garde figures, Zamyatin resorts to conscious deformation of reality, which, in his opinion, helped to come to the deep essence of phenomena, hidden from a superficial glance.
Zamyatin's perception of the D-503 becomes the focus of the image, obviously distorted by the "official" ideology, due to which a grotesque deformation occurs at the level of the narrative.
5. Zamyatin's psychologism is based on the use of both traditional artistic techniques and those that acquire special significance in “non-classical” prose. Confession, emotional unevenness of diary entries allows us to convey the confrontation of states and moods of the hero. Contrary to the narrator's adherence to the four rules of arithmetic, the aesthetics of cubes and parallelepipeds, a “verbal blizzard” (V. Erofeev) rages in the “Records” with its characteristic “flow” and the development of motives that convey a stream of swirling consciousness. Zamyatin's unique syntax: breaks in syntactic constructions, the frequency of unfinished sentences, the peculiar use of short and double long dashes, the constant introduction of colons - reproduces the stream of consciousness, blurs the rational structure of the narrative, introduces a third dimension into the seemingly two-dimensional structure of the novel.
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