The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

174 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

grasping, loving, rebellious singularity, a process that D-503 both craves and bitterly resents. The beautiful I-330, midwife to the birth of his soul, is a member of the Mephi, a sect named after Goethe’s demonic tempter Mephistopheles, which flourishes beyond the Green Wall enclosing the City.

His soul expanding, D-503 watches with horror as his diary, begun as a dutiful and devout propaganda piece for the missionary spaceship of which he is First Builder, transforms itself into a treasonous document. There is nowhere to tuck it away; its pages, increasingly full of anguish and doubt, are discovered on his glass desk through the glass walls of his room and become incriminating evidence. After the rebellion of the Mephi fails, D-503 is seized and lobotomized. His final diary entry, #40, resumes in the voice of a bland, collective “normalcy.” Impassively recorded there is the spectacle of his beloved I-330 being interrogated – tortured by suffocation – under the Glass Bell.

This closing scene especially has resonated throughout twentieth-century anti-totalitarian literature. In discussing his 1948 novel 1984, George Orwell acknowledged a debt to his Russian predecessor. In both novels, the betrayed female beloved (Julia or I-330) is tortured, or set up to be tortured, in front of the collapsed male hero-victim (Winston Smith or D-530) who has been broken on the wheel of their love. Orwell’s novel, however, is an anti-utopia precisely because the shabbiness, fraudulence, and doublethink of Ingsoc are clear to all from the start. Life in Oceania’s capital London, with its Ministries of Peace, Plenty, Truth, and Love, is utopia with its signs reversed, a city pasted all over with exuberant untruths in the spirit of Swiftian satire. Zamyatin’s We is the more dynamic and unsettling genre of dystopia: a dysfunctional utopia, the purportedly perfect city, at first applauded by an insider, which in the course of the novel turns into a nightmarish prison because a soul has matured and rebelled inside it.

Petersburg recreates Dostoevskian themes of parricide and political conspiracy; We , in contrast, the coldly satiric sides of Notes from Underground. In that dark place, we recall, Dostoevsky’s anti-hero speaks mockingly of a rationalist utopia, a dwelling-place made entirely of glass (the “Crystal Palace”), where transparency has become a way of life. No one has anything to hide (or anything to envy) because each person’s needs are mathematically calculated in advance and efficiently satisfied. Thus happiness is as possible and unambiguous as “twice two equals four.” This Crystal Palace becomes the world incarnated in Zamyatin’s OneState, which the Underground Man, a committed irrationalist, would immediately recognize as “not life, gentlemen, but the beginning of

death.”14