Zamyatin's We: A Collection of Critical Essay - Hardcover

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9780882338040: Zamyatin's We: A Collection of Critical Essay

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0882338048 ISBN 13: 9780882338040

Publisher: Ardis, 1988

Zamyatin's anti-Uponian novel We is one of the great 20th-century Russian classics. Gary Kern has collected various interpretations of the work and added eight selections from little-known works by Zamyatin. Essays on We are by A. Voronsky, V. Shklovsky, M. Kuznetsov, O. Mikhailov, R. Gregg, O. Ulph, C. Proffer, R. Parrott, G. Kern, M. Ehre, C. Collins, S. Layton, L. Cooke, K. Lewis & H. Weber, J. White, E. Stenbock--Fermor, I, Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. and E. J. Brown.

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From the Inside Flap:

Nearly seven decades since it was written, Evgeny Zamyatin's novel We remains a brilliant work of science fiction, political satire and experimental prose. Its basic plot, whereby a true believer comes to question the validity of a totalitarian state, has been repeated by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty Four and dozens of writers and filmmakers subsequently, yet it remains unsurpassed in its artistry, prophetic power and philosophical depth.

We has become standard reading for every course in modern Russian literature and many courses in political science, history, science fiction, Utopian literature, and so on. It has been the subject of a variety of different, sometimes antithetical, critical approaches, yet the novel has never lost its freshness and remains an exciting stimulus for discussion. It is revealing that to this day critics cannot decide about the ending of We: are the forces of revolution crushed, or is that merely a false assertion on the part of the narrator?

Gary Kern has collected the best of the many articles on We with the intention of providing a handy sourcebook for interpretations of Zamyatin. The essays include the predominant Soviet view (the novel was banned there in 1922) and a variety of Western views, organized into sections on mythic criticism, aesthetics, and influences and comparisons. This collection, which should prove invaluable to the reader of We, is testimony to the idea that one of the marks of a great book is its susceptibility to multiple levels of interpretation.

Gary Kern has written widely on early Soviet writers and on Solzhenitsyn. His previous publications include The Serapion Brothers: A Critical Anthology, Before Sunrise, a translation of Mikhail Zoshchenko, and Snake Train: Poetry and Prose by Velimir Khlebnikov.

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