The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Fall in the book of Genesis to Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who castigates Christ for his reluctance to work the miracles required to guarantee humanity its material security.12 Despite these motifs, Zamyatin was a wholly secular writer, and skeptical as regards divine or mystical allegory. Although authority is everywhere in OneState, neither miracle nor mystery has a place. The world of We is a post-Edenic blueprint, and to drive this point home Zamyatin plays openly, even mechanically, with alphabets and prefixes.

All citizens (“numbers”) of OneState are named with an initial letter plus a numerical digit. Males begin with consonants (the hero is D-503), females with vowels (O-90, I-330). D-, the novel’s Adam, is a mathematician by profession, and his prefix is written in Cyrillic, д, a letter derived from the Greek delta, also the mathematical symbol for change. The novel’s Eve, the seductress I-330, is named not with the Russian equivalent of this vowel, и, but with the Latin ‘I’: the English first-person singular pronoun, the dangerous unit that has broken away from the “We.” The double-agent doctor who is in league with I-330 also carries a Latin prefix, S- (snake, G. Schlange, Fr. serpent), not the less slinky Cyrillic equivalent, C. But the lesson to be learned from these cunningly named heroes and their biblical subtexts is not one of salvation, and certainly not of sexual guilt. Zamyatin was curious in a scientific, “Einsteinian” way about the growth of consciousness out of a multiplication or fragmentation of human perspectives. Thus his novel tells a different cautionary tale than Bely’s.

Zamyatin constructed his We as a series of diary entries that read like an experiment in mechanics. Stretches of narrative are punctuated by the visual play of sharp-edged or intersecting surfaces, panoramic shots followed by abrupt close-ups. Fragments, splinters, emissions and cracks have an ominous texture to them (“A knife. A blood-red bite.” “A microscopic bubble of saliva appeared on his lips and burst”). Material objects and human organisms are chopped up, inventoried, and juxtaposed to one another from various points of view. These episodes list at a forty-five degree angle and flash by as if glimpsed from a speeding car. About the day of the liquefaction of a dissident poet:

Cube Square. Sixty-six powerful concentric rings: the stands. And sixty-six rows: quiet faces like lamps, with eyes reflecting the shining heavens, or maybe the shining of OneState. Blood-red flowers: women’s

lips.13

As long as D-503 remains a loyal subject of OneState, he perceives three-dimensionality, depth, and the capacity to absorb and project personal desire – what the doctors diagnose as the birth of a “soul” – as illness and imminent death. Forty diary entries (his forty days in the Wilderness) chronicle his metamorphosis from an obedient servant of impersonal reason into a

174 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

grasping, loving, rebellious singularity, a process that D-503 both craves and bitterly resents. The beautiful I-330, midwife to the birth of his soul, is a member of the Mephi, a sect named after Goethe’s demonic tempter Mephistopheles, which flourishes beyond the Green Wall enclosing the City.

His soul expanding, D-503 watches with horror as his diary, begun as a dutiful and devout propaganda piece for the missionary spaceship of which he is First Builder, transforms itself into a treasonous document. There is nowhere to tuck it away; its pages, increasingly full of anguish and doubt, are discovered on his glass desk through the glass walls of his room and become incriminating evidence. After the rebellion of the Mephi fails, D-503 is seized and lobotomized. His final diary entry, #40, resumes in the voice of a bland, collective “normalcy.” Impassively recorded there is the spectacle of his beloved I-330 being interrogated – tortured by suffocation – under the Glass Bell.