The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

This closing scene especially has resonated throughout twentieth-century anti-totalitarian literature. In discussing his 1948 novel 1984, George Orwell acknowledged a debt to his Russian predecessor. In both novels, the betrayed female beloved (Julia or I-330) is tortured, or set up to be tortured, in front of the collapsed male hero-victim (Winston Smith or D-530) who has been broken on the wheel of their love. Orwell’s novel, however, is an anti-utopia precisely because the shabbiness, fraudulence, and doublethink of Ingsoc are clear to all from the start. Life in Oceania’s capital London, with its Ministries of Peace, Plenty, Truth, and Love, is utopia with its signs reversed, a city pasted all over with exuberant untruths in the spirit of Swiftian satire. Zamyatin’s We is the more dynamic and unsettling genre of dystopia: a dysfunctional utopia, the purportedly perfect city, at first applauded by an insider, which in the course of the novel turns into a nightmarish prison because a soul has matured and rebelled inside it.

Petersburg recreates Dostoevskian themes of parricide and political conspiracy; We , in contrast, the coldly satiric sides of Notes from Underground. In that dark place, we recall, Dostoevsky’s anti-hero speaks mockingly of a rationalist utopia, a dwelling-place made entirely of glass (the “Crystal Palace”), where transparency has become a way of life. No one has anything to hide (or anything to envy) because each person’s needs are mathematically calculated in advance and efficiently satisfied. Thus happiness is as possible and unambiguous as “twice two equals four.” This Crystal Palace becomes the world incarnated in Zamyatin’s OneState, which the Underground Man, a committed irrationalist, would immediately recognize as “not life, gentlemen, but the beginning of

death.”14

Symbolist and Modernist world-building 175

Dostoevsky’s paradoxical Underground provides only one subtext to the dynamics of We , however. For further clues, we must turn to Zamyatin’s early journalism. In 1918, Zamyatin published his first polemical essay, “Scythians?” The Scythians, a fierce nomadic tribe that left Central Asia in the eighth century BCE for the Don and Dnieper rivers, were adopted as a symbol during the revolutionary years by several avant-garde Russian writers to celebrate maxi-malism, spontaneity, absolute independence of spirit, and “eternal readiness to revolt.” This was the Dionysian impulse,writ large on the political canvasofthe day. Zamyatin’s essay criticizes a recent anthology of “Scythian” writings for its insufficiently principled rebelliousness. “The Scythian is an eternal nomad,” Zamyatin writes:

He is alive only in the wild, free gallop, only in the open steppe . . . Christ victorious in practical terms is the grand inquisitor . . . The true Scythian will smell from a mile away the odor of dwellings, the odor of cabbage soup, the odor of the priest in his purple cassock . . . and will hasten into the steppe, to freedom.15

Several years later, Zamyatin structured We around this mesmerizing “Scythian” binary of entropy versus energy, authoritarian stasis versus unfettered (and even purposeless) motion. Dostoevsky had applied similarly rigid polarities to his trap of the Underground: on one side, deterministic reason and the smug material security of the Crystal Palace; on the other, irrational spontaneity and perpetual doubt. But Dostoevsky is maximally distant from the revolutionary romantic celebrated by Bolshevik-era admirers of the Scythians. In Notes from Underground, he satirizes the irrationalist option as severely as he censures its opposite. Dostoevsky’s abject anti-hero is indeed a rebel. Every word, argument, and recollected event in the Underground Man’s monologue, however, makes it clear that he is interested not in freedom but in power (over others, and over his right to define his own purpose). He knows better than anyone else how few are the exits from that controlling passion. Zamyatin’s We , although it was written in a Nietzschean era, is a brighter satire, almost a utopian satire, celebrating everything that does not require any firm point of support or point of rest. It is also, after a fashion, a love story. But nothing resembling a free or responsive personality could ever evolve on either side of its Green Wall. Nor was the presentation of such a life-option part of Zamyatin’s intent.

Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita belongs to a different era and tradition, and – for all its demonology – is a genuine hybrid. Its time-space is divided equally between secular and sacred realms. It too is a love story, although grounded in

176 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature