1 post tagged “orwell”
We reads as a series of diary entries, kind of like a blog on vodka and a slow. Recognizing that it was written in 1922, it still brims with a romanticism that seems tired. Remember, this was a year before Edna St. Vincent Millay and T.S. Elliot shocked the world with fresh poetry. Hemingway would publish In Our Time in 1925. My point is, the writing world was alive and there was little room for the pretentious flitting between experimentation and stale artifice that slog from Zamyatin's yawning Edison. Pages gasp with an asthmatic desperation. At the strongest moments, I comic book characters peek around imagination's restless corners, never human beings. In fact, an ambitious graphic novelist might be able to revive Zamyatin's work.
Zamyatin's cardboard characters, especially his protagonist and narrator D-503, never lift from the ground that they are attempting to rise above. We is of important academic interest if you are attempting to understand the nature of Soviet oppression or the history of dystopic literature. As a work of narrative art, however, it lacks the very thing it fights so hard to defend.