The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin

Shane, Alex M. The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin. Berkeley: U of California P, 1968.

Includes an extensive biblio. of works by and about Zamiatin. Main discussion of We is in ch. 6, esp. 137-61. See for color imagery in We, the square root of minus one, and the relationship between We and Zamiatin's other works, esp. "Ostrovitjane" ("The Islanders" [1918]), and Zamiatin's essays. See for Zamiatin's own comments about We as "a warning against . . . the hypertrophic power of machines and the hypertrophic power of the State," and for cautions against taking for the norms of We irrationality and cultural primitivism, or taking We as ultimately pessimistic. (See in this Category, D. J. Richards on "Zamyatin: A Soviet Heretic", and G. Beauchamp, "Cultural Primitivism as Norm in the Dystopian Novel.")

RDE, Title, 11Aug19