Threatening a Utopian World: The Post-Romantic Aesthetics of the “Melusine” in Zamyatin’s We

Auteurs-es

  • Alessandra Carbone University of Siena

DOI :

https://doi.org/10.26512/vis.v18i2.29229

Mots-clés :

Zamyatin, we, post-romantic, Modern aesthetics, femme fatale, Zamyatin and Blok, Melusine

Résumé

This work analyses the famous anti-utopian novel "My" ("We", in English) by Evgenij Zamyatin, written in Russian in 1920 and published for the first time in English in the United States in 1924. The novel was banned in the Soviet Union and published in the original language only in 1988. Writing a review about it George Orwell was one of the first commentators to recognize its innovative scope and crucial socio-political meaning, calling it «a study of the Machine, the genie that man has thoughtlessly let out of its bottle and cannot be put back again» (Orwell, 1946). We will examine how the author succeeds to construct an evident contrast between the Utopia of the new, exaggeratedly futuristic world of the machines  in the "Single State" of the imaginary XXVI century - where the novel is set and where the weather is always sunny, - and the cultural and aesthetic references to the Modernism of the actual early XX century (mainly ”“ to post-romantic and pre-revolutionary Russia), that seem here to be loaded with a strong subversive potential against the utopian and collectivistic State of “We”.

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Références

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Publié-e

2020-01-17

Comment citer

Carbone, A. (2020). Threatening a Utopian World: The Post-Romantic Aesthetics of the “Melusine” in Zamyatin’s We. Revista VIS: Revista Do Programa De Pós-Graduação Em Artes Visuais, 18(2), 19–35. https://doi.org/10.26512/vis.v18i2.29229

Numéro

Rubrique

Imagem e Utopia