ABSTRACT
The history of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We as a literary artefact mirrors some of the interactions of cultural and political history addressed within the novel. Zamyatin’s text engages with Hegelian and Kantian aesthetic theory as a means to make political points about post-Revolutionary Russia as well as the industrial capitalism of Western Europe. In this highly metafictional text, formal literary innovations and narrative techniques are used to form social and political commentary on topics such as diary writing, the new cinema, sexual desire, and labour relations. This chapter argues that Zamyatin’s repeated references to dialectics are a means of showing how political and aesthetic thought is imbricated in processes of material historical change.
