Zamyatin's We

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February 1: Yevgeny Zamyatin was born on this day in 1884—somewhat ironically, as Zamyatin's dystopian novel, We, anticipates Orwell's 1984 (and anticipates Huxley's Brave New World even more so, a point which Orwell made in his 1946 review of We). The publication of Zamyatin's book in 1921 certainly seemed to confirm his warnings about totalitarianism: the Russian authorities banned We as a "malicious slander against socialism," and more than once imprisoned Zamyatin before exiling him. For its prescience and its literary offspring, critic Martin Seymour-Smith has We on his list of "100 Most Influential Books Ever Written."

We presents life in 2600, by which time all citizens of the One State—or almost all, as a revolution is brewing—are happily numbered and regimented, right down to the Sex Hour. In the passage below, D-503 is out for a springtime walk (the daily walk is compulsory) with O-90 (she is just 10 centimeters short of the Maternal Normal) as the Music Plant (it plays one song, "The March of the One State") booms away in the background. D-503 is a mathematician-engineer, and the scene before him inspires both awe and revolution:

And then, just the way it was this morning in the hangar, I saw again, as though right then for the first time in my life, I saw everything: the unalterably straight streets, the sparkling glass of the sidewalks, the divine parallelepipeds of the transparent dwellings, the squared harmony of our gray-blue ranks. And so I felt that I—not generations of people, but I myself—I had conquered the old God and the old life, I myself had created all this, and I'm like a tower, I'm afraid to move my elbow lest walls, cupolas, machines tumble in fragments about me.

Then—a leap across centuries, from + to – (evidently an association by contrast)—I suddenly remembered a picture I had seen in a museum: one of their avenues, out of the twentieth century, dazzlingly motley, a teemng crush of people, wheels, animals, posters, trees, colors, birds…. And they say that this had really existed—could exist. It seemed so incredible, so preposterous that I could not contain myself and burst out laughing.

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Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.