This is the first of what will become a series of seminar recaps – a fragment-archive of the conversations we have in class. On Wednesday we started to think – on a very general, meta scale – about Zamyatin’s We :
– a brief political/historical context; Zamyatin was writing in light of the Russian Revolutions, WWI. Its critical position on Communism caused the book to banned from publication in Russia, and eventually Zamyatin was himself forced to emigrate (1931), settles in Paris.
– questions of translation, re-translation: while the novel was completed c. 1921, it was was initially published in english, (new york, 1924), and made a circuitous trajectory through a range of translations before finally attaining Russian publication in the late 80’s. The penguin intro chronicles failed attempts made at posing the novel as originally a Czech work, in order that (an erroneous) Russian translation of this copy be published in Zamyatin’s homeland.
– there were several English translations in class, we noticed initial differences in chapter headings; will be interesting to further explore the ways in which these versions differ
– the employment and characterization of numbers and letters – textual and numeric symbols become associated with facets such as gender and personality, in a way a grafting of these symbols onto the human body; questions of physicality and textuality.
– Zamyatin the engineer, the naval architect; beginning to think about the novel as a kind of construction
– an intertwining of affect and rationality, the corruption or subversion of rationality by way of poetic distillations (ie: the list form of the chapter headings, the poetics of lists; an affront on the utilitarian)
– the city of glass; panopticonal associations; metaphorical values of transparency, reflection, distortion. Interesting here to explore political metaphors and implications of glass architecture; Foster’s re-modeling of the Reichstag, for example.
-and in a more regional context, glass architecture is one of Vancouver’s hallmarks; a city of reflections and refractions inclined to resemble any place but itself (the generic, cinematic city).
– glass walls, borders, boundaries: the position of Zamyatin as writer in exhile; his own reflections in a kind of abjection of his homeland (OneState as an OtherState, geopolitical orientalism)…something mentioned about the “geographic imaginary”