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Timing in my life dealt Zamyatin an unfair hand: by the time I read We, I had already read both Brave New World and 1984, and had also been intimately familiar with Isaiah Berlin's philosophical explorations on pluralism, totalitarianism, and the impossibility of a Platonic ideal. The former books had an all-too-familiar plot, and Berlin's philosophical essays were much more satisfying and thorough than Zamyatin could weave into a plot-driven novel. Thus, this book didn't bring much to the table to me. I also thought Zamyatin's writing was a bit disjointed.
And yet--there is truth here. It resides in one of the novel's most central themes: that the essence of man -- of life itself -- is our freedom to choose our destiny. Happiness by formula, by reasoned calculation that admits no personal oddities nor irrational emotions, is impossible. We find that these irrational emotions at once have the power to devastate our lives, and immeasurably enrich it nonetheless. For this is why we choose freedom; this is why calculated happiness (and with it, the ideal of static Utopian societies stretching back to Plato) is nonexistent. The essence of humanity is freedom. It is only through this freedom--freedom to make badly measured choices, freedom to always lead self-revolutions and realizations, freedom to define and re-define meaning--that we weep, rejoice, find our gods, and love life for all we can make it worth.
Life resists classification into mathematically precise, logical, interrelated, perfectly locking units. Ideals and values--often held within a single individual--clash and fail to meet mutually satisfying ends. The totalitarian One State attempts to force such a calculated pattern on its subjects: "To unbend the wild, primitive curve and straighten it to a tangent--an asymptote--a straight line." Inevitably, the repression of primitive, innate human nature fails, as it always has and always will.
Add in that Zamyatin created this first dystopian novel with no precedent, with only his frightening, rapidly 'progressing' homeland Russia to garner inspiration from, and I can't deny it: I'm impressed.
F*ck future Soviet Realism. Stalin can read it and weep.
And yet--there is truth here. It resides in one of the novel's most central themes: that the essence of man -- of life itself -- is our freedom to choose our destiny. Happiness by formula, by reasoned calculation that admits no personal oddities nor irrational emotions, is impossible. We find that these irrational emotions at once have the power to devastate our lives, and immeasurably enrich it nonetheless. For this is why we choose freedom; this is why calculated happiness (and with it, the ideal of static Utopian societies stretching back to Plato) is nonexistent. The essence of humanity is freedom. It is only through this freedom--freedom to make badly measured choices, freedom to always lead self-revolutions and realizations, freedom to define and re-define meaning--that we weep, rejoice, find our gods, and love life for all we can make it worth.
Life resists classification into mathematically precise, logical, interrelated, perfectly locking units. Ideals and values--often held within a single individual--clash and fail to meet mutually satisfying ends. The totalitarian One State attempts to force such a calculated pattern on its subjects: "To unbend the wild, primitive curve and straighten it to a tangent--an asymptote--a straight line." Inevitably, the repression of primitive, innate human nature fails, as it always has and always will.
Add in that Zamyatin created this first dystopian novel with no precedent, with only his frightening, rapidly 'progressing' homeland Russia to garner inspiration from, and I can't deny it: I'm impressed.
F*ck future Soviet Realism. Stalin can read it and weep.