Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884–1937)

I know this is an important book, and it was a major influence on later dystopias like 1984 and Brave New World. But it wasn’t a very enjoyable or even very edifying book to read (or, more properly, listen to). It’s told as a series of first-person journal entries of D-503, who lives in the OneState, in many ways similar to the aforementioned better-known dystopias. D-503’s prose is laden with difficult-to-follow metaphors, to the extent that I sometimes didn’t know if he was dreaming, hallucinating, or just using incomprehensible metaphors to convey what he himself had trouble comprehending. The ending was impactful, but it was a long haul to get there. As a warning to future readers, this edition had a spoiler-y preface by Margaret Atwood—I wish I’d saved it for after I finished reading. Narrator Toby Jones did a good job, but it didn’t salvage the difficult text.… (altro)

This is my second read of this early modern dystopian classic, written in the early years of the new Soviet Union, but almost immediately banned, then smuggled out and published in the West in 1924 - so we are now marking the centenary of its free publication. The writing style is quite brutalist - ironically, like Stalinist architecture - with the characters having serial numbers not names, and being described as looking like the letters of the alphabet in their serial numbers. The writing is also minimalist, with characters described in terms of angles and lines and simple colours - a lot of white and yellow, with true beauty being found only in the action of machines and the pure logic and simplicity of mathematical operations ("only the four rules of arithmetic are steadfast and eternal. And it is only the code of morals that resides within these four rules that is great, steadfast, and eternal").

The philosophy of the One State and its Benefactor is that happiness can only be achieved by absolute unanimity as though each individual is a cell of one body. The main character D 503 is chief builder of a rocket called the Integral, through which the Benefactor aims to spread his version of happiness to other planets, as the newspaper says: "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".

Eventually, the One State decides the only way to true uniform "happiness" is through a medical operation to excise the imagination from human brains, which seems to actually lead to the creation of machine conglomerations of people - though these chapters are very unclear and I found myself rather confused at what was going on for a sizable chunk of the book, which is why, despite its powerful overall message about the dangers of mindless collectivism, I don't think it is anywhere near as effective as a dystopian novel as is Orwell's 1984.… (altro)