The novel "We" by E. Zamyatin: problems

The novel "We" is a novel, an anti-utopia, written by the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin in 1921. It's no secret that at the beginning of the last century the political situation in the world left much to be desired, therefore such works were popular not only in Russia but also abroad. It is interesting that in Russia the novel was released only after many years in 1988, since earlier the work was published only in Czech and English languages in other countries. Work on the novel "We" took place during the Civil War.

The profound but obvious meaning that E. Zamyatin put into his novel opens to the reader already from the title: behind the simple pronoun "we" hides the collectivism of the Bolsheviks, when the individual person meant nothing, and the more important role was played by group decisions and collective activity. Heroes of anti-utopia live in Russia of the future in a thousand years. One of the main themes touched upon in the novel is a person's life in the conditions of totalitarianism. The novel itself is written in the form of diary entries, which belongs to an engineer named D-503. Despite this form of writing and the fact that events take place in the distant future, E. Zamyatin, the novel "We" and his characters raise important problems of human life that will always be relevant.

The leading problem is the path to human happiness. The heroes of the novel "We" live in a world that was formed as a result of the search for a happy life. It would seem that a world dominated by technocracy and collectivism is ideal, however, it is imperfect, as a person loses his individuality and is just another cog in a huge mechanism. The lives of people are subordinate to mathematics and are painted by the hour. The person is impersonal. Moreover, instead of names people are given a code in the form of letters and numbers. What is important, people have become accustomed to such orders, they forgot about the naturalness and the need to hide something from each other.

Another problem with which the reader meets is the problem of power. E. Zamyatin lays out his ideas when describing the Day of Unanimity and the election of the Benefactor. It's strange that people do not think about choosing someone else to be Benefactor, except for the Benefactor himself. In addition, they find it strange that once the election results were known after the election.

E. Zamyatin also introduces the situation of the revolution into the plot of the anti-utopia novel. Some of the workers do not reconcile themselves with the existing state of things and are ready to fight with the ruler for the sake of freeing people from such power. The protagonist joins the revolutionaries and gains a soul. At the end of the novel, the beloved woman of the hero dies, and he returns to the former "balance" and "happiness" after the operation to remove the fantasy.

Thus, E. Zamyatin described the development of totalitarianism. His novel "We" is a warning about what can lead to a rejection of individuality. The writer, revealing important problems, showed how destructive a totalitarian state can be and how tragic the lives of those who fell to be a part of it. The novel "We" (a brief summary can be found on the Internet) is a model of the novel's genre of anti-utopia and makes the reader think about a number of important problems.