Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We

Written about 100 years ago, We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, is often considered the first dystopian novel. I’d read We back in college, although I have to admit I didn’t remember more than the characters have number-names, the use of √-1 to mean confusing emotions, and the basic beats of the plot.

In the glorious future of the One State, everyone is at their mathematical best, at all times. The numbers (people) live on an optimized daily schedule of work, rest, exercise and mass educational entertainment. It’s a scifi future dystopia, but it also feels like a possible path from those intermittent fasting schedules for optimal health or those guides promising to optimize our work lives with regimented mediation and email-checking schedules.

Our narrator, D-503, is writing down his thoughts before the launch of the Integral, a rocket ship that will go out to other planets and share the One State’s perfectly happy way of life to any alien life. D begins writing how contented and optimized everyone is, and describing their OneState life to aliens — AKA the reader — who can’t yet know the perfection of the OneState. It’s a world without privacy, individual choices or strong emotions, but D describes this with contentment.

The overall plot of We is the same as 1984, or I should say, the overall plot of 1984 is We. The male protag is a cog in the future  machine before meeting a beautiful girl who shows him beautiful old-time things  (AKA everyday things from the reader’s life), wears a sexy dress in a world of uniforms, and just shakes up his worldview in general.  In a way, We‘s I-330 is the first manic pixie dream girl. D starts to have feelings for her, and he’s suddenly every sad-sack boyfriend who discovers the joy and beauty of the world through meeting a manic pixie and having feelings. Yes, ok, this is more about D discovering plants and sunlight and so forth in a sterile future, than about a boring boyfriend discovering quirky whimsy.

I-330 seems more like she’s using D for the rebellion than inviting him to join the rebellion, though. And her ending is even starker than Julia’s. At the end of 1984, Julia has her own Room 101 and returned to depressing Orwellian life, just like Winston is. But I-330 is executed without saying a word of the rebellion. (Although brave, this somehow doesn’t leave readers with a positive feeling about the future success of the rebellions, because the rest of the rebels were tortured into submission.) Then D gets caught and his imagination is surgically removed and he becomes an even more docile citizen of the OneState. He ends up loving the Benefactor, just as Winston’s final scene is about loving Big Brother. 

So, yeah, this is a 1924 Russian novel, so the repressive and carefully controlled society is obviously a metaphor for police-state communism. But at the same time, I kinda see the appeal of a society where everyone has food, shelter, access to medical care, reliable public transit, and just one job, with additional leisure time. No one’s running to their second job or side hustle to pay rent.

In the OneState, men’s names are consonants, women’s are vowels. It’s slightly less imbalanced in the original Russian, because there are 10 vowels and 21 consonants, but still.

Usually when I complain about retro scifi-itis, it’s a male author developing an amazing, fascinating world, but then writing the 1 or 2 female characters in the world like he’s never talked to an actual woman.  You know, the kind of scifi with a lot of well-developed male characters with interesting backstories and conflicting goals, and then there’s one incredibly sexy lady who exists solely for romance and babies! We is pretty bad about this. I was mostly on board with O as a fairly flat character because the numbers don’t really have a lot of emotion or backstory, but her one goal is to get pregnant. Even though she know she’ll be put to death when she gives birth. Ugh. This secret and sudden need doesn’t make a lot of sense with the rigid and bland life of the numbers in general. And then! Her one emotion is jealousy over D and I, to where at one point, it overpowers her protection of her baby. Ladies, amirite? Do they have thoughts besides getting pregnant by the protag and getting jealous of the protag’s attractiveness to other women? UGH. At least I has her own goals, even if manipulative sexy lady isn’t a great character trope.

There’s a weird racist strand in this book, particularly in the descriptions of D’s friend R. I think the intention is showing that the perfectly uniform numbers of the perfect One State still have imperfectly individual human traits, like D’s body hair or O being 10 centimeters too short. But it’s still unpleasantly dated.

I wanted to read We because it’s often referenced in other scifi. Orwell read and reviewed We in 1946, and noted that We has “a rather weak and episodic plot which is too complex to summarise,” I guess before cutting  out the mathematical rambling, the spaceship storyline, and the weird pregnancy subplot, and putting the main beats of We into a snappier, faster-paced 1984.  He also notes that in the OneState, people “live in glass houses (this was written before television was invented), which enables the political police, known as the ‘Guardians,’ to supervise them more easily.” You can really see Orwell coming up with the two-way TVs of 1984 here.

Overall, I was fascinated by reading about the low-tech dystopia found in the OneState of We, even though there isn’t enough character development for me to get invested in any particular number/person’s storyline. I think this is intentional, since all numbers are interchangable in the OneState, but led to me feeling kinda meh when characters were in dramatic moments.

 

Orwell, George. “Freedom and Happiness.” Tribune, 4 Jan. 1946., accessed here: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/freedom-and-happiness-review-of-we-by-yevgeny-zamyatin/