The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 30 July 2001
by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Purported to be an inspiration for Orwell's 1984, this book is a bleak vision of the future and was once banned in Soviet Russia. It is a time when mathematical rigidity is applied as the source of all happiness. Man, it is said, is really only most happy when all disorder is removed from his life. Thus, the world runs on tables and schedules. Even sexual encounters, meals and sleep hours are centrally controlled. Buildings are made of transparent glass. Rather than propose the sort of technological surveillance seen in 1984, Zamyatin sees a world in which nobody has any secrets from anybody else. The United State holds tight reins over the populace, the descendents of the survivors of a 200-years war between urban and rural peoples that took place toward the end of the 20th century. And so, our protagonist, D-503 is a scientist working on launching the first interplanetary rocket, hoping to spread the gospel of order to other possible extraterrestrial civilizations. It is a great time for the United State. Yet, within the society lies a current of tension and unrest. D-503 meets I-330, a woman of compellingly iconoclastic personality. She leads him down into the world of potential, change and revolution.
The book is written as a journal D-503 plans to place aboard the rocket heading for the stars. It is disjointed and tense. Our hero has an obsessive personality, confused and stirred by the potential for change around him. His entire world is turning upside down, and the tension of the writing reflects that. He obsesses with little details, and punctuates the narrative with suggestive ellipses that get a little frustrating to interpret. What is really going on is never clear. D-503 is ambivalent, and has a constant urge to return to order. The United State, meanwhile, takes more and more drastic measures to control the revolution already in progress. Are the United State's days numbered? Indeed, it is clear why this book (published outside Russia in 1924) would be banned in the Soviet Union. Zamyatin, himself, eventually left Russia after a written plea to Stalin. This is a dark dystopic vision of a State committed to control of the populace. Echoes of Stalinist Russia abound, but now nine decades later, there are even subtle echoes of our own surveillance-obsessed society. While the book is most interesting from an historical standpoint, it remains curiously, morbidly, compellingly relevant and taut.