Zamyatin and his “bomb”: how a dystopian novel written in 1920 destroyed the USSR

— Tatyana Timofeevna, let’s start with a general question: what is dystopia anyway?

– A utopia shows a world better than the one in which the current reader lives, where all conflicts and problems are resolved – such, for example, was the first “Utopia” by Thomas More. In translation, “utopia” means “a place that does not exist,” where “topos” is a place and “y” is a negative particle.

That is, there is an idealized future, as in the dreams of Vera Pavlovna, the heroine of Chernyshevsky’s optimistic novel “What is to be done?” And dystopia turns everything upside down.

— Why did Evgeniy Ivanovich become the “discoverer” of the genre?

“He valued individuality very much and always remained an extremely freedom-loving person. Also, the formation of his system of views was helped by work in England, where since 1916 Zamyatin built the first Russian icebreakers. At that time, he was teaching engineering at the institute; they needed a good domestic shipbuilder – they chose him. In Britain, Zamyatin mastered English well, and thanks to his knowledge of the language, he became acquainted with English literature. And it so happens that the germs of dystopianism appear for the first time in Jonathan Swift and Herbert Wells. Both of them, as you understand, are English.

— And the government chose Zamyatin for a strategically important mission, although at the dawn of his youth he was a revolutionary, a member of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party?

“By the sixteenth year everything was already forgotten. But during his student years (he graduated from the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute), Zamyatin was an active member of the RSDLP (b) and participated in the revolutionary movement. In 1905 he could well have been hanged for this. In the student dormitory, where the young man lived as a nonresident, he kept the filling for the bombs in paper bags from Filippov’s buns.

As we see, his party associates did not consider committing terrorist acts prohibited. The young revolutionaries were arrested, and Zamyatin too – but, fortunately, they managed to warn their comrade, and he threw away everything dangerous by the time the gendarmes arrived. During the search, they did not find anything terrible, but as a member of the workers’ party, Zamyatin was subjected to solitary confinement. And when they were released, they were sent to their hometown of Lebedyan.

– Where is it?

— Previously, the city belonged to the Tambov province, so Tambov traditionally hosts anniversary celebrations and operates the Zamyatinsky Center at Tambov State University. Derzhavina. But today Lebedyan belongs to the Lipetsk region.

— Did the future classic stay long in his small homeland?

– Yes, he returned illegally to the capital because he could not stay in the provinces, he continued to study somehow and eventually graduated from college. He even found himself in very good standing with the teachers (which became his “ticket” to England. – I.V.).

Revolutionaries in the catacombs and fatherhood according to Freud

— Is it possible to say that Zamyatin was not a rebel, that he, like Blok or Gorky, was attracted by the elements in revolutionary transformations?

“He was a revolutionary by outlook, by nature – a great romantic. What attracted him to the revolution was struggle, danger and adventure.

Subsequently, he will express his attitude towards the October Revolution, and it is unflattering. He managed to return to Russia only in October; he did not participate in the February events, which he greatly regretted.

Only the party of which he had once been a member took power alone (however, he did not undergo re-registration in 1910).

Zamyatin wrote that he liked the first Christians only as long as they were in the catacombs.

— Which did not stop him from staying in the RSFSR/USSR and building the culture of the young Soviet state.

— Yes, being close to Gorky, who patronized him, Zamyatin works at the World Literature publishing house, edits English and American authors (including his favorite Wells), and stages plays on the stages of theaters in both capitals. Becomes one of the “fathers” of the St. Petersburg group of young writers “Serapion Brothers” (Fedin, Kaverin, Slonimsky, Zoshchenko). They even joked later that they had no mother, but two fathers: Zamyatin and critic Viktor Shklovsky. Evgeniy Ivanovich became very attached to the writing youth, also because the Zamyatin couple was childless: unrealized fatherhood manifested itself here quite according to Freud. By the way, after leaving the USSR with Mikhail Slonimsky and Konstantin Fedin, he will continue correspondence and creative communication.

– Zamyatin was not white, why did he break with the Soviet regime?

— All because of the novel “We,” which Zamyatin finished in 1920 and turned, somewhat with naive hopes, to Soviet publishing houses. He believed in his creativity, in the fact that he would raise young Soviet literature to new heights with this book, when he turned to Gorky, Chukovsky and Prishvin with the manuscript. But all three were terrified. Everyone found the work unusually dangerous and anti-Soviet.

The impossibility of publishing the novel in his homeland – and Zamyatin was a Russian man who endlessly loved Russia and Soviet Russia – led to the first differences with the party. Back in 1919, Zamyatin began to think that the Bolsheviks were very good at destroying, that they had perfectly cleared the country of the heritage of the past, but they could not build something fundamentally new. Although, to be honest, very little time had passed – the calendar showed 1920, but the writer’s gift of foresight was also at work here, the dangerous trends that appeared in Soviet society scared Zamyatin – let’s say, equalization.

He thought this: it would be good if everyone had equal rights, say, political rights, the right to be nominated for high positions, but trying to subject every citizen to some kind of regulation is unthinkable. Zamyatin supported Nietzsche’s point of view that happiness cannot be universal and cannot be built according to a single model.

Execution ranges, Stalin and nausea

– And from that moment on, he was no longer on the same path with the Bolsheviks?

“Perhaps the conflict with the authorities would not have been so acute if “We” had not been published in the USA in 1924 in a good translation, making it available to millions of English-speaking readers. Zamyatin was sent an insignificant fee – ten dollars.

Five years pass – and suddenly a press campaign begins against two “outcasts”: Boris Pilnyak and Zamyatin (Pilnyak also dared to publish abroad the story “The Mahogany Tree,” which was absolutely neutral in an ideological sense). In fact, the officials who were trying to manage literature needed a reason to abolish the apolitical All-Russian Writers Union, which included both “outcasts.”

The ground was being prepared for the creation of the Union of Soviet Writers of the USSR (there should only be one union left – this was the logic under Stalin. – I.V.)

An avalanche of criticism fell on Pilnyak and Zamyatin, they behaved differently: the first publicly repented (which did not save him: Boris Andreevich was shot at the Kommunarka training ground in 1938). And Zamyatin writes his famous “Letter to Stalin”, where he asks to be released from the country for a year or two, and with the help of Gorky in November 1931 he leaves the USSR.

— However, experts refuse to call this emigration?

— Zamyatin was not sure that he would remain there until the end (although he died in Paris in the year of the “Great Terror” – in 1937, not avoiding the fate of those who remained. – I.V.).

He did not become an emigrant like Merezhkovsky, Bunin or Shmelev, he kept his Soviet passport, and paid all the time for the reservation of the Leningrad apartment. Moreover, by the time of the organization of the First Congress of Soviet Writers of the USSR, Zamyatin was offered to join a new association. Gorky has nothing against it – and he is accepted.

At the same time, in his letters he speaks very sharply about Stalin’s personality cult, saying that when he reads Soviet newspapers, where everyone swears allegiance to the leader, he begins to experience an acute attack of seasickness.

And the emigration did not particularly welcome Zamyatin: at first they were happy about his arrival, but quickly realized that he was not going to publish any anti-Soviet materials. Nina Berberova directly points out in her memoirs that Zamyatin thereby alienated emigration.

– Let’s return to the novel “We”. What’s wrong with the future that awaits humanity?

“The events there take place in an indefinitely distant future, where women and men wear the same uniform, where everyone is controlled, where you can only communicate with the opposite sex using coupons and behind special pink curtains.” Where not every woman can give birth to a child, but only those who meet the “Maternal Standard”.

And where there is one leader – the so-called Benefactor, only one party, the leader of which he is and which wins uncontested elections every year (and not “chaotic” ones, “like the ancients, where the very result was unknown in advance”).

And where all the citizens are numbers – beings that are not only soulless, since there is no religion, but soulless in the literal sense of the word: they have no souls. And if someone has a soul, then this is considered a dangerous disease.

Removing the souls of dissidents

— How were “mentally ill” patients treated?

— Therapeutic methods, and when dissent manifested itself, doctors began to remove the part of the brain responsible for fantasy.

Plus, the Table of Hours regulated the life of numbers in such a way that only a few hours remained unintegrated, uncalculated. This may seem funny to us, but one of the writers of the United State wrote a tragedy (!) called “Late for Work.” It sounds satirical, but being late, whether for work or to your home, is strictly prohibited.

— And the main character rebels against such orders?

– No, not a hero, but a heroine. Of course, there is a main character – a man, largely autobiographical: D-503 – a mathematician, a shipbuilder (but only the ship is not a sea ship, but a space one. – I.V.). But the real rebel in the dystopia is I-330, she rebels against the Benefactor and the One State. It turns out that it is not so united – behind the Green Wall, as it turns out, “wild people” live – in the conditions of a primitive society, but freely.

— Like Orwell says, “the proles (proletarians) and animals are free”?

— Rather, the savages here resemble Leo Tolstoy’s “natural people.” We won’t retell the book – it’s better to read it than hear it from someone else’s words, but in general, dystopia is characterized by a dashingly twisted plot, while utopia is close to a philosophical treatise and is a little boring.

— Zamyatin describes the torture and excruciating operations that the totalitarian state applies to “numbers.” Why is he doing this?

— A real dystopian must scare his contemporaries with gloomy forecasts and terrible stories; in part, this genre is a descendant of the English Gothic novel, which contains a lot of all sorts of horrors.

— The novel was first published in our country in the magazine “Znamya” during perestroika, then several editions were published as a separate volume, with huge circulations. The USSR still existed, but what was happening seemed like an internal revolution?

— I still keep the issues of “Znamya” for 1988. And I remember well other magazine publications: “Doctor Zhivago” was published in the same 1988 in the “New World”, on the pages of which Orwell’s dystopia “1984” was published in 1989. And in 1987, NM published “Pushkin House” by Andrei Bitov. Let’s not forget about the return to the reader of Andrei Platonov’s prose: “The Pit”, “Chevengur”… This was a colossal undermining of the system, a massive attack on the existing ideology.

— Also because in the image of the Benefactor they saw a caricature of Lenin?

— There is an opinion that the Benefactor has a very specific prototype. According to one version, a huge forehead, receding hairline, average height – everything points to Lenin.

But Zamyatin did not direct his novel against one particular leader or country, believing that it had universal significance.

— If we compare books with the battering rams that destroyed the USSR, which of them was the most powerful?

— Perhaps “We” and “Doctor Zhivago” were among the strongest.