Forrest's Reviews > We

I think there is room for both of them in the world, Orwell and Zamyatin. I love them both!

good review

Jenny (Reading Envy) wrote: "I think there is room for both of them in the world, Orwell and Zamyatin. I love them both!"

That may be true, but history has robbed Zamyatin.

Lyn wrote: "good review"

Thanks, Lyn. Though it was more of a rant than a review! :)

Yes! Great stuff. Didn't A.Huxley basically steal a bunch of ideas from this one as well (or am I only assuming so since Brave New World and 1984 always associate in my mind)?

s.penkevich wrote: "Yes! Great stuff. Didn't A.Huxley basically steal a bunch of ideas from this one as well (or am I only assuming so since Brave New World and 1984 always associate in my mind)?"

I'm not sure . . .

Phew, i feel you're maybe being a tad harsh on Orwell, but I cannot argue with any of your points.
Plus i understand your righteous anger. ;) I'd forgotten 1984 by the time I read We about a year ago, and then I re-read 1984 about a month ago, and i must admit that up to about the middle of 1984 i thought that save for the glass/TV screens difference, it was going to be more or less the same plot. (You'd have thought Orwell should have acknowledged 1984 as a homage to We, eh?)

Though there are quite a few differences between the worlds of We and 1984, its basic plotline and aspects of the story worlds run frighteningly close.

Forrest wrote: "Furthermore, Zamyatin's prose is beautiful. Yes, you have the occasional turn of phrase that came out well, iconic, even, but Zamyatin's writing is beautiful throughout, even in its stochasticity.."

Hmm, now I'm very curious as to which translation of We you had read. There are 5 that I know of: by Natasha Randall, Clarence Brown, Mirra Ginsburg and Alexander Glinka and Gregory Zilboorg.

I read a few of them side-by-side, and it was interesting to see where they diverged. But in the 2 or 3 translations i liked best, Zamyathin's brilliant metaphors and lovely prose shone through despite the translation process. By comparing the different translations you could get a better idea of what the original Russian version must be like. We were also very lucky to have read it in a group with Nataliya whose mother tongue is Russian. :)

I enjoyed your review despite feeling a bit sorry for poor old Orwell and the thrashing he is getting! :D
Oh, and for me We deserved 5 stars just.. well, I really loved the novel. Couldn't actually find fault with it!

I wonder if part of it was Zamyatin's greater experience with a totalitarian state!

I did love We. It felt completely modern.

We is a brilliant and beautifully-written book by a real intellectual rebel, while 1984 is more grim and utilitarian, but they are both great books in my opinion. Still, We deserves more credit for the reasons you outlined, and was also plagiarized by Huxley for Brave New World though he denied it. I wonder which translation rendered his prose most faithfully?

What a weird review. Orwell does more than mangle We, he adapts and transposes it. There are obvious reasons why 1984 has become a staple of our culture while We hasn't. And to say kids should read We over 1984, kids in highschool read both. And to say Zamyatin's book was better because he's the 'real deal' and got exiled, lol what a misplaced idea.

s.penkevich wrote: "Yes! Great stuff. Didn't A.Huxley basically steal a bunch of ideas from this one as well (or am I only assuming so since Brave New World and 1984 always associate in my mind)?"

Orwell was very critical of Huxley, in part because he felt that Brave New World was a rip-off of We. One difference that I think Orwell would have found significant is that Huxley didn't credit Zamyatin, whereas Orwell was very open about his debt to We (and to Chesterton, London and so on). Vonnegut also accused Huxley of stealing from Zamyatin.

Then again, Zamyatin has himself been accused of borrowing heavily from London (whom Zamyatin himself translated) and from Jerome (one of Zamyatin's dystopian short stories is apparently a direct lift plot-point-for-plot-point from Jerome).


I do think it's a little harsh (/inaccurate) to call Orwell a 'vested academic'. Orwell was not an academic (although he spent a few years as a teacher). Nor was he 'vested' - he spent most of his life a devoted enemy of the status quo. Orwell may have had a middle-class background, but he spent years living among the poorest of the poor, in England and in France; he picked fruit in the fields, he washed dishes, he begged, he went down coal mines. He certainly had a more intimate experience of the 'real life' of the general public than the comfortable Zamyatin did!

But even going beyond that, I think it's really problematic to contrast 'real deal' Zamyatin with 'academic' Orwell. After all, ONE of these book was written by a guy who had to hide in ruined buildings to escape an NKVD manhunt (while recuperating from having a large, near-fatal hole shot through his neck)... it's just that guy wasn't Zamyatin. Zamyatin was a writer. Yes, he was exiled by the Tsar, and yes, he spent a few years under early communism, but his fears were hypothetical fears for what the USSR might develop into, and were more a warning against the utopias of HG Wells than an actual reaction to the USSR in 1921. The oppression Zamyatin faced was that people didn't publish his books, so (with the blessings of Stalin) he moved to a country where they would.

Orwell, on the other hand, knew all about oppressive state regimes, because he was part of one. He was a policeman of the Empire, at one point responsible for keeping a quarter of a million subject people under control. He actually helped supervise executions. [If you want a neat symbol, take his body when he left Burma: a regulation British police moustache on his face, and traditional Burmese tattoos on his hands. He split his free time between his friends among the British establishment and his friends among the Burmese monks and Karen priests] His experiences among the oppressed in Burma made him passionate about the oppression taking place at home, so he spent time immersing himself in the world of the British poor, becoming a propagandist for socialist.
Real deal? Orwell fought for Marxism in the trenches in the Spanish Civil War - he fought bayonet-to-bayonet. He was shot through the throat. He was in Barcelona during the chaos of the May Days, when the Republicans and Stalinists violently suppressed the Anarchists, Trostkyites and Marxists. Orwell didn't get his suspicions of Stalinism from academia, he got them from seeing the blood in the streets. He and his wife had to go underground to escape the NKVD, who were rounding his comrades up and in some cases torturing them to death. Orwell himself was convicted of high treason against the state... but fortunately the trial was in absentia, as he had eventually been able to flee the country.

And then during the War, his books were suppressed by the Ministry of Information. His wife worked in the Censorship Department, while he himself worked in counter-propaganda. He had been regarded as a potential enemy of the state ever since his poverty writings - at the time he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, he was actually still under secret government surveillance!

Zamyatin's book was written as a hypothetical warning, a SF piece written in reply to SF. Orwell's book was an extension of his own experiences on both sides of state oppression. [And perhaps that does make Zamyatin's fantasy more universal and timeless - today we struggle to really believe in the specificity of Orwell's work.]

That said, I think Orwell would probably agree with you on the prose. He himself said that the idea of Nineteen Eighty-Four was good but that the execution was very poor. In his defence, he was dying of tuberculosis at the time - the time he was typing up the manuscript, he couldn't even sit up in bed for any length of time - and he was being pressured by his publishers to get the thing finished as soon as possible. He would probably be disappointed to learn that he was remembered for that book, rather than his earlier work.

Anyway, I'm not trying to argue for one book over the other (I haven't read 'We' yet, but I wasn't impressed by '1984'). I just think that maybe you were a bit too quick and simplistic in juxtaposing one author against the other.

Traveller wrote: "Phew, i feel you're maybe being a tad harsh on Orwell, but I cannot argue with any of your points.
Plus i understand your righteous anger. ;) I'd forgotten 1984 by the time I read We about a year a..."

Trav, I read the Clarence Brown translation. The language was poetic and beautiful. I don't know Russian, so I can't say anything about the quality of the translation itself.

Linda wrote: "What a weird review. Orwell does more than mangle We, he adapts and transposes it. There are obvious reasons why 1984 has become a staple of our culture while We hasn't. And to say kids should read..."

I'm full of misplaced ideas. In which High School system do the students read both We and 1984? I'm a product of my time and maybe it was just the time in which I was brought up. I actually read 1984 in . . . 1984.

Wastrel wrote: "s.penkevich wrote: "Yes! Great stuff. Didn't A.Huxley basically steal a bunch of ideas from this one as well (or am I only assuming so since Brave New World and 1984 always associate in my mind)?"
..."

You make some excellent points that I was not fully aware of, Wastrel. My main point is that while Orwell may have fought against totalitarianism, he never lived *under* it. He was trying to prevent it from happening to his country at some future date. Zamyatin had lived under the Tsar, then under the Communists. So his view of what it was like to live under totalitarian rule was more natural and more nuanced. Perhaps I didn't make that clear in my admittedly hastily-written comments.

I must observe that many writers who lived in the Soviet Bloc were stunned by how well Orwell captured the atmosphere.

The additional "but" in your last line really conveys your exasperation.

Wonderful.

As previously mentioned, I now am quite anxious to read We.

!!!

I felt the complete opposite, that this book (its characters, its plot, such as it is) was sterile where 1984 was not.

Lostaccount wrote: "I felt the complete opposite, that this book (its characters, its plot, such as it is) was sterile where 1985 was not."

Nothing wrong with differing opinions. Reading is a very personal experience, isn't it? One of the best exercises of personal freedom is freedom to think what we want. :)

Which is why I can say what I said. :)

which translation?

Claire wrote: "which translation?"

Clarence Brown.

Forrest wrote: "Claire wrote: "which translation?"

Clarence Brown."

thanks, couldn't wait a day, I've already started that one:)

Very good!

virgodura wrote: "my highschool in toronto. but even if it's not assigned reading, people do read it in highschool. one of my russian lit profs mentioned it as something some of us probably read in highschool."

Interesting! We didn't have Russian lit as a course (or any courses devoted to non-Anglophone lit -- I think we read maybe 3 translated books total) and I never heard of We until I was assigned in grad school to teach it to undergrads. If any of them had heard of it before they didn't mention it.

I think I would have liked your class better -- our curriculum was mostly Great American Novels with some Shakespeare here and there.

virgodura wrote: "Idk, it strikes me as kind of sad how our school was about 90% Asian and all we read were books by dead straight white men. It put me off poetry for years actually, lol."

"Dead" is objective, "white" is hard (though not impossible) to argue, and "men" can be taken on the balance of probabilities (though do we really know how most of these people thought of themselves?). But "straight"? Why automatically assume that people are straight just because they're novelists, when most of them have left little or no clear evidence of their sexuality?

Chaucer, for instance, did marry and have children, but that doesn't mean he was "straight" (not that sexuality was conceived of in the same way historically in any case). And as it happens, it was an arranged marriage before either of them entered puberty... and apparently there's long been suspicion that at least some of his children weren't actually his, and if that's the case then he doesn't seem to have had a problem with it. [He constantly praised the man in question in his works] So who's to say that he was "straight"?

We don't even know the name of the author of Beowulf, let alone who he liked to have sex with. We don't even know he was a 'he' (aiui little is known about saxon poets in general, but it is known that in their sister-cultures in iceland and norway there were certainly female poets, so it's likely that there could have been some among the angles and saxons too). Beowulf most likely was written by a man (because the great majority of poets in that era were probably men even if not all of them were), but we don't know that.


Regarding the racial composition of your school set texts, I suspect the main reason is just that until the 20th century there were probably very few English-language literary works of great merit composed by authors from an asian background.

[Although aside from genetics (which has no direct impact on writing style), I would think that a book by, say, a 2nd-generation chinese gay man from california writing in the 1990s, or a by a middle-class, english-school-educated indian doctor's wife in the 1970s, would be far, far, far more the product of, and representative of, the literary canon of 'dead white straight male' modern europeans, than an epic poem by a 7th century saxon tribesman, or even a collection of popular narrative poems by a 14th-century park warden.... judging authors by their genetics and the colour of the skin risks obscuring the much greater diversity of perspectives that comes from a wide range of different cultures throughout time and space.]

.......................christ

the reason why my school texts were the way they were because they were trying to teach us the 'canon' because it was a prep school without reference to how racist and sexist the canon is. the end.

So.. Is this a review of We or of 1984?

Don't understand this antipathy to Orwell - go read his journalism and then come back and belittle him.

I don't find any shame in being inspired by an author like Zamyatin. The best ideas are stolen ones.

Michael wrote: "I don't find any shame in being inspired by an author like Zamyatin. The best ideas are stolen ones."

Heh. How to Steal Like an Author.

Over thinking things just a tad aren't we, kids?
This whole thread fk'n stinks of elitist snobbery.
Get over yourselves. Honestly.

Well, regarding the review it hit the nail on the head. Shame this is not as well known

I like your review. You're right to point out that Zamyatin was indeed the first to cover this theme in this way. I still do adore 1984, for me it is just as great a novel as We. I read We for dystopian literature class about 6 or 7 years ago. I think that a reread is due. I should summon the guts and try to read it in Russian, not English this time.

How very judgmental of you.

Jcb wrote: "How very judgmental of you."

Yeah, how dare you like this book a lot?!

A finely written review, though I can only shrug at the hostile tone and theme of it. But I want to comment on your mention of prose: for me that was the one element of the whole that failed to draw me in: that a man raised in a totalitarian society modeled on mathematical precision, whose name is a number and whose only function is a technical one, should write such flowery and romantic prose. It's as if he had been possessed by a great Russian poet from the past. I felt like it needed, sorry to say, to be written in some kind of Newspeak.

You don't have to tear down Orwell to praise this novel, especially since Orwell himself has stated this book inspired 1984.

wow! I didn't know writing a book was a competition...

wow, I felt the power behind your words. Epic review!

Mr. Forrest, you sir are a quack.

This will be next for me.

I wonder if Orwell had lived to see the success of 1984 if he would have cited this work.

I think it was Bowie who said only good art is worth stealing from.

Jennie wrote: "This will be next for me.

I wonder if Orwell had lived to see the success of 1984 if he would have cited this work.

I think it was Bowie who said only good art is worth stealing from."

If Bowie didn't say that, he definitely should have.

(I'm a Blackstar).

I think you’ll also find that Orwell fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil war, being wounded in action.

Zamyatin hadn't live in totalitarian state when he wrote "We" (book was first published in 1920). He wrote it after two years he spent in England

Alexey wrote: "Zamyatin hadn't live in totalitarian state when he wrote "We" (book was first published in 1920). He wrote it after two years he spent in England"

Where was he before his stay in England?

Definitely in Russia. It was a monarchy there in that times.

It has been a while since I read 1984 but recollect I preferred the world that Orwell created. The descriptions of politics for me grounded the book. I also felt that Winston was a more rounded character than D-503 who I didn't relate to as easily. That said your review makes me now want to revisit this novel.

A book that certainly inspired both 1984 and Brve new world. The plot is difficult to follow, and the writing stumbles a bit, but it kept my interest and is a quick read.