Comparison of 2 Novels: We & 1984

Zamiatin wrote We in 1920, after it had become clear to him that there were rapidly developing elements of totalitarianism in the nation of Russia after the Revolution. Once a strong backer of that Revolution, Zamiatin became a critic of its increasing tendency to pressure the people to conform. As we read in the Introduction to the novel, "The ruling principle of the rigidly controlled society in We is that freedom and happiness are incompatible: men are congenitally incapable of using their freedom for constructive ends and merely make themselves miserable by their abuse of it; most of them yearn for a materialistic happiness and are eager to surrender their troublesome freedom and to be reduced to the status of lotus-eaters" (Rudy viii).

On the very first page of the novel itself, Zamiatin writes of the intention of the United State (the fictional Utopia) to "subjugate to the grateful yoke of reason the unknown beings who live on other planets . .

. . .
ly just as condemnatory of the regime he portrays as Orwell is of the regime in 1984, Zamiatin's book displays a joy and a pleasure in skewering the regime, while Orwell is almost humorless and joyless. Zamiatin's protagonist, D-503, is, for all his conformity, a joyous individual, a citizen happy to be an obedient and productive cog in the We machine, at least until love and a hint of liberty intruded. Orwell's hero, on the other hand, is a much more self-knowing individual who carefully and with much determination plots against the state. What clearly might account for this difference in tone---Zamiatin joyously satirical and Orwell determinedly humorless---is the political reality existing at the time of the writing of each book. Zamiatin wrote at a time in which he perhaps believed that he could stop the growing totalitarianism by poking fun at it. Orwell, writing almost thirty years later, after Hitler and Mussolini and in the midst of Stalin's reign, saw totalitarianism as a terrifying reality which perhaps could never be stopped on its journey toward extinction of all individual freedom. As we read in Kern: " . . . Orwell's pictures of the new world do not amuse us, as Zamiatin's do for the most part, but rather terr
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Approximate Word count = 2202
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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