Volume 19, Number 6 · October 19, 1972
Them and Us
By John Bayley
We: A Novel of the Future
by Yevgeny Zamyatin, translated by Mirra Ginsburg
Viking, 192 pp., $6.95
A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin
edited and translated by Mirra Ginsburg
University of Chicago, 322 pp., $9.50
Whatever their design upon us, novels of Utopia share some of the limitations of pornographic fiction. The fancy has only so many fixed counters to play with, and the imagination can only work through style and idea, not with any deeper creative process. Like sex, the future turns out to be distinctly finite: we shall probably see the point too early, and having seen it become bored. Tolstoy thought this always happened when art relied too much on gimmicks, and Dr. Johnson observed of Gulliver's Travels that once Swift had thought of big men and little men the rest was easy. Johnson's dislike of Swift made him unfair, but he has a point. Satiric fantasy is apt to be self-limiting, even at its best.
Review, 2291 words
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