car. About the day of the liquefaction of a dissident poet:
Cube Square. Sixty-six powerful concentric rings: the stands. And sixty-six rows: quiet faces like lamps, with eyes reflecting the shining heavens, or maybe the shining of OneState. Blood-red flowers: women’s
lips.13
As long as D-503 remains a loyal subject of OneState, he perceives three-dimensionality, depth, and the capacity to absorb and project personal desire – what the doctors diagnose as the birth of a “soul” – as illness and imminent death. Forty diary entries (his forty days in the Wilderness) chronicle his metamorphosis from an obedient servant of impersonal reason into a
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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
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Dostoevsky’s paradoxical Underground provides only one subtext to the dynamics of We , however. For further clues, we must turn to Zamyatin’s early journalism. In 1918, Zamyatin published his first polemical essay, “Scythians?” The Scythians, a fierce nomadic tribe that left Central Asia in the eighth century BCE for the Don and Dnieper rivers, were adopted as a symbol during the revolutionary years by several avant-garde Russian writers to celebrate maxi-malism, spontaneity, absolute independence of spirit, and “eternal readiness to revolt.” This was the Dionysian impulse,writ large on the political canvasofthe day. Zamyatin’s essay criticizes a recent anthology of “Scythian” writings for its insufficiently principled rebelliousness. “The Scythian is an eternal nomad,” Zamyatin writes:
He is alive only in the wild, free gallop, only in the open steppe . . . Christ victorious in practical terms is the grand inquisitor . . . The true Scythian will smell from a mile away the odor of dwellings, the odor of cabbage soup, the odor of the priest in his purple cassock . . . and will hasten into the steppe, to freedom.15
Several years later, Zamyatin structured We around this mesmerizing “Scythian” binary of entropy versus energy, authoritarian stasis versus unfettered (and even purposeless) motion. Dostoevsky had applied similarly rigid polarities to his trap of the Underground: on one side, deterministic reason and the smug material security of the Crystal Palace; on the other, irrational spontaneity and perpetual doubt. But Dostoevsky is maximally distant from the revolutionary romantic celebrated by Bolshevik-era admirers of the Scythians. In Notes from Underground, he satirizes the irrationalist option as severely as he censures its opposite. Dostoevsky’s abject anti-hero is indeed a rebel. Every word, argument, and recollected event in the Underground Man’s monologue, however, makes it clear that he is interested not in freedom but in power (over others, and over his right to define his own purpose). He knows better than anyone else how few are the exits from that controlling passion. Zamyatin’s We , although it was written in a Nietzschean era, is a brighter satire, almost a utopian satire, celebrating everything that does not require any firm point of support or point of rest. It is also, after a fashion, a love story. But nothing resembling a free or responsive personality could ever evolve on either side of its Green Wall. Nor was the presentation of such a life-option part of Zamyatin’s intent.
Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita belongs to a different era and tradition, and – for all its demonology – is a genuine hybrid. Its time-space is divided equally between secular and sacred realms. It too is a love story, although grounded in
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modesty and reduced expectation rather than in Scythian rebellion or excess, and one that does end, perhaps even triumphantly, on a point of rest. The plot weaves together three familiar stories, albeit with unfamiliar, altered names. The first is the visit of the Devil (here called Woland, professor of black magic) to a major city (here Moscow) during a springtime full moon, to find a hostess for his annual ball. The second is the Faustian contract between this devil and a bereaved person (here Margarita), who bargains her soul in hopes of locating her disappeared beloved (the Master, a novelist out of favor with Stalinist literary bureaucrats). The third is the crucifixion of Christ (here called Yeshua) in Jerusalem (here Yershalaim), told as a detective story – in places a secret-police story – scattered in four installments throughout the Moscow narrative. The two cities are frequently superimposed on one another, Moscow’s towers and turrets signaling the city’s status as the “New Jerusalem,” with violent events in one prefiguring similar violence in the other.
Such double-tiered, “palimpsest” narration need not in itself be disorienting. What startles the reader is Bulgakov’s chronotopic play, that is, the fact that miracles, madness and magic do not occur in the environments where we would most expect them. The Moscow chapters are crammed with supernatural happenings, devils (sublime and petty), vampires, witches, hallucinations, carnival trickery, and yet are set in a familiar city full of recognizable streets, buildings, Soviet-style communal apartments, famous landmarks, as well as real people and events out of the Stalinist 1930s. This invasion of the comic-diabolical into everyday activities – professional meetings, tram rides, visits to the theatre or grocery store – recalls much more the texture of Gogol than of Dostoevsky, who doesn’t really have an “everyday.” Bulgakov’s use of this device in the Moscow chapters functions in part as political allegory. As the Terror gained momentum after 1936, innocent people were disappearing as if by witchcraft, their apartments sealed and their names effaced from public record.
If Moscow is the humdrum demonic, what of the Jerusalem chapters? They constitute a genuine historical novel – perhaps even a “novelized history.” Bulgakov was a meticulous researcher, and in the early drafts of his
