Letters to the Editor
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Thanks!
"We" is simply magnificent. Thank you for giving it some long overdue attention. Everyone I give it to comes back after reading it to ask, "why in the world haven't I heard of this before?"
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Thanks, Salon!
Thanks for the endorsement of Zamyatin!
Thhanks also for taking the opportunity not just to praise We but to dismiss two writers that many of your readers know and respect. We can always count of you guys to make the average reader feel just a teensy bit more stupid, can't we?
There you go! Put 'em in their place!
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"1984" Remains a Superior Work of Art
While it's hard to underestimate the debt Orwell owes to Zamyatin's "We," Priya Jain's dismissal of Orwell and "1984" as somehow passé reveal Jain to be nothing more than a callow, pretentious and ultimately misguided snob.
Jain's contention that the faceless generalities and abstraction of "We" are more timeless and somehow superior to Winston's Smith's specific and harrowing tale is almost laughable. Almost.
In her review, Jain says: "1984, with its crumbling, post-blitzkrieg London, invokes a fear of rampant communism that is no longer a part of our lives." Sadly Jain's reading of "1984" is woefully limited.
While communism may no longer be a part of our lives, let me remind Jain that the forces that created it are more than alive and well. Ultimately, "1984" isn't a novel about communism; it's about the ability of totalitarian forces -- in any guise, even democracy -- to eradicate the humanity within each and every one of us.
With each passing year, Orwell's classic becomes more and more relevant. The same simply cannot be said for "We."
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dystopia at home
"If the novel, with its low-tech paper-and-ink delivery system, is rebellion against scientific progress,..."
Ink, paper, printing and distribution are four (of many) bits of technological/scientific progress I wouldn't want to be without.
I'll definitely read We anyway (thanks!), but I don't get this knee-jerk luditism. One thing useful Bush has done is proven that science & technology are not (just/even) tools of the right. They are orthogonal to politics, though of course they intersect with it since they affect our lives.
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Dystopia forgotten
I'm glad that Priya Jain is pointing out _We_'s status as an unjustly neglected piece of good dystopian literature. Someone should be descrying its absence from American curricula and consciousness (and directing prospective readers in in its direction). But perhaps it is more important to ask *why* _We_ is so little-known. Why hasn't anyone read _We_, especially when Orwell, who borrows very, very heavily from Zamyatin, gets so much recognition? Dystopias of all sorts, from Lois Lowry's _The Giver_ to Huxley's _Brave New World_ are commonly known, read, assigned in classrooms. Of course, those books were all written in English. _We_ was not.
It is true that the Red Scare was even more en vogue when Orwell's work came out circa 1949. Zamyatin's work, published in the early '20s (before Stalin's rule) was probably hurt by its prescience. Reputations aside, it's not a lesser work than _1984_. But it has little chance to be reevaluated because Americans are jumpy about reading translated works.
Even the most educated or the most book-hungry readers have probably only heard of a few Russian writers: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekov. Some may know Boris Pasternak or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as well, but only as a result of the publicity surrounding their criticism of the communist regime in the U.S.S.R. And almost no one has heard of Aleksandr Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, or Nikolai Gogol. This is not a strictly Russian phenomenon either. Lit. students can probably tell you about a few Frenchmen: Sartre, Camus, Balzac, or Flaubert. Or Germans: Goethe, and Grass, perhaps. Very few, however, have read, say, Thomas Mann (German), who won the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Of course, it is true that something is always lost in translation. That’s a shame, but it’s not so serious that so many beautiful works in translation should be excluded from high school and university classrooms, bestseller lists, and the (American) Canon of Classic Literature.
Until society can get over its extra-English literary prejudice (or until Oprah recommends more Russian authors), novels like _We_ are going to stay virtually unknown in the U.S.
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1984
I agree with Redstar that 1984 remains important today; in fact, like all the best dystopian fiction, it becomes more and more important every day. My students often are startled at how well Bradbury predicted our thought processes and lifestyles in Fahrenheit 451 more than 50 years ago; similarly, Orwell seems to have anticipated much of our modern lifestyle in 1984. In the era of wiretapping, revised rationales for our Iraq debacle, a nebulous enemy that never can be entirely defeated, doublethink that turns things into their opposites (the "Patriot" Act, for example), the public distrust of intellectualism, and so forth, I can't imagine too many more relevant dystopias than the one presented in 1984.
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No reason to have to choose
Heidi: My earlier point is that Salon more than makes up for the overfamiliarity of the canon by reflexively, and cynically, attacking adherents to it, or even simply fans of its contents, as members of the booboisie.
It's not a contest. There's time enough in life to read several books, or even to learn another language (Russian, perhaps) if we suspect that translation reduces even the greatest art to plot summary. We can have our Zamyatin and our Huxley, too.
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Other works influenced by "We"
Shaved heads? numbers instead of names? Sounds like the George Lucas film "THX1138". It also somewhat reminds me of Ira Levin's underappreciated novel "This Perfect Day" where the populace is kept drugged to maintain a neutral emotional state and sex is no more important that brushing your teeth.
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I'd love to be read 'We'
could someone point out where I could score enough Paxil to do so without plunging into deeper depression regarding the state of the Earth?
No? Damn.
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SF writers are the ultimate conservatives
The future always SUCKS.
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Canons
Heidi may be right about what is and is not being taught in literature classes. It's been years since I taught or took one, since I left teaching to write full-time. But it's a mistake to think that people only read what's on the syllabus or only read because they're taking classes. In college and grad school, I read Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, Zola, de Maupassant, Gide, the Goncourt brothers, de Laclos, Huysmans, Proust, Queneau on my own, without ever taking a French lit. class. I was an English major, but a curious reader. And I read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, all of Turgenev, and books by Voinovich, Pushkin, Gogol, Babel--and yes, Zamyatin. Not for a class, but for myself.