Yevgeny Zamyatin: We.(Book review)

Yevgeny Zamyatin We. Modern Library, 240 pages, $12.95

Yevgeny Zamyatin was first imprisoned in 1906 in Czarist Russia, only to find himself again in the same hallway of the same prison eighteen years later, this time--with a twist!--at the hands of the Bolsheviks whom he'd only recently saluted in October 1917. Out of this turmoil, Zamyatin wrote We, his dystopia of "mathematically infallible happiness." Zamyatin knew that something was rotting in the state of Russia; he told the world, and he did so before both Orwell and Huxley.

In such a state and state of mind, Zamyatin penciled out the formula for the perfect man in the perfect world: "when the freedom = o, he doesn't commit a crime." Man as barcode is the workable theme: a measurable quantity, not a quality, of living.

It could be said, perhaps, that there is no "I" in We--certainly not in a digitized hero like D-503. In We's "One State" the mechanics of modern man step over the "spirit of man: Sex is rationed out with pink slips, a controlled commodity; glass houses are not so much solar houses as they are moral safeguards against mystery and imagination, a penitentiary of the spirit. Indeed, transparency-as-penitentiary maintains the rigid order of the work-a-day tyranny of the "One State."

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