Paradox And Tragedy

The famous anti-utopian novel We, which was written by Zamyatin, the famous writer in Russian Silver Ages, is the object investigated of this thesis. The paper analyzed the constitution, operation, ethics and the paradox of subsistence in the future world in the novel, and revealed some super-ideological considerations and forecast for the human society by Zamyatin.First, the constitution of the society and the goverment in the Only State are analyzed and compared with 1984 and Brave New World, and I analyzed the operation of the Only State in four aspects: production, distribution, political system and law. So we can discover some basic exterior features, such as the annihilation of the imparity, average ration system, direct vote by all of the people, and the essence of autarchy and totalitarianism which were concealed by the exterior, then we can sum up the morals and the measures of value in the Only State.It has been proved in the beginning of the second part that the Only State is an objectizational world by the personalism of the famous Russian philosopher БЕРДЯЕВ and the viewpoints in the book Escape from Freedom by the eminent American scholar Erich Fromm. Then the paper analyzed the four morals and the measures of value one by one: the negation of freedom, the negation of individual, absolute rationalism, absolute equality, and the paradox which can not be overcome by themselves. This was the roots of the numbers' tragedy.In the third part, I analyzed Zamyatin's consciousness and some super-ideological considerations and forecast in the novel: 1.The Universal Messiah, a kind of compelling salvation which always personated as "for freedom" > "for felicity" > "for national security";2.The dissimilation of human being, the people must be trained and work like machines;3. totalitarianism and personality cult;4.Entropyand anti-entropy, including Zamyatin's thoughts------fighting ossification andendless revolution. These thoughts were looked upon as "heresy" because of the ideological parochialism and the short sight of the age and the society, it was the cause of Zamyatin's personal tragedy.The fourth part mostly discussed the significance of We in the history of literature. It opposed some trends of thought in literature and society since the October Revolution in Russian Silver Ages, including fighting for the literary hegemony; and in Russian literature of twentieth-century, it foreshowed that the repenting literature mode died out of the Russia, which would be superseded by the socialism realism and the hero literature mode in the days of Stalin; in world literature of twentieth-century, it was the beginning of the twentieth-century anti-utopian novel. The publishing time of We was the earliest and it's accomplishment was the highest.It is not only in the Only State in the novel that the paradox exists and the numbers' tragedy did not have no realistic roots. Also it is not a personal tragedy to Zamyatin or many other writers in the Silver Age, the Silver Age had the same fate, they were all the tragedies in the age and the social environment.