Dystopia as Protest: Zamyatin’s We and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty - Four Rachel Stauffer
I. Introduction Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (Russian title: Мы, meaning “My”), a dystopian novel written in the early 1920s, is said to have been influenced by H. G. Wells and to have influenced George Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour, although We is less familiar to Western readers than Nineteen Eighty-Four. In Soviet Russia, We was censored until the late 1980s when General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost policy of openness lifted the ban on the book; the publication of Nineteen EightyFour and Brave New World soon followed (Tall 183). The publication of We, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Brave New World in Russia therefore coincided directly with the dissolution of the Soviet Union after seventy years of Communist rule. This suggests that some dystopias, by virtue of their content, are texts of social protest. I will explore this first through close examination of Zamyatin’s We and then through a comparison of We with the protest elements of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. A dystopia firmly rejects the ideal society envisioned by a utopia. The first appearance of the word “utopia” occurs in Thomas More’s work Utopia in 1516: The word utopia, first coined by More for his book [Utopia], also has a comfortable, modern feeling. It is now a very common term in English, most often carrying the meaning of a vain fantasy, a hopelessly unrealistic reform program, or an entirely impracticable set of social institutions (Sacks 4).
In the text of Utopia, More establishes the word by combining the Greek u, meaning “not,” with topos, meaning “place,” literally meaning Dystopia as Protest: Zamyatin’s We and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty - Four
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