American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

The Imagination and the "I" in Zamjatin's WeAuthor(s): Gary RosenshieldReviewed work(s):Source: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring, 1979), pp. 51-62Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/307799 .Accessed: 10/12/2011 14:07

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages is collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to The Slavic and East European Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

THE IMAGINATION AND THE "I" IN ZAMJATIN'S WE

Gary Rosenshield, University of Wisconsin, Madison

In the criticism of the last two decades, Zamjatin's We continues to be treated almost solely as a work of anti-utopian fiction.' Critics have tended to view it not as a novel in the traditional sense, but as an example of what Northrop Frye has called Menippean satire, a genre of narrative in which characters serve mainly as the mouthpieces for the author's social ideas.2 Since, according to Frye, such works are governed by different aesthetic laws than the novel, it is unfair to judge them by novelistic criteria. Close ex- amination of the text of We, however, reveals that its artistic merits result less from its prophetic presentation of social reality than from its original and consummate development of such essential novelistic "aspects" as theme and character.3

In order more clearly to elucidate Zamjatin's novelistic achievement in We, it is useful to analyze the theme of the imagination as manifested in the narrative structure of the work. Though the theme of the imagination lies at the heart of the novel it has received surprisingly little attention. In par- ticular, no one has studied the transformation of the narrator from mathematician to poet. Yet this transformation is of crucial importance to our appreciation of We as a novel, for it is the means by which Zamjatin is able to dissolve the work's abstract social ideas into that experiential reality viewed by most critics as the essential stuff of the novel.

The action of We takes place in the twenty-ninth century in a utopian state based on the rule of reason. The only state to survive a long period of protracted wars (and thus appropriately named the One State), it attempts to secure universal human happiness by completely regimenting the daily life of its citizens. To achieve this goal, the state has found it necessary to strip man of his individuality and freedom.4

The novel is in the form of a diary. The point of view is that of the diarist, D-503. At the beginning of the novel, D-503 is in charge of building a spaceship, the Integral, which will carry the ideology of the One State (happiness without freedom) to other planets. The narrator is an ardent sup- porter of every aspect of his society; he is, in effect, a true believer-otherwise he would not have been entrusted with the building of the Integral. Not content, however, with merely supervising the construc-

SEEJ, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1979) 51

52 Slavic and East European Journal

tion of the Integral, D-503 begins a diary-to be part of the Integral's precious cargo-which will explain and glorify the goals and accomplish- ments of the One State to the inhabitants of other worlds.

D-503's views ironically begin to diverge from those of the state, once he takes up the diary. He continues to believe in all that the One State stands for, but the sudden emergence of hitherto unknown irrational desires begins to undermine the foundation of his rational beliefs. His very desire to write a poem in praise of the Integral awakens in him the emotional and imagina- tive forces that he had originally intended to depreciate in others.5 At- tempting a paean of the Integral, almost unbeknownst to himself, and almost against his own will, he writes a poem in praise of irrational man. As long as D-503 was only building the Integral, he suffered no inner doubts; he was a perfect citizen of the state. He neither questioned, nor dreamed. Once he decided to dedicate a poem to it, however, the floodgates of the irrational and the imagination opened, and from his own point of view, his fate was sealed.6 In the course of We, the narrator is transformed from a number into a human being, from the builder of the Integral into its potential destroyer, and most ironically from a mathematician into a poet.7

The clash between the mathematician and poet in D-503 is presented in the very first diary entry. The narrator tells of being inspired by a proclama- tion in the state newspaper announcing the mission of the Integral and re-

questing its citizens to compose works extolling the beauty and grandeur of the One State. As a mathematician who does not know how to create the "music of assonances and rhymes," D-503 can only hope to write a clear and accurate description of what he believes to be the perfect society. "But this, after all, will be a derivative of our life, of the mathematically perfect life of the One State; and if so, then will it not be in and of itself, despite my will, a poem? It will-I believe and know it will."8 But almost immediately after this statement of intentions, rational formulae and impersonal descrip- tions give way to poetic metaphors and sentiment.

I write this and I feel my cheeks on fire. This is probably similar to what a woman

experiences when she first senses within herself the pulse of a new, still tiny, blind human being. It is I, and at the same time, it is not I. I will have to nourish it for long months with my own life's juices, my own blood, and then painfully tear it out of myself and lay it at the feet of the One State. But I am ready, just like-or almost like everyone of us-I am'ready.

The narrator's burning cheeks are the outward signs not only of intense emotion, but also of poetic fantasy. The blind little human being that he senses within him betokens the birth of imagination as well as the recrudescence of his irrational primitive self, a self which he has almost com- pletely repressed.9 He intuitively understands that this newly discovered be- ing is an enemy of his rational self which will have to be sacrificed eventually to the greater glory of the state. But at this point, he is willing to make the sacrifice, to suffer the pain; later he will be more reluctant.

Zamjatin's We 53

Much of Zamjatin's success in handling D-503's awakening to the irrational and imaginative sides of his personality results from the way he combines impressionistic and expressionistic techniques with the poetics of the diary-confession. The struggle that is being waged within D-503 throughout the novel is reflected not only in the narrator's thoughts and ac- tions but in the language and form of the diary. In the passages that reflect his rational self, D-503 cannot resist the temptation of expressing his thoughts in terms of mathematical formulae:'1

Freedom and crime are as inextricably linked to each other as ... well, as the motion of an aero and its speed. When the speed of an aero equals zero, it does not move; when man's freedom

equals zero, he does not commit crimes. That is clear. The only way of saving man from crime is to save him from freedom. (34.)

Well, it is clear then: in order to establish the true value of a function, it is necessary to take it to its limit. And it is clear that yesterday's absurd "dissolution in the universe" taken to its limit, is death. Because death is precisely the most complete dissolution of myself in the universe. It follows then, if we designate L as love and D as death, then L=f(D), that is love and death ... (116-17.)11

People, objects, and events are all depicted with the same mathematical clarity and precision. Until the split in D-503's personality occurs, the very idea of a non-scientific comparison is alien to him. He describes human movements entirely in terms of mechanics, so that, stylistically, human be- ings are reduced to the inanimate objects they resemble. But this is entirely understandable, given the society of the One State, which has so regulated social life that the numbers actually behave like machines-they walk everywhere in rows, chew their food so many times per minute in unison, and even copulate according to a timetable.

In addition to perceiving the actions of his fellow numbers in terms of regular, mechanical movements, D-503 invariably records their physical presence in terms of geometric shapes.12 Occasionally, the letter worn on the chest badge blends in with the narrator's visual impression of the character. 0-90's shortness-ten centimeters below the maternal norm-makes her look "carved in the round" (8). Just before seeing S-4711, the narrator says: "I half opened my eyes, and at first (association with the Integral) something impetuously flying into space: a head-and it is flying, because on its sides-protruding pink wing-ears. And then the curve of the heavy neck at the back of the head-a hunched back-bent double-the letter S." (32-33.) The back of R-13's head is first likened to a square little valise at- tached from behind. A few lines later the narrator dispenses with the simile. "R-13 jumped up, turned, and stared somewhere through the wall. I looked at his tightly locked valise and thought: What is he now pouring over in there-in his little valise?" (40.)

The most important descriptions in the novel concern 1-330, the rebel with whom the narrator falls helplessly in love. Despite the irrationality of

54 Slavic and East European Journal

his love for 1-330, D-503 perceives her very much in the same way as he per- ceives the other characters. In the tenth entry, under great emotional strain, D-503 explores 1-330's face for an answer to the enigma that she poses for him. But instead of an answer he received an undecipherable geometric con- figuration, the main component of which is an irritating "x," the symbol for a mathematical unknown.13

Once the irrational side of the narrator's personality makes itself felt, however, the rational style begins periodically to alternate and combine with one much more emotional, suggestive, and poetic.14 Stylistically, it is as if a new writer were born. Impersonal, precise, and self-assured definitions and logical syntax give way to an array of dazzling color, disjointed word order, and emotionally charged similes and metaphors from the world of nature:

We walked, the two of us-One. Somewhere far away through the fog barely audibly sang the sun; everything was suffused with elasticity, with pearl, gold, rose, red. The whole world-a single unencompassable woman, and we, in its very womb, still unborn, are joyfully ripening. And it is clear to me, perfectly clear: all this is for me: the sun, the fog, the rose, the gold-for me. (64.)

At first, D-503 sees his primal, irrational feelings as something alien, and the birth of his soul as a sickness which separates him from his true self as well as from his fellow numbers. Thus the imaginative enterprise that D- 503 undertakes in writing the diary provides no catharsis. The emotive and irrational forces which it elicits only hasten the progress of the "disease." Fantasy stimulates and is in turn stimulated by the irrational self.'5 But gradually D-503 discovers, as is evident in the above passage, that the ex- pression of his irrational drives in sexual love brings him far closer to another human being, as well as to all creation, than the rational, com- pulsory conformity of the collective "we." Images of procreation, birth, and death begin to take on increased importance in the style of the diary. The sun, the source of all life, sings barely audibly, a sentence which, even at the beginning of the diary, D-503 would have thought completely contradictory if not incomprehensible. The narrator experiences a mystical oneness with all things, as if he were in direct contact with the source of life itself. His ex- perience is, in effect, transcendental: he has been transported into a hitherto unknown reality. When he describes making love to 1-330, all the charac- teristics of the new irrational style appear in the most concentrated form:

Her lips were mine. I drank and drank. I ripped myself away, silently looked into her eyes, wide-open for me, and again. ...

The half-light of rooms, blue, saffron-yellow, dark green morocco, the golden smile of Buddha, the glimmering of mirrors. And my old dream, so clear to me now: everything filled with a golden pink sap, and now it overflows and spurts. (66.)

The images of life and growth again predominate, but this time they are pre- sented in a more impressionistic and disjointed style, so as to convey the

Zamjatin's We 55

fluidity and intensity of the narrator's emotional and spiritual experience. It soon becomes clear that the mathematician in D-503 is in serious danger of being usurped by the poet: The sun . . . it wasn't our sun, uniformly distributed over the mirror-like surface of the sidewalks. These were living fragments, constantly moving spots, which blinded the eyes and made the head spin. And the trees, like candles rising into the sky itself; like spiders on crooked legs crouching on the earth; like mute green fountains.... And all this was crawling, stirring, rustling .... (132.)

The narrator makes explicit the difference between the two realities existing in his soul. The machine has temporarily been usurped by the living sun; crisp, clear, mathematical formulae by suggestive similes from nature; the whirring of flywheels by the crawling, stirring, and rustling of living things. 6

The emergence of the poet is also evident in D-503's changing sen- sibilities and increasing concern with the theme of creation. Whereas the rational D-503 sees beauty only in unfree motion, in machines flawlessly performing a "grandiose mechanical ballet flooded with light blue sun (7)," the new irrational D-503 begins to embrace the world of nature with passionate intensity. That the narrator is, as it were, seeing with new eyes is evident in the synesthetic effects of the following passage:

I returned home when the sun was already setting. The rose ash of evening-on the glass walls, on the gilt spire of the Accumulator Tower, in the voices and smiles of the numbers passing by. Isn't it strange: the dying rays of the sun fall at the very same angle as the rays of the rising sun, and yet everything is completely different; the rose is different-now it is quiet, slightly bitterish, and in the morning-it will again be resonant and sizzling. (90.)

Logically, things should not look different when the angle of the sun is the same in the morning and the evening. The narrator, however, now sees what he has never seen before; for he is seeing with the eyes of a poet: the light really is different. In addition, the rosiness of dawn and dusk are contrasted not in terms of light, but in terms of sound ("quiet," tixaja), taste ("bit- terish," gor'kovataja), and sight and sound ("sizzling," Sipuaaja).

It would be inaccurate to give the impression that D-503 continually os- cillates from one personality extreme to the other, at one moment com- pletely the old D-503 and at the next an individual governed by irrational forces beyond his control. Nor is there a regular progression in the course of the novel from the old to the new self. Although the narrator's poetic side continues to develop during the course of the diary, it never gains true ascendency over his rational self. Rather, throughout the novel, Zamjatin presents a personality the warring sides of which are engaged in an unin- terrupted struggle for supremacy.'7 Like the Underground Man, D-503 is a battleground on which the irrational-presented as the very essence of life-stages a revolt against an existence based solely on logical abstractions and lifeless formulae.

56 Slavic and East European Journal

In order to render the division of the hero's soul through his diary, Zamjatin either combines elements of the two predominant styles within the same paragraph-and sometimes within the same sentence-or uses the narrator's characteristic mathematical and mechanical imagery to describe the irrational processes occurring within him. The result is that the struggle between the mathematician and poet in D-503 is conveyed almost totally in terms of style. Since neither stylistic element predominates, but rather their combination and alternation, the reader is kept in suspense till the end of the novel, not knowing whether the narrator will join the rebels or submit to the operation which will rid him of his imagination. The heroine, 1-330, makes explicit what is implicit in the style. She tells D-503 that "a human being is like a novel: you don't know until the last page how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading." (130.)

There are literally dozens of passages stylistically juxtaposing the two warring sides of D-503's personality and conveying the narrator's feelings in mathematical, scientific images. In the following short paragraph, describ- ing the hero's sexual experiences with 1-330, both tendencies are repre- sented, as it were, in microcosm:

Unbearably sweet lips (I suppose it was the taste of the "liqueur"),-and into me flowed a mouthful of burning poison-and more-and more. ... I became detached from the earth, and revolving madly like an independent planet, I rushed down, down-along some uncalculated orbit.... (51.)

In the first sentence, the "unbearably sweet lips" and the repetition of the subjective "more" followed by an ellipsis bear the marks of the narrator's more poetic style. The parenthetical sentence in which D-503 ascribes the sweetness of the lips to the liqueur is an attempt to understand and present the sweetness rationally. In the second sentence the very same emotion is ex- pressed in terminology more characteristic of the old D-503. He describes his intense emotional release in terms of planetary bodies and orbits. But here the mathematical, scientific imagery is used to convey the almost transcendental beauty of irrational experience.18 Under the pressures of the irrational self, the narrator's own language, a language which seems at first cold and inexpressive, becomes in the end an effective and even eloquent means of poetic expression.19 In a sense the language of science and mathematics undergoes as great a change as D-503 himself.

The same process can be seen in even more striking form in a passage that records D-503's turmoil caused by his irrational experiences with 1-330:

The morning bell-I get up-and everything is quite different: through the glass ceiling, walls, in every place, everywhere-penetrating fog. Insane clouds, heavier and heavier-and lighter and closer; the boundaries between earth and heaven are gone; everything is flying, melting, falling; there's nothing to hold on to. No more houses: the glass walls have dissolved into the fog as little salt crystals in water. Looking from the sidewalk-the dark human figures in the houses, like suspended particles in a feverish milky solution, hang low, and high, and still

higher-up to the tenth floor. Everything is smoking-perhaps, it is a silently raging fire. (62- 63.)

Zamjatin's We 57

The narrator's confused feelings are conveyed in short, emotive phrases. The imagery, however, as in the previous example, is taken from D-503's rational life. Glass walls dissolve like crystals in water; people appear like particles in solutions. D-503 is able to use the old poetic forms, but more im- portant, he is equally adept at transforming the unpoetic objects of his everyday existence into powerful and effective means of artistic expression.20

The changes taking place in D-503 are evident not only in the style and content of his diary, but in his altered appearance and unusual behavior. The exact nature of D-503's transformation is guessed by several of the characters, a fact that gives the reader a more objective basis for evaluating the subjective evidence of the diary. On first meeting the narrator, for exam- ple, 1-330 exclaims: '"Forgive me,' she said, 'but you looked around at everything with such an inspired air like a mythical god on the seventh day of creation. It seems to me that I too am your creation, and no one else's. I am very flattered."' (9.)21 1-330 may have an ulterior motive for attracting the hero's attention, but her words nevertheless ring true. They correspond to D-503's mood at the time. Perhaps one of the main reasons she chooses D-503 as an accomplice is that his inspired air makes him seem like a possi- ble convert to the rebel cause.22 But more important, 1-330 comes to life to us only through the diary; she is indeed D-503's poetic creation.

R-13 also notices the change in the narrator. In the eighth entry, he catches D-503 daydreaming and remarks: "Yes, of course, of course! You know, my friend, you ought to be a poet, that's right, a poet and not a mathematician. Really, why don't you come over to us poets, what do you say? If you want to, I could arrange it in a moment!" (37-38.) R-13 is, of course, speaking ironically and cannot be aware of the accuracy of his own words. Writing a poem in praise of the Integral, D-503 has indeed entered the ranks of the poets. His dreaming is not a sign of idleness; it is a sign, among other things, of the imagination in ferment.23

When D-503 first decided to write a poem in praise of the One State, he bemoaned the fact that he had no poetic talent. "Oh, why am I not a poet, so that I might sing your just praises, O Table, 0 heart and pulse of the One State!" (14.) Nevertheless, he believed that an accurate description of the perfect state would in and of itself be a poem. As his poetic talent develops, however, he becomes increasingly aware that he is engaged in a real literary endeavor and that his poem about the One State is turning into a personal confession.24 He tries to deceive himself by telling his future readers that he is writing his "poem" in the form of a novel or adventure story so that it will be simpler for them to understand the beauty and truth of the One State. But the adventure story he is writing is not really about the Integral at all; it is about himself. It is a story not about "we," but about an "I," a story about the birth and development of an individual soul. D-503 says every true poet is a Columbus, by which he means to glorify R-13's great achieve-

58 Slavic and East European Journal

ment of revealing the beauty of the multiplication table. Zamjatin is using the narrator's words here to ridicule the utilitarian aesthetic of the One State. But he is also intimating that in a sense it is the narrator who is the true Columbus, for he has embarked on a poetic journey that has led to the discovery of a whole new world within himself.

Ironically, it is the diary and not the Integral that turns out to be the hero's most important work. Since the diary will carry to the inhabitants of other planets not a precise, rational paean of the perfect society, but an im-

passioned account of the narrator's discovery of and rapture with the irrational forces of the human soul, it will serve to warn other civilizations of the virulent ideals of the One State.

The state is well aware of the danger that the diary poses for its ex- istence. For the act of imagination goes against the very principles on which the state is founded. Poetry, as Aristotle pointed out, deals with what might happen in contrast with history which deals with what has already hap- pened. That is, it deals with the possible and not the actual. Its domain therefore is infinite. It posits new worlds and finds them in each individual. The One State, however, is determined to outlaw infinity and its corollaries, possibility and freedom. As long as man has imagination, he will continue to

go beyond the rational bounds set by the One State.25 The state soon realizes that it must destroy man's imagination if it is to secure its ideal of un- freedom and make man happy. The loss of imagination, however, com-

pletely dehumanizes man, reducing him to a machine whose name is fit-

tingly a number. Man without imagination is a contradiction in terms, since man without imagination is not man. D-503 himself senses this when he first sees the numbers who have just had their imaginative faculties destroyed:

At the corner, in the auditorium-a wide-open door, and out of it comes a slow, heavy column of about fifty people. But "people" is not the right word. These aren't legs, but heavy, welded wheels turned by an invisible gear. These are not people, but only people-like tractors. Over their heads, a white banner with an embroidered golden sun waves in the wind-in its rays an inscription! "We are the first! We have been operated on! Everyone follow us." (161.)

By excising the imagination, the state also hopes to destroy love and

friendship, which jeopardize the loyalty to the collective, to "we." At the

beginning of his diary, D-503 states that love is a function of death; in the end he comes to see that it is essentially a function of the imagination. It is not only sensual, painful, and irrational, it is also poetry. It is color, sound, taste, smell, and touch in infinite combination and variety. In fact, D-503's

diary turns out to be a poem about his love for the enigmatic 1-330, not for the spaceship Integral. She has replaced the Integral as his muse. She diverts him from his original intention of writing a dry, rational tract on the virtues of unfreedom and inspires him, unawares, to write of his love for her.26 She is, in effect, the catalyst which completes his transformation from mathematician to poet.27

Zamjatin's We 59

The role of imagination in the narrator's and I-330's romance is dramatically highlighted in the last entry. Apprehended while hiding un- derground, D-503 is taken to an operating room where an x-ray machine cauterizes the little nodule in the brain housing the imagination. The narrator's last entry is devoid of emotion: compared to the passionate outbursts of the previous entries, it is almost machine-like. From the point of view of the One State, the operation has been a complete success. D-503 comments on his diary: "The handwriting is mine; in fact, it's the very same handwriting, but fortunately, only the handwriting. No delirium, no absurd metaphors, no feelings; only facts. Because I am well. I am completely, ab- solutely well!" (199.) On the day following the loss of his imagination, the narrator betrays 1-330 and then sits stolidly by while she is brutally tortured. He remembers who she is, but he feels absolutely nothing for her. The death of imagination has resulted in the death of love.

D-503's fate raises questions about the success of the revolution against the One State. Some critics maintain that We is very pessimistic about the future, for in the end the state not only brutally crushes the revolution, but utilizes its scientific knowledge to make all future revolutions impossible.28 After all, the rebels fail to take over the Integral (the most important symbol of the One State), the leader of the rebels is executed, and large numbers of the citizens, including the narrator, have undergone or are undergoing the operation.

The narrator's last lines, however, indicate that the state is not doing as well as many critics have argued. There is still chaos in one part of the city and "quite a few numbers... have betrayed reason." (200.) D-503 is himself not quite sure that the forces of the One State will prevail. "And I hope we shall be victorious. What is more, I am sure that we shall be. Because reason must prevail." (200.) The narrator's use of the word dol2en for "must" in- dicates that the ultimate victory of the state is something that he believes to be morally necessary rather than historically inevitable. Furthermore, if the characters of the novel are meant to be taken as representative, then the ranks of the rebels are much greater than D-503 imagines. Almost everybody that the narrator has a close relationship with is either sym- pathetic to the rebels or part of the actual conspiracy. R- 13 turns out to be a close friend of 1-330. 0-90 is to have a baby among the free people outside the Green Wall. Even the Guardian S-4711, to the consternation of the narrator, is a conspirator. Rebellion, it seems, is rife at every level. Moreover, the fragility of the One State is repeatedly suggested by the very substance with which it builds its ideological and physical edifice-glass. The "impregnable" glass wall protecting the city is breached several times at the end of the novel.

Although D-503 had often almost confessed his "crime" to the authorities, in the end he does not go willingly to the operation. If we con- sider that he was once one of the most rational and regimented "numbers"

60 Slavic and East European Journal

in the state, a man of unquestioned loyalty and a strong booster of the of- ficial ideology, it is not surprising that others are also resisting. The implica- tion is that all the numbers possess imagination and therefore they are all potential rebels against the totalitarian state. What is most significant, however, is that the open rebellion is the direct consequence of the state's

plan to extirpate the imagination of its citizens. It is as if the rebels un- derstood that this is their last chance to defend their humanity. They have realized that life without the imagination is existence and not life. If Notes from the Underground and The Brothers Karamazov show that men will not consent to live without freedom, in We Zamjatin demonstrates that men will not consent to live without imagination.

NOTES

1 See Gleb Struve, "Novye varianty sigalevsciny: O romanax Zamjatina, Xaksli i Orvella," Novyj Zurnal, 30 (1952), 152-63. See George Woodcock, "Utopias in Negative," Sewanee Revue, 64 (1956), 81-97; D. J. Richards, "Four Utopias," Slavonic and East European Review, 40 (1961), 220-28; Irving Howe, "The Fiction of Anti-Utopia," The New Republic, 146 (23 April 1962), 13-16; Edward J. Brown, "Zamjatin and English Literature," American Contributions to the Fifth International Congress of Slavists (2 Vols.; The Hague: Mouton, 1963), II, 21-40; Christopher Collins, "Zamjatin, Wells, and the Utopian Literary Tradition," Slavonic and East European Review, 44 (1966), 351-60; Gordon Brow-

ning, "Zamjatin's 'We': An Anti-Utopian Classic," Cithera, 7, No. 2 (1968), 13-20; Gor-

don Browning, "Toward a Set of Standards for Anti-Utopian Fiction," Cithera, 10, No. I (1970), 18-32; Gorman Beauchamp, "Of Man's Last Disobedience: Zamiatin's We and Orwell's 1984," Comparative Literature Studies, 10 (1973), 285-301; Patrick Parrinder, "Imagining the Future: Zamyatin and Wells," Science-Fiction Studies, I, Pt. 1 (1973), 17-

26; James Conners, "Zamjatin's We and the Genesis of 1984," Modern Fiction Studies, 21

(1975), 107-24; E. J. Brown, "Brave New World," "I1984," and "We".' An Essay on Anti-

Utopia (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1976). 2 For Frye's discussion of Menippean satire, see his Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Prin-

ceton Univ. Press, 1957), 308-12. In the second edition of his study of Dostoevskij, M. M.

Baxtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, 2nd ed. (M.: Sov. pisatel', 1962), 150-210, dis-

cusses Menippean satire in some detail. Baxtin's views of the genre differ considerably from Frye's; nevertheless, he too links Menippean satire and utopian fiction.

3 For those who hold the opposite view, see D. S. Mirsky, Contemporary Russian Literature

(London: G. Routledge, 1926), 114; Vladimir Pozner, Panorama de la litterature russe

contemporaine (Paris: Kra, 1929), 320; Richard A. Gregg, "Two Adams and Eve in the

Crystal Palace: Dostoevsky, the Bible, and We," Slavic Review, 24 (1965), 687. 4 The influence of Dostoevskij's Notes from the Underground and "The Grand Inquisitor"

on Zamjatin's We has been repeatedly examined. See, for example, Struve, 152-63; Robert L. Jackson, Dostoevskij's Underground Man in Russian Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1958), 150-57; Richards, 220-24; Gregg, 680-87; Alex M. Shane, The Life and Works of

Evgenij Zamjatin (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1968), 139-44; Edmund Yarwood, "A Comparison of Selected Symbols in Notes from the Underground and We,"

Proceedings.' Pacific Northwest Conference on Foreign Languages, 21 (1970), 144-49; Patricia Warrick, "The Sources of Zamyatin's We in Dostoevsky's Notes from Un-

derground," Extrapolation, 17 (1975), 63-77.

Zamjatin's We 61

5 Parrinder, 23, notes that "superficially D-503 develops a soul as a result of falling in love with the fascinating 1-330, but really it is constituted by the act of writing." Parrinder, however, does not expand on this point.

6 I have translated Zamjatin'sfantazija as imagination. Voobrafenie andfantazija are often used interchangeably by Russian writers. Dostoevskij's use of the two terms in "White Nights" is a case in point. See my "Point of View and the Imagination in Dostoevskij's 'White Nights,"' SEEJ, 21 (1977), 191-203.

7 Most critics who treat the split in D-503-and especially those who compare Zamjatin with Dostoevskij-discuss it in terms of the conflict between the forces of rationalism and irrationalism. See, for example, Jackson, 150-57; Shane, 139-44; Yarwood, 144-49; Warrick, 63-77. But the most interesting studies on this topic are those of Carl R. Proffer "Notes on the Imagery in Zamjatin's We," SEEJ, 7 (1963), 269-78, who examines the rational-irrational dichotomy in terms of color imagery, and Christopher Collins, "Zam- jatin's We as Myth," SEEJ, 10 (1966), 125-33, who interprets it in terms of Jungian archetypes.

8 Evgenij Zamjatin, My (New York: Inter-Language Literary Associates, 1967), 6. Transla- tions from the Russian are my own.

9 Whereas most critics recognize this new being as the irrational self-and some, like Richards, 226, and Shane, 145, explicitly equate the imagination with the irrational-no one to my knowledge has noted in this passage the birth of the poet.

10 Zamjatin is remarkably successful in convincing us that a man of D-503's position and training in the One State might very well speak and write the way he does. In this respect Zamjatin clearly outdid both Huxley and Orwell. The originality of Zamjatin's language in We has been noted by Parrinder, 17-26; Gorman Beauchamp, "Future Words: Language and the Dystopian Novel," Style, 8 (1974), 462-76.

11 For other good examples of this style, see 21, 22-23, 70-71, 100-102. 12 Parrinder, 23, notes that such descriptions are "striking instances of literary Cubism."

Since D-503 sees all phenomena in much the same way, cubist devices are evident in almost all of his "rational" descriptions.

13 With only a few exceptions-two proclamations of the One State and a letter written by 0- 90-the only prose represented in the diary is D-503's. The style of the state proclama- tions (5-6, 153-54) is very similar to the narrator's more rational style. However, 0-90's let- ter to D-503, telling him of her frustrated love, is completely free of D-503's mathematical-scientific jargon and comparisons. Another sign that the narrator's language in general may be characteristic of only the state and its most logical citizens is 1- 330's realization that D-503 speaks, in effect, his own language and must have things ex- plained to him in it. At one point, she even says to him: "Do you remember-there, on the stone, the picture of the youth? No, I'd better say it in your language, it'll be easier for you to understand." (142.) She then proceeds to explain her idea using the same type of mathematical-scientific language that D-503 uses throughout the diary.

14 The term style is sometimes used in the narrow sense to describe an author's syntax and lexicon. In this paper, I am using the term style in a somewhat broader sense to cover, in addition to syntax and lexicon, the narrator's imagery and the way the imagery is incor- porated into the text.

15 D-503 explicitly ascribes his heightened sensibilities to his illness. "And if you too have ever been ill, as I am now, you know what the sun is like in the morning-what it can be like-you know that rose, transparent, warm gold" (72).

16 For similar poetic passages, see also 31, 58, 63-64, 72, 112, 113, 127, 137, 141, 144, 164, 176-77.

17 Parrinder, 24, thus greatly simplifies the actual situation when he maintains that D-503's "orthodox discourse diminishes" and his "expressionistic style" is established "as the diary proceeds."

62 Slavic and East European Journal

18 Beauchamp, "Future Words," 472, notes that D-503, lacking the language to express his desires, "must forge a formulation of his rebellion from the enemy's own technological terminology."

19 This is, in effect, an attempt, through style, to integrate the hero's rational and irrational selves. As Shane, 141-42, points out, Zamjatin was not an irrationalist like Dostoevskij, but believed that in the complete man the irrational and rational would be reconciled.

20 For several especially effective passages in which the two styles are juxtaposed, see 42, 47, 146, 187. Examples of the use of mathematical and scientific imagery to represent deep, personal emotion can be found on almost every page. For the more striking instances of this technique, see 41, 47, 49, 64, 69, 74, 76, 77, 80, 85, 89, 99, 102-3, 113, 116, 117, 134, 163, 167, 169, 193.

21 The Biblical symbolism of the novel is treated in detail by Gregg, 680-87; Beauchamp, "Man's Last Disobedience," 285-301.

22 I disagree here with Gregg, 682, who maintains that 1-330's statement is mockingly ironic. 23 It is thus not accidental that the portrait of Puskin in the Ancient House smiles right into

his face. It is as if Puskin foresees the transformation that will take place in D-503 and is

inwardly laughing. 24 Yarwood, 144, maintains that D-503 takes to writing a diary to "solve his conflict with his

society through verbalization." Alexander Angeloff, "The Relationship of Literary Means and Alienation in Zamiatin's We," Russian Language Journal, 23 (1969), 3, states that D-503 "uses the diary to verbalize and thus better understand his own mental tur- moil." D-503, however, is not aware of his problem until he starts writing.

25 Yarwood, 145, notes that, like the Underground Man, but in contrast to D-503, the heroine 1-330 refuses to accept the wall (the laws of nature) and the Crystal Palace (the rationalistic utopia). However, as D-503 develops into a poet he too comes more and more to reject the wall. This is why he must undergo the operation. Here Zamjatin, as in

many other places, is most noticeably a disciple of Dostoevskij. Jackson and Warrick also discuss the problem of the wall and the Crystal Palace in some detail.

26 Beauchamp, "Man's Last Disobedience," 292, implies that it is D-503's sexual ex-

periences with 1-330 that open for him the world of imagination. On the contrary, it is the

development of the imagination that makes D-503 receptive to love. It is only later that his love for 1-330 becomes the main stimulus of his imagination.

27 For the most interesting discussions of the other roles 1-330 plays in We, see Gregg, 680- 87; Beauchamp, "Man's Last Disobedience," 287-93; Owen Ulph, "1-330: Reconsidera- tions on the Sex of Satan," Russian Literature Triquarterly, 9 (1974), 262-75.

28 See, for example, Jackson, 156; Shane, 145; Beauchamp, "Man's Last Disobedience," 296-98; Parrinder, 27.