Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/5

Rh these phenomena involve great masses, large groups, enormous mobs. Despite the fact that there is hardly a corner in the world where the average man does not make the trite complaint, “What we need is leadership,” the world seems for a time, at least, to have lost its capacity to produce real leaders. For our great successes in mechanical civilization, our exceptional efforts in efficiency, tend to bring into play large masses rather than great individuals. What, under these conditions, is the lot of the creative personality? The tragedy of the independent spirit under present conditions is pointed out in a unique way in We. The problem of the creative individual versus the mob is not merely a Russian problem. It is as apparent in a Ford factory as under a Bolshevik dictatorship.

Of course, the sincere, honest, and frank treatment of this problem seems offensive to anyone who prefers to be a member of a mob or to keep this or that part of humanity in the state of a mob. That is why We could not be published in Russia, and will probably be disliked by those whose spiritual activities are reduced to the mechanical standards of a mechanical civilization which is devoid of original creative effort.

A few words should be said about the method by which Zamiatin tries to drive home his main ideas to the reader. It is the method of “laughter through tears,” to use an old expression of Gogol’s. It is the form that is dictated by a profound love for humanity, mixed with pity for and hatred of those factors which are the cause of the disindividualization of man today. It is the old emotion of ancient Catullus: “Odi et amo.” Zamiatin laughs in order to hide his tears; hence amusing as We may seem and really is, it barely conceals a profound human tragedy which is universal today.

The reader may be interested in knowing something about Zamiatin himself. Zamiatin does not like to talk about himself, and the translator does not think he has the right to tell more than to quote Zamiatin’s own answer to