It’s difficult to imagine this quiet bucolic corner of London being the point of origin of the defining dystopia of modern times. Yet, according to literary folklore, it was here in a Canonbury beer garden, in the shadow of a vast horse chestnut, that George Orwell first conceived the idea for 1984. The location would even make it chillingly into the novel: “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me…” Of course, this was a very different London, of ration books and bomb sites, and a recently widowed Orwell was already coughing up blood from the tuberculosis that would kill him. The future was, understandably, to be afraid of. Yet the seeds of 1984 originated decades earlier and over a thousand miles away, blowing in across the seas from what had been St Petersburg.
Despite themselves, censors point out which books are worth reading. The Soviet Union created a banned reading list that was second to none — Pasternak, Bulgakov, Akhmatova, Nabokov, even Orwell. The very first book condemned by the state’s own Ministry of Truth Glavlit was written by one of their own, the naval engineer and communist veteran Yevgeny Zamyatin.
The author had impeccable radical credentials. He was a shipbuilder, behind what would become the Lenin icebreaker. He’d taken part in the “whirlwind” 1905 Revolution and made it back from overseas at great risk to the very heart of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Before that, he’d been imprisoned and exiled several times by the Tsarist regime, an experience that had made him a writer rather than breaking him. “If I have any place in Russian literature,” he admitted, “I owe it entirely to the Saint Petersburg Department of Secret Police”
The problem with Zamyatin, for the new regime, was twofold: he was a natural rebel and a mathematician. He had chosen his occupation through sheer belligerence, dedicating himself to the subject he had struggled with at school. And he knew enough of his trade to know that applying mathematical criteria and machine analogies — the abstraction of suffering, the delusion of perfectibility, utopian expediency — to humanity would have horrific consequences.
It might be thought that Zamyatin would have been free to speak and protected by his Old Bolshevik history. Yet Lenin’s communists showed early on they had little inhibitions about repressing those who’d built the revolution and in whose name the party supposedly ruled. They’d also no aversion to killing troublesome writers, executing the poet Nikolai Gumilev, for instance, under the fictitious guise of the Tagantsev conspiracy.
In such a climate, science fiction offered a tangential way of telling the truth, of demonstrating where the regime was heading, with a degree of plausible deniability. Though it would become an effective tool in the post-Stalin years, with the Brothers Strugatsky smuggling messianic questions past the censors in their astonishing alien visitation tale Roadside Picnic, it was an exceptionally dangerous gamble. Even the Bolshevik hero Mayakovsky found the sky came crashing down on him for tangentially criticising the new order in his futuristic plays The Bedbug and The Bathhouse. Zamyatin, however, was as headstrong as he was prescient. And so, a century ago, the novel We was born, a book that went on to directly or indirectly influence almost every dystopian book and film of the century to follow.
Set in 30th century AD, We takes place in a society that has aimed at and supposedly achieved perfection. This has occurred after the apocalyptic trauma of the Two Hundred Years War, which killed all but 0.2% of the population. In order to prevent conflict, any conflict — anything that differentiates or divides — has been minimised or excised, including identity, excellence, idiosyncrasy, even personality. The society is revealed to us via a curious ruse — part-diary and part-message to future extraterrestrials “to save them by force and teach them happiness”. It’s written by D503, a scientist who is leading the construction, not of an icebreaker but, a spaceship called Integral. He’s a kind of anti-Zamyatin who’s done well under the system and has little friction with it, until he meets the rebellious I-330. His emerging feelings for her threaten everything he believes in. Via the disruptive nature of love, he’s introduced to insurgents dedicated to overthrowing the One State, a chaotic world beyond the Green Wall, and the vertigo of freedom.
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