45 pages • 1 hour read
Yevgeny ZamyatinWe
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1921A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: Record 1, An Announcement—The Wisest of Lines—A Poem
In the future authoritarian society of the “One State” (1), 1,000 years after it subjugates the world, D-503, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, discusses “the Integral” (1). This is an interstellar rocket that is nearing completion, of which D-503 is the chief builder. The purpose of the Integral is to integrate other planets and civilizations into the “mathematically faultless happiness” (1) of the One State. Before using coercive means, this integration will be attempted by attaching to the rocket poems and treatises on the perfection of the One State, which the state encourages its citizens to write. To this end, D-503 begins writing a journal to record the beauty and joy of life within the One State.
Chapter 2 Summary: Record 2, Ballet—Square Harmony—X
D-503 is going for a state-mandated walk with a woman, O-90, who is registered as one of his sexual partners, and who is “ten centimeters shorter than the required Maternal Norm” (2), meaning that she is not permitted to have children. As they walk through the street with the other citizens, or “Numbers”, an unknown woman, I-330, starts talking to him. She mentions his “ape-like” (3) hands and how he looks divinely inspired. D-503 finds I-330 intriguing and agrees to see her at a state lecture in two days, which, she says, she will ensure that he is assigned to.
Chapter 3 Summary: Record 3, A Coat—A Wall—The Tables
The day after the walk, D-503 reflects on his writing from the previous day and how it might not be clear for readers unfamiliar with the One State. For example, readers who still live in a more “primitive” (4) civilization may not know what the “Hour Tables” (4) are. These, he explains, are the rules for living given by the state, written on the walls of citizens’ rooms, giving instructions on when and how to eat, go for walks, go to sleep, and attend educational lectures. In addition, the Tables allow for two “personal” hours a day for relaxation and sex. These tables, says D-503, provide an “exact solution to the problem of happiness” (4), by mandating for everyone an optimal way of life. D-503 reflects with incredulity on earlier states which let people live as they pleased despite this shortening people’s lives. D-503 acknowledges that occasionally Numbers deviate from the Tables but that the Guardians, the One State’s secret police, are there to check for and eliminate such transgressions.
Chapter 4 Summary: Record 4, The Wild Man With the Barometer—Epilepsy—If
The next day, D-503 is assigned to a lecture on music and the recently invented “musicometer” (6) which allows for the production of mathematically perfect scores. To demonstrate the superiority of the One State’s music the lecturer reveals on the stage the “ancient instrument” (6) of the piano. I-330 then appears on stage, wearing a 20th-century dress, and plays something on the piano which sounds to D-503 wild and irrational. After leaving the lecture, D-503 gives a pink ticket to the controller on duty in his block of flats, U-, certifying that he will be having sex with O-90 at 10 o’clock. As D-503 explains, One State citizens live in blocks of transparent glass flats. During their “sexual days,” (7) though, they are permitted to close their curtains for an hour while having sex.
Chapter 5 Summary: Record 5, The Square—The Rulers of the World—An Agreeable and Useful Function
D-503 discusses the war between rural and urban populations which predates the establishment of the One State. The war began after a period when growers withheld food from city dwellers. The invention of “petroleum food” (8) which eliminated the need to grow crops on the land, solved the problem and ended the war. D-503 says that just as the state scientifically resolved the problem of hunger, so too did it eliminate the problem of sex. The state implemented an examination and determined for individuals a table of sexual days, and then required people to submit applications to have sex with other people on those days. According to D-503, this system eliminates jealousy and turns sex into a useful social function.
Chapter 6 Summary: Record 6, An Accident—The Cursed “It’s Clear”—Twenty-Four Hours
On a subsequent day, I-330 rings D-503 during his “personal hour” and he agrees to go with her to the “Ancient House” (10). This is a house based on 20th-century architecture with opaque walls, full of ancient books, and strange objects, including a bust of Pushkin, and a brass buddha. Inside, I-330 asks D-503 to go into another room while she changes from the blue One State uniform, into a short yellow dress. I-330 then asks D-503 to stay with her over their allotted personal time, even though this will mean being late for the next proscribed lecture. She tells D-503 that she can get him a doctor’s certificate saying that he is ill to justify his absence. D-503 does not agree to this transgression but does not report I-330 to the Guardians, something he is supposed to do within 48 hours of any offense he witnesses.
Chapter 7 Summary: Record 7, An Eyelash—Taylor—Henbane and Lily of the Valley
The night after meeting I-330 in the Ancient House, D-503 has his first-ever dream, where he sees sap flowing from I-330’s yellow dress and the brass buddha. The next day, while at work on the Integral, he bumps into a Guardian, S-4711, but is unable to tell him what happened with I-330. Later in the afternoon, he sees O-90 who expresses her distaste when he tells her that he is on his way to report to the Guardians. D-503 does not go to the Guardians in the end. He uses the pretext of feeling ill and visits the Medical Bureau instead.
Chapter 8 Summary: Record 8, An Irrational Root—R-13—The Triangle
The next afternoon, D-503 stands before the Bureau of Guardians and equivocates about going in. R-13, an old school friend and state poet, who has also been chosen by and sexually assigned to O-90 approaches him. D-503 goes to R-13’s flat to talk before R-13 and O-90 have their sexual time together. While talking to R-13 in his flat about his poem for an upcoming execution, D-503 senses that something connects R-13 and I-330.
Chapter 9 Summary: Record 9, Liturgy—Iambus—The Cast-Iron Hand
The next day D-503 goes with thousands of others to a giant glass tube to watch the execution of a man who violated the One State’s rules. In honor of this event, R-13 reads a poem that reveals the condemned man’s crime was writing “sacrilegious verses” (17) about the Benefactor. The Benefactor is the leader of the One State, a superhuman “metallic figure” (17) with huge hands. The Benefactor, on top of the cube, completes the execution by pulling the lever on a machine which reduces the condemned man to a pool of water.
Chapter 10 Summary: Record 10, A Letter—A Membrane—Hairy I
The day after, D-503 remarks on the execution’s purifying effects. However, at noon he receives a notification that I-330 has been assigned as his sexual partner and to meet her that evening. When D-503 arrives at I-330’s flat she tells D-503 that she knows that he did not go to the Guardians about her. She then smokes and drinks alcohol in front of him, two prohibited activities. She kisses D-503 and forces him to drink the alcohol that is in her mouth. The drink causes a crisis in D-503 who declares that he wants I-330 for himself and imagines another animalistic version of himself tearing I-330’s dress and biting her. D-503 leaves I-330’s flat just before 10:30 p.m. when it is illegal to still be out, uncertain of who he is or of what is happening to him.
Chapters 1-10 Analysis
Like Winston in George Orwell’s 1884, D-503 lives in an authoritarian society that recently underwent the crisis of war. Also, like Winston, D-503, the protagonist, keeps a journal. Unlike Winston, D-503 does not start his journal to critique the existing state but to celebrate and support it. D-503’s goal in writing about the “perfect life” (1) under the One State is to serve his government and convince other states to emulate them. D-503 is sincerely committed to this goal. The One State’s control over citizens stems from how it contrasts current reality with the past and with other “non-perfect” civilizations. D-503 contributes to this control as he crafts the narrative in his journal. He compares the ordered, harmonious life in the One State to a picture of a 20th-century avenue that he recalls. He says there was a “many-colored confusion of men, wheels, animals, billboards, trees, colors, and birds” (3). Like the “crazy loudness of colors and forms” (11) found in the Ancient House, the picture is a visual representation of the disordered, irrational character of previous states. Namely, it is a visual representation of a state of strife, of “thousands of microscopic States, fighting eternal wars” (11). The One State’s use of personal written testimony in its master plan illuminates the theme of The Conformist and Subversive Potential of Writing. Like other writers faced with authoritarian reality, Zamyatin chose the vehicle of fiction to depict his fears. His art inverts reality in the novel’s beginning: His protagonist is conformist, but in creating this protagonist, Zamyatin’s government would consider him subversive.
For D-503, the picture manifests chaos through past music and sexual mores. With the former, he contrasts the “perfect regularity” (7) of contemporary music to the “wild, convulsive” music played by I-330 that imitates earlier music. Meanwhile, with sex, this past chaos is seen in the fact that the Ancients “left sexual life absolutely without control… and like beasts blindly gave birth to children” (5). The status quo views within the narrative indicate How Industrial Modernity Alienates Humans from Nature and Themselves. D-503 muses that past sex was left to individual whim and gave rise to endless, often bloody, jealousies and conflicts, as well as unwanted or neglected offspring. In contrast, as D-503 writes, sex “has been converted in our time into a harmonious, agreeable and useful function of the organism” (8). State regulation by an applications system of who sleeps with whom and how often means that sex is integrated with an optimally healthy, balanced life. In addition, there is less reason for envy now, when all have access to sex, and when citizens can have multiple sexual partners.
Despite the logical basis of the structure of his society, doubts creep into D-503’s thoughts. The focus on past epochs which allows D-503 to highlight the One State’s perfection also introduces troubling uncertainty into his world. His response to the “ancient” piano piece played by I-330 illustrates his first uncertainty. Although D-530 dismisses this music as inferior, he is nevertheless moved by the “wild sunshine, rushing and burning, tearing everything to pieces” (6) it evokes. With the Ancient House, he dismisses the rooms as lacking form or reason but the objects and artifacts, which are “impossible to reduce to any clear equation,” intrigue him (11).
Despite D-503’s commitment to the state’s philosophy, something vital and untamed in the past house and music attracts him. This intangible quality cannot be reduced to the One State’s transparent and rational categories. D-503’s dream indicates that he senses what he is missing and reveals to him how he desires it. After going to the Ancient House with I-330, D-503 experiences his first dream where he sees “drops of sap” (13) flowing from the brass Buddha and “from the large bed… and soon from myself” (13). In this way, the dream signifies the disintegration or subversion of D-503’s categories for understanding the natural world. The hard distinctions between reason and unreason, the wild and domesticated, and where D-503 exists concerning these, begin to melt during his dream. A hidden life force or “sap” unites these former binaries, both revealing D-503’s unspoken desires and exacerbating them.
The theme of The Religious Character of State Collectivism first appears in the contrasting and powerful spirituality I-330 offers. The past, and the dream it provokes, are alone not enough to foment D-503’s dissent. However, his encounter with I-330 is a spiritual awakening. Her use of music mirrors the effects of music in liturgy. She administers a communion when she delivers alcohol from her body to D-503’s. The communion is sexually symbolic, but not of the state-sanctioned, regimented, approved sex. I-330 succeeds in pushing D-503 to transgressive thought and action because she eroticizes and spiritualizes the past by connecting it to human nature, which awakens in D-503’s dream.
I-330 wears a “dress of the ancient time, a black dress closely fitting the body” during the lecture (6). In the Ancient House she changes into another revealing twentieth-century outfit, “a saffron-yellow dress of an ancient style” (20). As D-503 says, this attire “was a thousand times worse than if she had not been dressed at all” (20). The dresses represent the eroticism of a past where attitudes around sex were not transparent, revealed, or logical. In suggesting sexuality but also placing it out of reach, I-330 and her clothes evoke a time when sex was mysterious and alluring and its free practice taboo. This contrasts starkly with a present where sex is banal because it is made merely functional. The erotic charging of the past symbolizes and cements D-503’s desire for something different from the existing order. It signifies a desire for, as he says of I-330, something “from the wild ancient land of dreams” (19) which the One State’s cult of science and reason can never satisfy.
