We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Mirra Ginsburg Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of We
Book Review: BIOSPHERE 2 GONE BAD
Summary: 3 Stars
The main character, D-503, realizes something interesting: he has a soul. And it just so happens that he's the head-honcho behind the development of a spaceship called the Integral. In this "utopia" people live in glass domes--what an Arizonan like me would call a biosphere--and have no privacy, expect for certain special times. So there is definitely a heavy science fiction aspect to this work, quite amazing for 1920-21 Russia. One thing that really stuck out was how believable the main character--D-503--was. As a mathematician, he thinks in numbers and geometrical shape. Instead of saying of a table, "it looked like a wooden animal", he might say something like, "it looked like a rectangle sitting atop four cylinders." A small detail, but one worth noticing. As in Brave New World and 1984, the ending line has the power of a knife being driven into your stomach. I'll disagree that WE is better overall than BNW and 1984, but it a good book in its own little way. The writing style can be a little clunky--as is usually the case with translated works--but not terribly so. Yes, this is a good book, well worth your time, effort, and money.Book Review: Beautiful Dystopia
Summary: 5 Stars
The book has as its obvious shelfmates Anthem by Ayn Rand and 1984 by George Orwell, but it is more lyrical, more hysterical, more stream-of-consciousness. I suppose Orwell's prose is stronger and Rand is certainly more direct, but I actually loved its dreamy and confusing style, and didn't mind not knowing what the hell was going on a lot of the time. It seemed more true that a journal entry from this future world, with its strange premises and priorities, would read as confusing and boggling to me. Sometimes I didn't know which end was up, and it almost felt like the narrator was writing blind. I think that was intentional and masterful. One of the best and most convincing aspects of the book was that the narrator didn't always seem in control.
This book begins with the narrator not only a willing part of this world without individuals, but an enthusiastic supporter of these ideas. He isn't grimy and hopeless about it all (ahem, Winston Smith?); he's a cheerleader for the system. Of course, it all goes terribly awry.
It occurred to me as I was comparing those three books that the oppressive, dystopian system never seems to break down for these people because of acquisition of material wealth. It doesn't break down because they don't like being told what pants to wear either. These characters, denied property, denied privacy, denied choice, do not rebel to get their own TV or to get their own bank account or their own window shades. They rebel to get their own girl. It's always love that breaks the system down, that sends the main character tangentially off, destroying himself to be alone with the woman he loves. Interesting. I wonder if that is really true. Maybe it just makes good books, to say that people will give up fortunes but not give up a mate. We'd have a harder time cheering for the grey little cog in the machine, who breaks out of his place so he can triumphantly and emotionally buy a Corvette. Love makes a good novel. But is that really how it would work? The characters in We are allowed to bed whoever they want -- they just have to register and receive a "pink coupon" to make it happen. Would people really bring the world down around their ears just to reinstate monogamy?
Book Review: Beautiful, personal and Misunderstood
Summary: 4 Stars
This is more of a philosphy novel than anything else. There are intertwinnings with beautiful fantasy, pure logic and a personalisation that you will not find in 1984 or Brave N ew World. There are direct references to religion, science experiments that were the buzz of Zamyatin's time and still ring with us today. The main problenm with this book is for people to take it too seriously. This is partly a mix of an author's life and his fiction. The 70s feel is amazing considering the time it was written in. I recommend people not to take to heart that this book may have influenced 1984 and BNW because then you will read too much into this and not enjoy it.
Book Review: Before Brave New World & 1984...
Summary: 5 Stars
I was reading an article some time ago that mentioned this novel as a precursor to George Orwell's 1984. Well, as 1984 is one of my favorite novels, I thought I should take a look at this one. Boy, am I glad I did. This is one fantastic book.In a world where no one has a name, this is the journal of D-503. He is a man who lives in a city entirely made of glass (since who would have anything to hide from the state?). He may only pull down his shades if he has the proper coupon (such as a permitted tryst with O-90). He must take his daily constitutional walk with the rest of the city and watch the films supplied by the state.
But D-503 is a man who believes in reason and the correctness of the state. He chews his food the suggested number of times before he swallows. He lives his life by the routine given to him by the state. He works to build the Integral, the first rocket ship to take reason to the stars. All seems perfect...until he meets I-330.
I-330 shows him the power of desire and soon independent thought takes over his mind. He learns of a more primitive world that exists outside the glass walls of the city. He even begins to believe he should participate in the revolution against the state.
And how does it all end? Well, I don't want to give too much away. Besides, there's so much more than I've even hinted at here. Do yourself a favor and read this book for yourself.
Book Review: Chilling and underrated dystopia
Summary: 5 Stars
This little-known and stream-of-consciousness dystopia is actually called 'Yedinoye Gosudarstvo' in the original Russian (which can be translated as 'One State,' 'Single State,' or 'United State'). Calling it 'We' is more eye-catching and more fully gets across what all the book's about. This book is also very similar to 'Brave New World'; I wrote a paper in my Modern Russian Lit class, when we read this book, about those similarities.
The book is told in the form of D-503's notes, notes he originally began taking on government orders to write or create something celebrating OneState once his precious creation, the spaceship INTEGRAL, blasts off into space and colonises other worlds and brainwashes them with their own brand of totalitarianism and forced conformity. Since he is a mathematician, he intends it to be a mathematical poem, until he meets I-330. Up till then, he had been in love with the sweet O-90 (who looks like her name, a round little O-shaped woman who still has baby fat on her), whom he and his best friend R-13 have been sexually sharing for at least three years, though O-90 doesn't feel any love for R-13 when they're together. At first he is repelled and horrified by I-330's nonconformist ways, like wearing forbidden clothing, smoking, drinking, lying to authorities, hanging out in the Ancient House a lot, going behind the Green Wall (which is like the "savage reservation" in BNW), and being very sexually liberated. As time goes on she gets to him more and more, though he never stops supporting OneState and the Benefactor. He even starts to go along with her plan to lock up the factory workers when they're at lunch so they can use the INTEGRAL for good instead of evil, and begins to have dreams and an imagination, things which had been stamped out for hundreds of years. D-503 also resists getting a new imagination-removing operation done on the day that everyone was supposed to get it done.
This is probably the most un-Russian Russian book I can think of; there is no mention of where they are in Russia, obviously no one has Russian names or any names at all apart from numbers and letters (women have vowels, men have consonants), there's no Russian food, history, or culture mentioned, nothing which would tell the reader that this was a Russian novel apart from the writer's name and the original language. The closest we get to Russian aspects are the old woman who guards the Ancient House and U, the guardian of D-503's house and who has a bizarre, laughable, and decidedly nonmutual crush on him; one might say they are like stereotypical old Russian grandmother-figures. There is also a bust of Pushkin in the Ancient House and a brief discussion on him. And it doesn't really matter where this takes place; there is no identifying national culture here because individuality has been crushed and the masses have surrendered to a collective state which controls every single part of one's life, right down to how many bites to take when chewing a morsel of food or what one has to do at nearly every single second of the day.