In 1921, Russian engineer and litterateur YEVGENY ZAMYATIN (1884-1937) wrote an essay castigating Communists who demanded of writers subservience to the Party: “There shall be no more polyphony or dissonances,” the former Bolshevik activist warned. “There shall only be majestic, monumental, all-encompassing unanimity.” That same year, Zamyatin completed We, a sci-fi novel that would circulate in samizdat for years (translated into English, it influenced Orwell’s 1984) before being published in Russia a half-century after his death. Extrapolating from the rhetoric of those communist and capitalist utopians who advocated extending Taylorism, Fordism, and other scientific-management techniques beyond the factory, We is a ripping adventure yarn set in a totalized social order whose citizens (“ciphers,” with numbers for names) eat, sleep, work, and even make love like clockwork. Zamyatin’s fable isn’t anti-utopian, but anti-anti-utopian. Like his protagonist, mathematician and rocket designer D-503, the author longed to see war, hunger, and poverty eradicated through collectivism… but not at the cost of spontaneity and freedom of choice. Their ancestors were right to invent a more equitable social order, the female revolutionist I-330 tells D-503. But afterward, she adds (speaking in a mathematics-inflected lingo capable of subverting D-503′s lifelong conditioning) “they believed that they were the final number — which doesn’t exist in the natural world, it just doesn’t.”

A version of this item appeared in the Boston Globe in July 2006.

***

On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Langston Hughes.

READ MORE about men and women born on the cusp between the Psychonaut (1874-83) and Modernist (1884-93) generations.

In 2012, HiLoBooks serialized and then republished (in gorgeous paperback editions, with new Introductions) five forgotten Radium Age science fiction classics! Five more titles will be serialized and published in 2013. For more info: HiLoBooks.

READ MORE ABOUT: HiLoBooks homepage! | What is Radium Age science fiction? | Radium Age Supermen | Radium Age Robots | Radium Age Apocalypses | Radium Age Telepaths | Radium Age Eco-Catastrophes | Radium Age Cover Art (1) | SF’s Best Year Ever: 1912 | Radium Age Science Fiction Poetry | Enter Highbrowism | Bathybius! Primordial ooze in Radium Age sf | War and Peace Games (H.G. Wells’s training manuals for supermen) | J.D. Beresford | Algernon Blackwood | Edgar Rice Burroughs | Karel Čapek | Buster Crabbe | August Derleth | Arthur Conan Doyle | Charlotte Perkins Gilman | Hermann Hesse | Aldous Huxley | Inez Haynes Irwin | Alfred Jarry | Jack Kirby (Radium Age sf’s influence on) | Gaston Leroux | David Lindsay | Jack London | H.P. Lovecraft | A. Merritt | Maureen O’Sullivan | Sax Rohmer | Paul Scheerbart | Upton Sinclair | Clark Ashton Smith | E.E. “Doc” Smith | Olaf Stapledon | John Taine | H.G. Wells | Jack Williamson | Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz | S. Fowler Wright | Philip Gordon Wylie | Yevgeny Zamyatin