Human Nature in Utopia Zamyatin’s We
Anticipating some Soviet Union developments, Evgenii Zamyatsin's We (1920) is a futuristic dystopic novel in which D-503, builder of the first rocket ship, extols the glories of the Single State and discovers another way of life beyond his highly controlled society. From the newer field of biopoetics, which applies evolutionary psychology to art instead of emphasizing the social construction of human behavior and consciousness, Cooke (Texas A&M U.) explores themes in the novel including workforce mechanization, the symbolic roles of food-sharing, eugenics, and writing as subversion. Comparisons are made with other dystopian literature (e.g. Brave New World ), and novels by Russian authors including Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy.
Brett Cooke
is Professor of Russian (русистики) at Texas A&M University, recognized as a 'world Slavistics star' by Литературная газета in 2013. Author of Pushkin and the Creative Process, (University Press of Florida, 1998), Human Nature in Utopia: Zamyatin's We (Northwestern University Press, 2002), and Tolstoy’s Family Prototypes in War and Peace (Academic Studies Press, 2020). As one of the founders of evolutionary criticism, he also edited collections, Sociobiology and the Arts (Rodopi, 1999), The Fantastic Other (Rodopi, 1998), Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts (ICUS, 1999), Critical Issues: War and Peace (Salem, 2014), and Evolution and Popular Narrative (Brill 2019), as well as special issues: Literary Biopoetics in Interdisciplinary Literary Studies (2001), “Zamiatin’s We” in Canadian-American Slavic Studies (2011), and “Applied Evolutionary Criticism” in Style (2012). He has published many articles on Russian literature—especially the development of subjectivity—as well as Western art and science fiction. Presently he is completing a Darwinian study of opera.
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