It’s difficult to imagine this quiet bucolic corner of London being the point of origin of the defining dystopia of modern times. Yet, according to literary folklore, it was here in a Canonbury beer garden, in the shadow of a vast horse chestnut, that George Orwell first conceived the idea for 1984. The location would even make it chillingly into the novel: “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me…” Of course, this was a very different London, of ration books and bomb sites, and a recently widowed Orwell was already coughing up blood from the tuberculosis that would kill him. The future was, understandably, to be afraid of. Yet the seeds of 1984 originated decades earlier and over a thousand miles away, blowing in across the seas from what had been St Petersburg.
Despite themselves, censors point out which books are worth reading. The Soviet Union created a banned reading list that was second to none — Pasternak, Bulgakov, Akhmatova, Nabokov, even Orwell. The very first book condemned by the state’s own Ministry of Truth Glavlit was written by one of their own, the naval engineer and communist veteran Yevgeny Zamyatin.
The author had impeccable radical credentials. He was a shipbuilder, behind what would become the Lenin icebreaker. He’d taken part in the “whirlwind” 1905 Revolution and made it back from overseas at great risk to the very heart of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Before that, he’d been imprisoned and exiled several times by the Tsarist regime, an experience that had made him a writer rather than breaking him. “If I have any place in Russian literature,” he admitted, “I owe it entirely to the Saint Petersburg Department of Secret Police”
The problem with Zamyatin, for the new regime, was twofold: he was a natural rebel and a mathematician. He had chosen his occupation through sheer belligerence, dedicating himself to the subject he had struggled with at school. And he knew enough of his trade to know that applying mathematical criteria and machine analogies — the abstraction of suffering, the delusion of perfectibility, utopian expediency — to humanity would have horrific consequences.
It might be thought that Zamyatin would have been free to speak and protected by his Old Bolshevik history. Yet Lenin’s communists showed early on they had little inhibitions about repressing those who’d built the revolution and in whose name the party supposedly ruled. They’d also no aversion to killing troublesome writers, executing the poet Nikolai Gumilev, for instance, under the fictitious guise of the Tagantsev conspiracy.
In such a climate, science fiction offered a tangential way of telling the truth, of demonstrating where the regime was heading, with a degree of plausible deniability. Though it would become an effective tool in the post-Stalin years, with the Brothers Strugatsky smuggling messianic questions past the censors in their astonishing alien visitation tale Roadside Picnic, it was an exceptionally dangerous gamble. Even the Bolshevik hero Mayakovsky found the sky came crashing down on him for tangentially criticising the new order in his futuristic plays The Bedbug and The Bathhouse. Zamyatin, however, was as headstrong as he was prescient. And so, a century ago, the novel We was born, a book that went on to directly or indirectly influence almost every dystopian book and film of the century to follow.
Set in 30th century AD, We takes place in a society that has aimed at and supposedly achieved perfection. This has occurred after the apocalyptic trauma of the Two Hundred Years War, which killed all but 0.2% of the population. In order to prevent conflict, any conflict — anything that differentiates or divides — has been minimised or excised, including identity, excellence, idiosyncrasy, even personality. The society is revealed to us via a curious ruse — part-diary and part-message to future extraterrestrials “to save them by force and teach them happiness”. It’s written by D503, a scientist who is leading the construction, not of an icebreaker but, a spaceship called Integral. He’s a kind of anti-Zamyatin who’s done well under the system and has little friction with it, until he meets the rebellious I-330. His emerging feelings for her threaten everything he believes in. Via the disruptive nature of love, he’s introduced to insurgents dedicated to overthrowing the One State, a chaotic world beyond the Green Wall, and the vertigo of freedom.
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SubscribePeople wonder at how authors like Zamyatin and Orwell could have been so prescient as to forecast what’s happening today. Of course what’s happening today is exactly what they had observed and experienced themselves. They didn’t create from imagination some dystopian future, they saw it already existed and reported on it. What we’re moving towards today is not just some fictional dystopian novel that happens to coincide with the times but a world that had already existed and in fact never went away.
“The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed”…William Gibson
Great article thanks. WE stopped me in my tracks when I read it as a very young woman in the early seventies. I’d cut my teenage teeth on science fantasy, (a minor branch of sci-fi) Ray Bradbury, and PKDick were my favourites, before I read Orwell who had escaped such classification probably a class influence. And here was surely the UR of such critical fantasies, a Soviet version compared to the capitalist ones though both wrestling with autonomy versus authoritarianism, the rational versus emotional, control versus chaos, freedom of the market versus the monetizing of everything. Safety from starvation versus lack of freedom. Written so many years earlier. The errors of either positions taken too far. Thanks
Superb essay
I’ve been critical of this writer’s two most recent articles for Unherd on the grounds of playing to popular culture but here he absolutely redeems himself.
I’d not heard of Zamyatin (no apologies for that) but a review of his life and work a century on is more than welcome, and reveals him to be a forerunner of some later cultural icons of literature and film which is quite remarkable.
What it demonstrates is a testament to the human spirit. There’s something atavistic about human thought, which can be viewed either positively and to be treasured, or negatively and to be eradicated. The key characteristic of those who wish to eradicate it is authoritarianism, in all it’s guises: whether state-sponsored or organised religions.
Brilliant – and thank you Unherd for publishing this.
How many of us believe what we think/perceive we need to believe, to conform, and how many of us grapple with the truth?
One thing about “We” is that it is as much a reworking and development of an earlier work by Zamyatin, a short story called “The Islanders”, as it is a key source for “1984”. And that is set, as the title suggests, in Britain, and was based in part on Zamyatin’s experiences of living in Jarrow before the First World War. There, the character who becomes the Benefactor of “We” or the Big Brother of “1984” is called Vicar Dooley, who essentially serves as a kind of spy-in-chief (whether more reminiscent of workings of the Russian Orthodox Church than the Church of England or not I would not care to say), all the while managing the intense tensions between the “rational Anglo-Saxon” and “emotional Celtic” peoples among his flock. (in another story by Zamyatin, a vicar spends his time parading around “Hampstead Park” -presumably “Heath” – separating courting couples.)
All of this is a slight aside, other than to note that the origins of “1984” were ultimately from an ur text that was also set in a recognizable England (albeit as viewed by a foreigner who had not spent an immensely long time in the country) – and perhaps Orwell thus breathed new life into, rather than creating afresh, some of those aspects of the English character that might lend themselves towards totalitarianism – a love of snooping and self-righteousness perhaps being foremost among htem.
Zamyatin also lived in middle class Jesmond, a suburb of Newcastle Upon Tyne, and a plaque sits proudly on the wall of his former house in Sanderson Road.
Newcastle was a perfect example of a successful industrial City in those days, and he was scathing about the proprieties of the managerial class living around him.
Quite interesting article. Having recently read “We” I think there is a distinct differentiation with 1984, as the former deals mainly with the emotional machinations of the system and it’s psychological effects on the individual, whereas in 1984 Orwell provides a more detailed analysis of the propaganda tools and methods used to control the masses.
I partially disagree with the statement that in 1984 tyranny is imposed whereas in We it comes as a relief.
In the end of 1984 the protagonist realises that he loves the Big Brother – granted he is forced through torture, but in both cases the populace is managed and controlled via emotional manipulation and not so much through brute force.
Finding out that Orwell was more of a reinterpretor than stone cold creator was disheartening. That said, 1984 is a significant reinterpretation and frankly better written.
In his other novels Orwell also borrowed heavily from George Gissing. Very heavily indeed for Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
It needn’t diminish him, necessarily. Rather like Johnson he was a first rate critic and essayist but a not-quite-first-rate novelist.
Had he written just this one sentence his reputation would shine through the galaxies…
‘All animals are equal bit some animals are more equal than others.’
Lots of excellent points. Others have pointed out that Gogol and Dostoyevsky perceived the growth of the totalitarian mentality. I wonder if Russia was special in its use of modern-seeming bureaucracy or if the modern bureaucracies are really a throwback to primitive forms of crowd control.
Solzhenytsyn, in some ways,shared much with Zamyatin he too was disappointed in exile as he saw up close the deep flaws in the USA. It would be deeply illuminating ro have those 3 carryout a symposium…
Foretelling Stalin? Little could exceed the horrors of the Russian Revolution, the Cheka kill lists, the famines , the class massacres, the invasion of the Caucasus and Central Asia, under Lenin.