Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

The ambiguity underlying scientific progress is perhaps no where more creatively expressed than in utopian literature and science-fiction. In both genres, science is depicted variously as: the indispensable element of a perfect society; a field prone to misuse and destructiveness, its product a nightmarish reality; and the conceptual framework of a world—often projected into the future—remarkable not for its moral quality but its metaphysical curiosity. The boundaries between these interpretations are blurred in the dystopian narrative, a hybrid of both genres, of which Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We—a tale set in the twenty-sixth century A.D., in the regimented totalitarian society of OneState—is the modern exemplar.

Written in 1921 and published in 1924, We stakes its claim to the modernist tradition of the early twentieth century by virtue of its experimental boldness in form and content, its open-endedness, and self-reflexivity. These aesthetic strategies also reinforce the novel’s negative image of scientific progress, and by extension, underscore Modernism’s reaction to scientific rationality. Thus, We effectively deconstructs the metanarrative of late nineteenth-century Positivism—a total worldview of human society and the natural environment—by casting it in a dystopian world, in which freedom and individuality have been abolished. Nevertheless, though the novel dramatizes Modernist anxiety over scientific rationalism, it does not repudiate science itself; rather, it cautions against the excesses of science and its potentially dangerous relationship with the state.