Yevgeny Zamyatin: We

There are so many directions from which to approach this book.  The most obvious one is to treat it as the precursor to the more well known examples of the genre: 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, Brave New World, et al. In fact, so much do these latter works owe to We that one cannot read it without becoming aware that it alone made these other books possible. 

As is so often true of seminal works with no forebearer, one could just as easily look at what is wrong with it. It is sloppy in places, especially when the author sees fit to deliver on his promise of a plot.  Plenty of passages feel like missed opportunities, connecting to the larger tapestry just enough to make a literary snob like this reader wish for a little tidier weaving. 

But I'm sure all of these essays have been written already, and by more knowledgeable scholars than me.  I did notice a point that is so subtle that perhaps it has escaped other eyes, however.  The narrator, mathematician that he is, often phrases his internal conflict as the task of removing the irrational number √-1 from himself.  Anyone who has taken high school algebra recognizes this as the formula for the number i, which opens these passages up to a fascinating set of questions.  I is /am indeed the most irrational of numbers/beings.  What is/am I?  Philosophers have never come up with an answer that satisfies.  Is it even possible to remove that most irrational--and potentially destructive--element, the ego, from ourselves?  Would it result in more or less happiness?  What would need to be sacrificed?  All of this ties in nicely with the themes of the book, and Zamyatin, freed from the requirement of proof, offers his answers rather more clearly than Descartes could.

But the most fascinating aspect of this question is that, in spite of its seamless blending into the overall themes of the text, and the almost precious cleverness that it elicits from the reader, it is unlikely if not impossible that it has any real place in the text.  We was written in Russian, and only translated later into English.  For all of the layered meanings and probing questions that i and the obvious corollary evoke in English, in Russian it is just another letter.  The first person pronoun in Russian is not I but я.  To what extent, then, do all of these fascinating interpretations have any place in the discussion?  If the author did not mean for them to be there, do they exist?  Are they part of the text?  Or do they belong only to the reader--specifically the English-speaking reader?  This is a marvelous window into the very question of textuality that divides literary theorists even as recently as a book I finished this week (Scholes' Textual Power).  It's a very concrete example of a very elusive question.  For me, this book is mine now, not Zamyatin's.  He can participate in the reading with me, but only as an equal partner.  Maybe he would be as pleased by his unintended(?) cleverness as I am.