L'ingegner Zamjatin e la rivolta della fantasia

Abstract

Evgenii Zamiatin worked as an engineer while pursuing his literary career; in the eyes of his contemporaries, this was one relevant trait of his image. His masterpiece, the novel “We”, however, depicts a deeply pessimistic picture of an over-rational future society. This depiction contains, moreover, a number of attributes that can be traced back to Zamiatin's satirical picture of England in his novella “The Islanders”. Was this meant to be a warning against the dangers of technology, or against the developments of the bolshevik westernizing ideology? Was this engineer an enemy of rational thinking? The language of mathematics plays a relevant role in the novel's figural system; maybe, part of this mathematical discourse can be taken at face value. In his essays, Zamiatin repeatedly pointed as Lobachevskii and Einstein as symbols of the new way of seen the world, which demands a new kind of literary realism. His critique of rationalism, consequently, can be interpreted as the critique of an obsolete, over-simplified rationalism.