“He works hard to earn our readerly trust, but we do not give it; it’s hard to empathize with this victim/agent at times, but equally we seldom can fathom the motives for the rebellion’s methods.”

Zamyatin’s dystopia is yes, a forerunner to Orwell, Huxley, Burgess, Rand, Le Guin, and others, and significant for that reason, but how does it fare against itself? That is, on its own is a worthwhile read? The answer depends a great deal on reader flexibility?

Certainly, a future society written from a 1920s writer will have its own misconceptions about science and technology and will likely reveal a number of miscues in cultural shifts: and Zamyatin is guilt. So we must forgive various aspects of ship design, how communication and the tracking of labor work, the characterizations of gender, and the like. Because utopia/dystopia novels function largely at the level of allegory in any event, we don’t worry overmuch about these details.

More problematic for me was the histrionics of its protagonist, D-503, who–for all of his initial self-assurance in the State and its efficient function (right down to regimented sex schedules)–spends much of the novel in astonishment and horror when he inevitably encounters those who deviate from it subjectively. For all his resistance, D-503 is an unlikely choice for recruitment into revolution, though his social position is important enough. And so–not that this is a spoiler since we aren’t reading The Hunger Games here–his eventual failure isn’t just expected; it’s nearly welcomed. And we wonder, not like we do for Orwell’s Winston who is destroyed because he desires to think for himself, whether D-503’s desire not to think for himself leaves him better off–at least to himself.

And so that leaves us with Zamyatin’s questions, obviously situated to challenge the new Soviet Union’s efforts to turn people into “human tractors,” but posed also quite a bit more universally. What is that line between the civilized and the natural man that arrests his wanton “freedom” at an ideal place? What policies of government meet the criteria of “reason” and which cross to “oppression”? What is the nature of revolution, that there is no “highest number”? Zamyatin’s novel may wander into scenes which delay these questions, sometimes lamenting overmuch about the ‘shocking’ concept of seduction or of tardiness, but they are there for us to contend with. 

Zamyatin well understands ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More, and his narrator the journalist D-503 offers us entries full of false pride and self-aggrandizing patriotism. We can see the workings of the state and rebellion behind his words easily enough. He works hard to earn our readerly trust, but we do not give it; it’s hard to empathize with this victim/agent at times, but equally we seldom can fathom the motives for the rebellion’s methods.

What we are left with are the questions such a State apparatus poses, the willingness of humanity not to normalize it but to glorify it, and that maybe out there–somewhere else, but definitely not us trapped in the mechanisms quite apart from them—there may be a small community who still say “No.” It is almost enough.