A few words about the method by which Zamyatin tries to drive home to the reader his main ideas. It is the method of “Laughter through tears,” to use an old expression of Gogol. It is the form which is dictated by profound love for humanity, mixed with pity and hatred of those factors which are the cause of the disindividualization of man today. It is the old emotion of the ancient Catul: “Odi et amo.” Zamyatin laughs in order to hide his tears, hence amusing as We may seem and really is, it barely conceals a profound human tragedy which is universal today.
The reader may be interested in knowing something about Zamyatin himself. Zamyatin does not like to tell about himself and the translator does not think he has the right to tell more than to quote Zamyatin’s own answer to a request addressed to him a couple of years ago to write his autobiography:
“I see you want my autobiography by all means, but I assure you that you will have to limit yourself only to an outside inspection and get but a glimpse, perhaps, into the dark windows. I seldom ask anybody to enter.
“As to the outside, you will see a lonely child without playmates, lying on a Turkish divan, hind-side up, reading a book, or under the grand piano while his mother plays Chopin. Two steps away from Chopin, just outside the window with the geraniums, in the middle of the street, there is a small pig tied to a stake and hens fluttering in the dust.
“If you are interested in the geography, here it is—Lebedyan, in the most Russian Tambov province about which Tolstoy and Turgenev wrote so much. Chronology?—The end of the ’eighties and early ’nineties, then Voronesh, the Gymnasium pension, boredom and rabid dogs on Main Street. One of these dogs got me by the leg. At that time I loved to make different experiments on myself, and I decided to wait and see whether I would or would not get the rabies and what is most important, I was very curious: What would I feel when the time would come for the rabies (about two weeks after the bite)? I felt a great many things, but two weeks later I did not get the rabies, therefore I announced to the inspector in the school that I got the rabies and must go at once to Moscow for vaccination.
“In the Gymnasium I would get A plus for composition and was not always on good terms with mathematics. Perhaps because of that (sheer stubbornness) I chose the most mathematical career—the shipbuilding department of the Petrograd Polytech.
“Thirteen years ago in the month of May—and that May was remarkable in that the snow covered the flowers—I simultaneously finished my work for my diploma and my first short story. The short story was published in the old Obrazovanye.
“Well, what else do you want? That meant that I was going to write short stories and was going to publish them. Therefore for the following three years I wrote about nothing but ice cutters, steam engines, refillers and The Theoretical Exploration of the Works of Floating Steam Shovels. I couldn’t help myself. I was attached to the chair of Ship Architecture and busied myself with teaching in the shipbuilding faculty, where I teach until now.
“If I mean anything in Russian Literature, I owe this completely to the Petrograd Secret Service. In 1911 this service exiled me from Petrograd and I was forced to spend two years in a non-populated place in Lachta. There, in the midst of the white winter silence and the green summer silence, I wrote my ‘Provincial.’ After that the late Ismaylov expressed in print his belief that I wore very high boots and was a long-haired provincial type, carrying a heavy stick, and he was later very much surprised that I ‘didn’t look a bit like that.’ Incidentally, ‘not a bit like that’ I became in England where, during the War, I spent about two years, building ships and visiting the ruins of ancient castles. I listened to the banging of the German Zeppelin bombs and wrote a short novel The Islanders.
“I regret immensely that I did not witness the Russian Revolution in February and know only the October Revolution, because it was in October, a life preserver around my body and all the lights out, passing German submarines, that I returned to Petrograd. Because of this I felt like one who never having been in love gets up one morning and finds himself married about ten years.
“Now I write little, perhaps because my requirements towards myself become greater. Three new volumes are in the hands of the publisher and begin to be published only now. The fourth will be my novel We, the funniest and most earnest thing I have written. However, the most serious and most interesting novels I never wrote. They happened to me in my life.”
Zamyatin continues to live in Russia and continues to live with Russia, but such is the sarcasm of Fate that the first Russian novel giving a real synthesis of the Russian revolution and its greater universal meaning, this novel written by Zamyatin, should remain unknown to the Russians in Russia.
We
Record One
An announcement—The wisest of lines—A poem.
This is merely a copy, word by word, of what was published this morning in the State newspaper:
“In another hundred and twenty days the building of the Integral will be
