As with most 22-year-old American males, my childhood was spent weaning from the electric mother of television and video games. (You wouldn't know it, because I deleted it, but I just absent-mindedly capitalized both "Television" and "Video Games" as though they were deified.) According to some people that I read somewhere once, I can blame the electronic sedentary behavior of my younger days for the attention deficit that I blame for my most of my shortcomings (including not being able to write a succinct sentence <ooh, "succinct sentence", I like that word-pair>).
ANYWAY! To make a short story long, I've replaced (for the most part) the sweet, light-giving life of the television for the cold pages of a book. Unfortunately, it's difficult to allow your brain to meander endlessly and still get anything out of a novel. So, like so many people I know, I have half-read Tolstoys and Dostoevskies adorning my nightstand and desk like some dilapidated tent-city.
My inability to finish anything by "The Russians" (close your eyes and give your voice the snootiest possible tone whenever you say "The Russians"; it's a lot of fun) has automatically restricted me from the category of "well-read" by the literati. So, without even realizing it, I read two books in a row by Russians! I'm not sure if either of them counts as part of "The Russians", but I have still gotten away with pretentiously referencing both of them.
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
This one's just long enough and has just enough characters with unpronounceable names to warrant pretention. Although the setting is of course dated (19th century Russia) and the targets (Russian landowners, or Barins) no longer exist, the satire is easily applicable to modern-day life. After all, it's a small step from the frivolity and greed of the Russian nobleman to the attitude of the Wall Street culture. The "hero", Chichikov, is essentially a Serpent in the Garden character, a careful manipulator of the narcissism that plagues the wealthy and impoverished alike. His mission: collect the "dead souls", those peasants who have died under the watch of their feudal lords, but still remain on the census. The main interplay is between swindler and oppressor, begging the question of who the real licentious character is. Gogol spares nobody, showing that the lazy and the workaholics alike suffer from the same disease of personal hubris.
The history and structure of the manuscript is sort of strange one, and leads to some continuity that takes getting used to. He originally intended it to be a sort of Divine Comedy. Part one of the book is a beautiful, haunting, and hilarious panorama of Russian life during serfdom; just as in Inferno, there are several levels to our social hell, all reserved with different punishments and trials for the different classes. Part II isn't exactly different, and I don't see many analogues to purgatory. Apparently, Gogol had a tumultuous time with the manuscript, destroying much of the final version. The entire novel ends in mid-sentence, but that actually makes sense.
Some have commented that the "dead souls" as a plot device makes the novel too ridiculous to have any merit. Personally, I think the metaphor translates beautifully to all the useless stuff we put value into, and makes the scenes of the flabbergasted landowners all the more entertaining. Not to mention, while all the characters in the novel are living, all save a couple seem to be dead in soul.
Apparently, Gogol, who by the end of his life had become highly entrenched in spiritualism, meant to write an uplifting part III about the redemption of the human soul. Well, that's not exactly how it turns out; but that's all I'll say for now.
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
The next time I hear a politician reference 1984 in comparison to our social situation (especially one who supported the USA PATRIOT Act), I'm going to take her or him hostage and make them read We. It is the prototype for all dystopian literature to follow, and unlike 1984, it is constantly poetic and beautiful. After all, Zamyatin's whole bent is that our imaginations are the thing that a dystopian government would find the most dangerous. Instead of a technical rundown of the way the omniscient state (One State) works, we get sketchy details about day to day life. Buildings are entirely glass, everyone's name is a number, and the Benefactor (essentially Big Brother, except you meet him in this book) has the use of a giant machine that zaps away his enemies.
The whole book is a series of journal entries by the guy who's working on the INTEGRAL, the government spaceship designed to bring the idea of this "perfect" society to other planets. He starts breaking down into a neurosis whose symptoms are moral conflict, emotional love, and dreams. He sees the state doctor- and the diagnosis? He has a soul, a totally incurable and degenerative disease! As you can see, the dystopian context makes the everyday decisions we all make into a sadly hilarious drama.
Zamyatin's prose-poetry is constantly biting and poignant, and the progression of the narrator's "disease" is absolutely brilliant. The way the events and settings are fantastical and imaginative lends it a higher calling than other dystopian novels. It doesn't present a socialist or reformist agenda; although Zamyatin himself was a socialist, he was much more interested in the importance of preserving creativity and the human "soul", which got him exiled by both the Tsar and Lenin.
It's so easy for any of us to look at any of the classic dystopian novels and say, "If I were there, I would realize it in a heartbeat! This is ridiculous, why would anyone act like this?" Zamyatin, I think, realizes this, and constantly lambasts "the ancients" (us) for their ways, satirically criticizing things like free elections, etc., but also pointing out that the society of streamlined logic and mechanization, metaphorically as well as literally, is very alive, well, and growing.
I could go into "America as dystopia", but that would be a subject for an entirely different blog.
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