The Icon and the Axe

In a series of surrealistic scenes, D-503 almost succumbs to their world of energy, which is contrasted with the entropy of the United State. Insisting on the infinite and Dionysian in face of the need for rationality is, however, ominously likened early in the novel to placing one's hand over the barrel of a rifle. As D-503 begins to succumb, this image becomes magnified to apocalyptical proportions. With the "forces of unreason" on the loose, Doomsday is at hand. D-503 prepares for suicide, but, at the very end, he is mysteriously brought back to daylight. His faith in finitude and the power of reason is restored by an operation which removes his soul. We is not only a brilliant forerunner of the anti-utopian Brave New World and 1984, it is also a culmination of the essentially anti-Christian preoccupation with Prometheanism and sensualism in the late imperial period. It might even be called a kind of black scripture for the satanists. Black masses had, after all, become a fashionable form of diversion in certain aristocratic circles; and Khlebnikov had not been alone in seeing "the world upside down" and life itself as little more than "a game in Hell."131 We is divided into forty "records" (rather than chapters), a number almost certainly suggested by the length of Christ's temptation and of the flood. It is related in the chronicle form of the Gospels, beginning with a black parody of the first chapter of St. John ("I am only copying-word by word . .. Before taking up arms, we shall try out the word") and a kind of annunciation ("The great historic hour is near, when the first INTEGRAL will rise into limitless space"). It ends with a surrealistic mock passion, crucifixion, descent, and resurrection of a hero whose age is that of Christ at the time of his passion. These events occur in the final "records," which correspond to the last days of Christ. The wall is shattered like the temple of Jerusalem; his descent into hell is portrayed through the image of the latrine in the underground railway, where he meets the Anti-God of the sensualists in a satanic parody on the image of Christ seated in glory at the right hand of God the father. Amidst the "unseen transparent music" of the waters in the latrine, Satan approaches D-503 from a toilet seat to the left. He introduces himself with an affectionate pat, and soon proves to be nothing more than a gigantic phallus: the true God of this neo-primitive and unnaturally erotic age. His "neighbor" is nothing but "a forehead-an enormous bald parabola" with "indefinable yellow lines of wrinkles" that suddenly seemed to be "all about me." This strange shape assures D-503 that he is capable of orgasm and not the "discarded cigarette butt" (which D-503 had assumed himself to be after an unsuccessful attempt at sexual union with I-330).

I understand you, I understand completely-he said-but just the same you must calm down: it is not necessary. All of that will return, it will inevitably return.132

He then tries to get D-503 to believe that "there is no infinity." Comforted by this thought, D-503 hastens to finish his chronicle on toilet paper and "put down a period just as the ancients placed a cross over the pits into which they threw their dead." In the last record, the fortieth, he is mysteriously resurrected and shown the path to salvation. This is again a kind of parody of the final vision of glory in the New Testament. The walls of the New Jerusalem are "a temporary wall of high voltage waves"; its bells are one giant Bell (Kolokol), which is the name given a torture chamber. Into it is led a mysterious person with sharp white teeth and dark eyes, a final satanic metamorphosis of the missing Madonna into the sensuous "unknown lady" of the silver age. As she is placed under "the Bell" she stares out at D-503 rather like the Queen of Spades in Pushkin's story and Chaikovsky's opera and the Demon of Vrubel's painting. However, for D-503, from whom the soul has now been removed, she is a creature from another world. He turns instead to look on "the Numbers who have betrayed reason" as they enter into the purgatory of the Gas Chamber, which will reintegrate them in preparation for "the ascent up the stairs to the machine of the Well-Doer."