We

  Zamyatin, at the time, was living in the Dom Isskustv, the House of Arts, established by Maxim Gorky, where the provision of work and lodging was meant to protect writers, artists, and musicians from the harsh conditions of the time.

  For three years after that we were all locked up together in a steel projectile and, cooped up in darkness, whistled through space, no one knew where. In those last seconds-years before death, we had to do something, to settle down to some sort of a life in the hurtling missile… . And all the writers, all those who had survived, were constantly bumping into each other in the cramped space—Gorky and Merezhkovsky, Blok and Kuprin, Muyzhel and Gumilyov, Chukovsky and Volynsky… . In the frozen, hungry, typhus-ridden Petersburg, there raged an epidemic of cultural and educational activities. Since literature is not education, all poets and writers became lecturers. And in place of money there was a strange new unit of exchange—the ration, obtained by abandoning poems and novels for lectures.8

  Between 1917 and 1921, the latter part of which Zamyatin was living at Dom Isskustv, he wrote a novel, a play, two tales, fifteen stories, fourteen fables, four vignettes, and a dozen articles.9 He was an active participant in the House of Arts and House of Writers (Dom Literatorov) and was also instrumental in the founding of the All-Russian Union of Writers (VSP). As an editor of the World Literature series, Zamyatin oversaw translations of H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Romain Rolland, and Jack London. He also delivered lectures on literature and taught a very important workshop for young creative-writing talent. In 1921, Zamyatin’s pupils would form a literary group called the Serapion Brothers, which included the likes of Mikhail Zoshchenko, Lev Lunts, Vsevolod Ivanov, Veniamin Kaverin, Konstantin Fedin, Nikolay Tikhonov, Mikhail Slonimsky, and Viktor Shklovsky. And it was during this time of editing, teaching, and administrative duties that Zamyatin wrote We, most likely from 1920 to late 1921.10

  As a writer, however, Zamyatin had been suspected of antipathy toward the Revolution and the Bolsheviks since his return to Russia in 1917. According to Alex M. Shane, he was considered a bourgeois writer and an internal émigré.11 As such, his new novel had a rocky reception. After he had put his finishing touches to We, its publication was announced several times but the manuscript never made it into print in the Soviet Union during his lifetime. It was considered too dangerously satirical, and even Gorky, Zamyatin’s sponsor for much of the 1920s, would later say: “Zamyatin is too intelligent for an artist and should not allow his reason to direct his talent to satire. [We] is hopelessly bad, a completely sterile thing. Its anger is cold and dry; it is the anger of an old maid.” 12 It wasn’t until 1988 that the manuscript was published in the Soviet Union.

  The earliest, most reliable Russian text of We is that published by Izdatel’stvo Imeni Chekhova (Chekhov House Publishers) in 1952. In a strange twist of Zamyatinesque fantasy, I discovered that Chekhov House was supported by the Eastern European Fund of the Ford Foundation, established by Henry Ford in 1936. Just prior to that, Henry Ford had instigated operations that used the principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor to promote efficiency in his automobile factories—as did Lenin to advance his super-population in 1920. As extraordinary as it might sound, the name Henry Ford became well known throughout Russian villages in the 1920s—better known, in fact, than the names of many party leaders. Lenin had imported Ford Motor Company tractors in large numbers after the revolution. Peasants affectionately called these tractors “Fordzonishkas” (they also were said to have named their children after Ford in the early years of the Soviet era!), and the terms fordizatsiya and teilorizatsiya (Fordization, Taylorization) were used in Soviet universities in the 1920s. 13 And it was exactly this effect, the mechanizing of Russia, thanks to American industrial thought, that Zamyatin so fiercely satirized in his novel. Indeed, in 1922, Max Eastman, defender of the revolution in Russia, said, “I feel sometimes as though the whole modern world of capitalism and Communism and all were rushing toward some enormous efficient machine-made doom of the true values of life.”14

  As a writer, Zamyatin was very much of his time. He crafted We with the precision and efficiency of a Taylorist worker, using every atom of the novel for his own aims to convey the “hypertrophy of the power of the machine and the power of the state—any state.” 15 The book is rife with symbols and its language as tight and suggestive as a coiled spring. In his essay “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters,” he describes writing and his conception of the fast “language of thought”:

  The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity—but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage. We must compress into a single second what was held before in a sixty-second minute. And hence, syntax becomes elliptic, volatile; the complex pyramids of periods are dismantled stone by stone into independent sentences. When you are moving fast, the canonized, the customary eludes the eye: hence, the unusual, often startling, symbolism and vocabulary. The image is sharp, synthetic, with a single salient feature—the one feature you will glimpse from a speeding car.

  As an engineer, Zamyatin was able to translate science and mathematics into his fiction. After all, his hero, D-503, is a mathematician, and it is through his syllogisms that we traverse his chronicles. Any mathematician will tell you, at first glance, that the computational elements of We are naïve—that the One State barely looks beyond the four rules of arithmetic. But the mathematical fabric of the novel is seamless, where mathematics travels through We almost as an allegorical supertext. There are books that explore the nuts and bolts of We’s mathematics,16 but fortunately language comes to our rescue in instances such as when D-503 explains that he is afraid of the square root of minus one (√-1) because it is an “irrational number” (it is also, in fact, an imaginary number, but Zamyatin chose the word irrational with distinct purpose). In his Universe of the Mind, Yuri Lotman said: “Modern science from nuclear physics to linguistics sees the scientist as inside the world being described and as a part of that world. But the object and the observer are as a rule described in different languages, and consequently the problem of translation is a universal scientific task.” 17 This was Zamyatin’s feat—he rendered emotions in equations, relationships in geometry, and philosophy in calculus while delivering a page-turning story.

  Aside from the mathematics, We is perhaps the most explicitly codified novel ever written. Given the sheer volume of symbols and allusions in the text, it is hardly surprising that We is said to be “the second most studied Russian novel of the twentieth century among Western scholars.”18 A sampling of the scholarship available will tell you that “Auditorium 112” in the story refers to the prison cell (no. 112) where Zamyatin was incarcerated on two occasions. The name of the duplicitous secret agent S-4711 may refer to the launch date of the Saint Alexander Nevsky icebreaker that Zamyatin worked on in 1917. Biblical undertones of the Myth of the Fall in the One State (Eden) are woven through the narrative.19 Pavlov’s experiments appear when a young cipher is corrected with an electrical whip and yelps “like a puppy.” The color yellow represents freedom, life, and the old irrational world. 20 Every material that Zamyatin conjures has something else to say beyond its simple semantics. Onomasticians and toponymists have a field day with this book.

  Of particular interest to language fiends, and to this translator, is Zamyatin’s relationship to the sounds of words. He told the artist Yuri Annenkov of the qualities he ascribes to certain sounds and letters. L is pale, cold, light blue, liquid, light. R is loud, bright, red, hot, fast. N is tender, snow, sky, night. D or T is stifling, grave, foggy, obscuring, stagnant. M is kind, soft, motherly, sea-like. A is wide, distant, ocean, misty mirage, breadth of scope. O is high, deep, sea-like, bosom. I is close, low, pressing.21

  In pursuing this new translation, I was intensely aware of Zamyatin’s sounds. I chose lingual and labial permutations that matched Zamyatin’s where I could. I distinctly recall the moment of deciding to render sverkayushchii (a very important w
ord in the novel) as “sparkling” rather than “gleaming.” Added to the patterning of consonants and vowels in We, Zamyatin’s rhythm is carefully wrought. But this occurs at the level of the sentence. Zamyatin’s sentences are rife with rhythmic markers of syntax—particularly the dash, the colon, and the ellipsis.

  To me, it is entirely clear that the relation between the rhythmics of verse and prose is the same as that between arithmetic and integral calculus. In arithmetic we sum up individual items; in integral calculus we deal with sums, series. The prose foot is measured, not by the distance between stressed syllables, but by the distance between (logically) stressed words . And in prose, just as in integral calculus, we deal not with constant quantities (as in verse and arithmetic) but with variable ones. In prose, the foot is always a variable quantity, it is always being either slowed or accelerated. This, of course, is not fortuitous: it is determined by the emotional and semantic accelerations and retardations in the text.22

  These rhythmics in Zamyatin’s narrative are what I hope to have captured with this new translation. I strived to preserve his tempi through a translation of punctuations between idioms. There are unexpected shifts of tense. He omits verbs and other grammatical elements. He avoids the words like and such as, preferring direct metaphor. I kept his sentence fragments. There are neologisms like javenishly, which describes the way a doctor laughs at D-503. Zamyatin insists on the leitmotif as a device to achieve artistic economy, so these signifiers are necessarily translated consistently throughout the book. Overall, Zamyatin approaches the design of his meticulous text with extreme logic. His character D-503, the voice of his novel, speaks in equations. In my rendering here, D-503’s sentences pivot cause and consequence around colons, like they would around an equal sign (=).

  The syntactical pacing and pulsing in both the Russian and this translation may seem strange at first, until you surrender to Zamyatin’s “language of thought.” In his essay “On Language” (1919–20), Zamyatin explained: “[I]f you try to follow the language of thought in your own mind, you will not find even the simplest sentences— only shreds, fragments of simple sentences. Only the most essential elements of a sentence are used: sometimes only a verb or only an epithet, an object … At first glance this assertion may seem paradoxical: why should fragments of sentences, scattered as after an explosion, have greater effect on the reader than the same thoughts and images arranged in regular, steady, marching ranks? … [because] you meet the reader’s natural instinctive need. You do not compel him to skim …”

  My gratitude goes to Christian Hawkey for his terrific counsel, to Barbara Diamond, to my mathematician father, to Alexander Simonovsky, to Josée Waring, and to my grandmother. Thanks also to the Bakhmete f Archive for their help.

  NOTES

  1. From Zamyatin’s essay “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters” (1923), as translated by Mirra Ginsburg in A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin (University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 110.

  2. Stites, Richard, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 55 and 69.

  3. Ibid., p. 53.

  4. Ibid., p. 71.

  5. Figes, Orlando, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2002) p. 463.

  6. Aleksei Gan wrote a play in 1919–20 that conceived of a population of nameless people, known only by graphic symbols (see Heller, Leonid, “Zamiatin: Prophète ou témoin? Nous Autres et les réalités de son époque,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, vol. 22, no. 2/3 [April–September 1981], pp. 138–40). Vladimir Kirillov also wrote a poem called “We” (see “My,” in Stikhotvoreniia: Kniga Pervaia 1913–1923 G. by Vladimir Kirillov [Moscow: Izd-vo “MOSPOLIGRAF,” 1924]), p. 58.

  7. Figes, p. 464. Here, Figes is drawing his research from Stites and Ernst Toller in Which World? Which Way? Travel Pictures from Russia and America (London: S. Low, Marston & Co., Ltd., 1931).

  8. From Zamyatin’s essay “Alexander Blok” (1924), as translated by Mirra Ginsburg in A Soviet Heretic, p. 205.

  9. Shane, Alex M., The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin (University of California Press, 1968), p. 37.

  10. These details of Zamyatin’s involvement in literary life in Petrograd were researched with gratitude to Alex M. Shane’s The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin, pp. 34–37.

  11. Ibid., p. 40.

  12. As translated by Alex M. Shane in a footnote on p. 27 of his book, Maxim Gorky wrote this in a letter to I. A. Gruzdev, Sobranie Sochinenii v Tridtsati Tomakh (Moskva: Gos. Izd-vo Khudozh lit-ry, 1955), p. 126.

  13. Stites, p. 148.

  14. As quoted by Irving Howe in “The Fiction of Anti-Utopia,” in The New Republic, April 25, 1962.

  15. Zamyatin says this in an interview in 1932, published in Les Nouvelles Litteraire, Paris.

  16. There is a very lively book called O Sintetizme, Matematike i Prochem … (1994), written by Edna Andrews, Thomas Lahusen, and Elena Maksimova, which delivers mathematical explorations of We.

  17. Lotman, Yuri, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (London, New York: Tauris, 1990), translated by Ann Shukman, p. 269.

  18. Cooke, Brett, Human Nature in Utopia: Zamyatin’s We (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2002), p. 18.

  19. Beauchamp, Gorman, “Zamiatin’s We” in No Place Else: Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, c. 1983), eds. Rabkin, Eric S., Greenberg, Martin H., Olander, Joseph D., pp. 56–57.

  20. Proffer, Carl R., “Notes on the Imagery in Zamyatin’s We,” in Zamyatin’s We: A Collection of Critical Essays (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis Publishers, 1988), ed. Kern, Gary.

  21. My thanks to Professor Edna Andrews for drawing my attention to this in her essay “Text and Culture: Continuous Discontinuation in Lotman and Zamjatin” in Russian Literature XLIX (2001), pp. 347–69. The material comes from Annenkov’s memoirs , Dnevnikh Moikh Vstrech; Tsikl Tragedii (New York: Mezhdunarodnoe literaturnoe sodruzhestvo, 1966).

  22. From Zamyatin’s essay “Backstage” (1930), as translated by Mirra Ginsburg in A Soviet Heretic, p. 197.

  RECORD ONE

  KEYWORDS: A Declaration. The Wisest of Lines. An Epic.

  I am merely copying, word for word, what was printed in the State Gazette today:

  IN 120 DAYS, THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE INTEGRAL WILL BE COMPLETE. THE GREAT, HISTORIC HOUR WHEN THE FIRST INTEGRAL WILL SOAR THROUGH OUTER SPACE IS NIGH. SOME THOUSAND YEARS AGO, YOUR HEROIC ANCESTORS SUBJUGATED THE ENTIRE EARTHLY SPHERE TO THE POWER OF THE ONE STATE. TODAY, YOU ARE CONFRONTING AN EVEN GREATER CONQUEST: THE INTEGRATION OF THE INFINITE EQUATION OF THE UNIVERSE WITH THE ELECTRIFIED AND FIRE-BREATHING GLASS INTEGRAL. YOU ARE CONFRONTING UNKNOWN CREATURES ON ALIEN PLANETS, WHO MAY STILL BE LIVING IN THE SAVAGE STATE OF FREEDOM, AND SUBJUGATING THEM TO THE BENEFICIAL YOKE OF REASON. IF THEY WON’T UNDERSTAND THAT WE BRING THEM MATHEMATICALLY INFALLIBLE HAPPINESS, IT WILL BE OUR DUTY TO FORCE THEM TO BE HAPPY. BUT BEFORE RESORTING TO ARMS, WE WILL EMPLOY THE WORD.

  IN THE NAME OF THE BENEFACTOR, LET IT BE KNOWN TO ALL CIPHERS OF THE ONE STATE:

  ALL THOSE WHO ARE ABLE ARE REQUIRED TO CREATE TREATISES, EPICS, MANIFESTOS, ODES, OR ANY OTHER COMPOSITION ADDRESSING THE BEAUTY AND MAJESTY OF THE ONE STATE.

  THESE WORKS WILL BE THE FIRST CARGO OF THE INTEGRAL.

  ALL HAIL THE ONE STATE, ALL HAIL CIPHERS, ALL HAIL THE BENEFACTOR!

  As I write this, I feel something: my cheeks are burning. Integrating the grand equation of the universe: yes. Taming a wild zigzag along a tangent, toward the asymptote, into a straight line: yes. You see, the line of the One State—it is a straight line. A great, divine, precise, wise, straight line—the wisest of lines.

  I am D-503. I am the Builder of the Integral. I am only one of the mathematicians of the One State. My pen, more accustomed to mathematical figures, is not up
to the task of creating the music of unison and rhyme. I will just attempt to record what I see, what I think—or, more exactly, what we think. (Yes, that’s right: we. And let that also be the title of these records: We.) So these records will be manufactured from the stuff of our life, from the mathematically perfect life of the One State, and, as such, might they become, inadvertently, regardless of my intentions, an epic poem? Yes— I believe so and I know so.

  As I write this: I feel my cheeks burn. I suppose this resembles what a woman experiences when she first hears a new pulse within her—the pulse of a tiny, unseeing, mini-being. This text is me; and simultaneously not me. And it will feed for many months on my sap, my blood, and then, in anguish, it will be ripped from my self and placed at the foot of the One State.

  But I am ready and willing, just as every one—or almost every one of us. I am ready.

  RECORD TWO

  KEYWORDS: Ballet. Quadratic Harmony. X.

  Spring. From beyond the Green Wall, from the wild, invisible plains, the wind brings the yellow honey-dust from a flower of some kind. This sweet dust parches the lips—you skim your tongue across them every minute—and you presume that there are sweet lips on every woman you encounter (and man, of course). This somewhat interferes with logical reasoning.

  But then, the sky! Blue, untainted by a single cloud (the Ancients had such barbarous tastes given that their poets could have been inspired by such stupid, sloppy, silly-lingering clumps of vapor). I love—and I’m certain that I’m not mistaken if I say we love—skies like this, sterile and flawless! On days like these, the whole world is blown from the same shatterproof, everlasting glass as the glass of the Green Wall and of all our structures. On days like these, you can see to the very blue depths of things, to their unknown surfaces, those marvelous expressions of mathematical equality— which exist in even the most usual and everyday objects.