The overwhelming binary remains city versus country, the urban factory versus the rural village or steppe. Inside OneState, the architectural principle of Petersburg reigns, albeit grossly exaggerated and essentialized: the triumph of the grid, square, box, the regimented “life in uniform” with its respect for reflecting surfaces, external rank, and standardized norms. It is one of Zamyatin’s masterful twists on the Petersburg tradition to represent the birth of D-503’s individuated consciousness (the birth of an “I” out of a “We,” recounted in entry 16) as the softening up of a mirror. Throughout the Gogol– Dostoevsky line, the anguish of a hero’s isolation, humiliation, and descent into madness is portrayed with the help of mirrors. These poor clerks gaze at themselves, are revolted by what they see reflected in that flat surface, deny that it exists, fantasize a substitute – and as a sign of their madness, a Double emerges. D-503 too resists his own reflection. He has been happy. But his soul flares up anyway. As the doctor explains to his bewildered patient (p. 87):
Take a flat plane, a surface, take this mirror, for instance. And the two of us are on this surface, see, and we squint our eyes against the sun . . . But just imagine now that some fire has softened this impenetrable surface and nothing skims along the top of it any longer – everything penetrates into it, inside, into that mirror world . . . The plane has taken on mass, body, the world, and it’s all inside the mirror, inside you . . . And, you understand, the cold mirror reflects, throws back, while this absorbs, and the trace left by everything lasts forever.
This is a Moscow moment, absorptive, dark, and (once begun) unstoppable, when some living impulse “takes root” inside. In Gogol’s and Dostoevsky’s Petersburg, mirrors are flat and doubling – a sign of insanity. Inside OneState, a “softened” surface is criminalized. But it is a sign of budding sanity.
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If inside OneState is the regimented city, then outside is the Big Village. This image, too, is exaggerated. Exiles from the city don’t need houses at all; homes have reverted to the trees out of which they were built. Separating the city of OneState from the forested wilderness is the glass Green Wall. The point of passage is the “Ancient House” – one of those ramshackle wooden homes tucked away down Moscow streets and alleys – presided over by a decrepit old woman who is all wrinkles and smiles, a Baba Yaga in league with the Mephi, able to control the boundary between life and death. Spiritually, I-330 is one of her daughters. Of course Zamyatin, a builder himself, is not advocating the Outside as anything like productive freedom. D-503 describes his visit beyond the Wall as a Dionysian nightmare: “It’s as if they set off a bomb in my head and all around, piled in a heap, are open mouths, wings, screams, leaves, words, stones...Icouldn’tmove, because I wasn’tstanding ona surface, but something disgustingly soft, yielding, alive, green, springy” (pp. 148–49).
The naked humanoids in this fantastic place are covered with glossy fur. They bask in the sun, drink wines, nibble fruit. Much in this wilderness partakes of the Moscow mythic cluster of values: fertility, an abundance of food and drink, natural rhythms and cycles, the sense that the ground underfoot is black earth, not stony pavement. Moscow is what survives when the utopian planners fail and the machines blow themselves up. Within her domain, life is supported at any cost and corporeal reality is never sacrificed for mathematics or a mere disembodied idea. At the last minute, I-330 arranges to slip O-90, pregnant illegally with D-503’s child, beyond the Wall to give birth. There, amid the moss and the screeching of birds, the child will be permitted to live.