ИСТИНА

As a political manifesto, the novel We was banned by the Soviet censors. Victor Shklovsky, who read the novel from the structuralist perspective, called it a failure. But reading it from the perspective of Zamyatin’s understanding of science fiction reveals We as the author’s literary experiment, an exercise in creating social extrapolations. Life, perceived through the acceleration of technological progress became fantastic, thus the most unrealistic literature is the works of realists who deny, or cannot, seeing the changes. In his critical study Herbert Wells (1922), the first extensive theoretical overview of poetics and history of science fiction in Russia, Zamyatin posited that H.G. Wells’ tradition of the genre, unlike realistic prose – the dominant mode of writing in the 19th century Russia, – is a new form of literature and the only form that can reflect dynamic processes of coming of social and technological modernity. Zamyatin’s conceptualization of the genre derives from William Thomson and Rudolf Clausius’ research in thermodynamics, specifically their formulation of the notion of entropy that by the end of the 19th century was interpreted in cultural and social terms as degeneration, particularly in the works by Henry Adams and Max Nordau. While the law of entropy shocked Zamyatin’s contemporaries by its inevitability and irreversibility, the writer found the remedy which resided in revolutionization of Russian literature. In my presentation, I focus on Zamyatin’s critical works and literary and technological contexts of his theorizations to provide a cultural reading of the novel We.