Introduction
Acknowledgments
PART ONE: DYSTOPIA WEST
1 What Is Justice? The Answers of Utopia, Tragedy, and Dystopia
2 Nineteenth-Century Precursors of the Dystopian Vision
3 The Dictator behind the Mask: Zamiatin?s We, Huxley?s Brave New World, and Orwell?s Nineteenth Eighty-four
4 Dictatorship without a Mask: Bradbury?s Fahrenheit, Vonnegut?s Player Piano, and Atwood?s The Handmaid?s
Tale
PART TWO: DYSTOPIA EAST
The Soviet Union 1920s?1950s
5 The Writer on Trial: Socialist Realism and the Exile of Speculative Fiction
6 The Dystopia of Revolutionary Justice: Serge?s Conquered City, Zazubrin?s ?The Chip,? and Rodionov?s Chocolate
7 The Legalization of Terror: Platonov?s The Foundation Pit, Ribakov?s Children of the Arbat, and Koestler?s Darkness at Noon
8 Terror in War, Terror in Peace: Grossman?s Life and Fate, Tertz Sinyavski?s The Trial Begins, and Daniel?s This Is Moscow Speaking
PART THREE DYSTOPIA EAST
The Soviet Bloc 1950s?1980s
9 Collective Paranoia: The Persecutor and the Persecuted: Andzrejewski, D?ry, Fuks, Hlasko, ?rk?ny, Vaculik, and Mrozek
10 Kafka?s Ghost: The Trial as Theatre: Klima?s The Castle, Karvas?s The Big Wig, and Havel?s Memorandum
11 From Terror to Entropy: The Downward Spiral: Konwicki?s A Minor Apocalypse, D?ry?s Mr G.A. in X, and Zinoviev?s The Radiant Future
12 Speculative Fiction Returns from Exile: Dystopian Vision with a Sneer: Voinovich?s Moscow 2042, Aksyonov?s The Island of Crimea, Dalos?s 1985, and Moldova?s Hitler in Hungary
13 Dystopia East and West: Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
Dystopian fiction is a post-Christian genre.
If the central drama of the age of faith was the conflict between salvation and damnation by deity, in our secular modern age this drama has been transposed to a conflict between humanity's salvation or damnation by society in the historical arena. In the modern scenario salvation is represented as a just society governed by worthy representatives chosen by an enlightened people; damnation, by an unjust society, a degraded mob ruled by a power-crazed elite. Works dealing with the former describe the heaven or earthly paradise of utopia; those dealing with the latter portray the dictatorship of a hell on earth, the "worst of all possible worlds" of dystopia.
Even a casual reading of such classics of dystopian fiction as Zamiatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World, or Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four will make it obvious that underlying this secular genre the concepts of heaven and hell are still clearly discernible. In fact, the post-Enlightenment author's vision of a collective hell for society is not that far removed from Dante's medieval dream-vision of Dis, the city of hell. As for the function of hell in the overall framework of The Divine Comedy, we should remember that the purpose of the narrator-protagonist's entire journey in hell is to serve him - and his readers - as a warning to avoid the sin that condemns the sinner to eternal damnation, and to pursue instead the ways up to heaven: Beatrice, who watches over Dante from above, sends to him Virgil, the voice of reason, to lead him out of the Forest of Error - the pain and confusion caused by his sinful state. Under Virgil's guidance the narrator-protagonist has the unparallelled privilege of travelling through the nine circles of hell unscathed in order to witness the endless suffering of all those who died as sinners. Beatrice makes Dante confront these horrors in order to warn him about the possible consequences of his own erring ways and thereby to encourage him not to end up in hell.
The strategies of Zamiatin, Huxley, and Orwell are also significantly the strategies of warning. As readers we are made to contemplate Zamiatin's One State, Huxley's World State, and Orwell's Oceania, each a hellscape from which the inhabitants can no longer return, so that we realize what the flaws of our own society may lead to for the next generations unless we try to eradicate these flaws today.
The correspondence between religious and secular concepts in dystopian fiction is still so strongly felt that, if we examine Nineteen Eighty-four closely as the prototype of the genre, twentieth-century dystopian fiction reveals the underlying structure of a morality play. Orwell's protagonist, a modern Everyman, struggles for his soul against a Bad Angel; he struggles for the dignity of the Spirit of Man against the dehumanizing forces of totalitarian dictatorship.
The parallel could be carried further. While the medieval morality play implies that the fate of the human soul will be decided at the Last Judgement, the modern dystopian narrative puts the protagonist on an ultimate trial where his fate will be decided in confrontation with the Bad Angel in his secular incarnation as the Grand Inquisitor, high priest of the state religion and God-like ruler of totalitarian dictatorship. Given the injustice endemic to the "bad place," this decision will invariably be in the negative: in Zamiatin's We, D-503 is sentenced to lobotomy; John Savage in Brave New World to madness brought on by loneliness and ostracism; Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-four to a transformation of the individual personality until it embraces all it abhors, a state worse than the effects of lobotomy. The sinister and irrevocable transformation of the protagonist represents the irrevocable damnation of his society. It is one of the most conspicuous features of the warning in these classics of dsytopian fiction that once we allow the totalitarian state to come to power, there will be no way back.
As for the origin of the term "dystopia," we find it of comparatively recent coinage. In his 1946 preface to Brave New World Huxley still refers to the bad place as a utopia, using the term he felt stood for any speculative structure taking us to the future. It was only in 1952 that J.Max Patrick 1 recommended the distinction between the good place as "eutopia" and its opposite, the bad place, as "dystopia."
In discussing a selection of Russian novels written since Stalin's death and critical of the Soviet regime's allegedly utopian purpose, Edith Clowes borrows Gary Morson's term of "meta-utopia" - that is, a work that is "positioned on the borders of the utopian tradition and yet mediates between a variety of utopian modes." To distinguish these books from what she sees as the far more limited scope of dystopian fiction, she argues that meta-utopia represents a "much greater challenge to current readers ? than dystopian novels do" because it "refers to a social consciousness involving social and cultural pluralism." By contrast, according to Clowes, dystopian novels advocate a "nostalgic revision of the past age" and "deconstruct utopian schemes, only to abandon the notion of a beneficial social imagination," thereby embodying a "nihilistic attitude toward both the present and the future, closing both off to a new imaginative possibility."2 But is her definition of dystopia valid if we examine it in the light of such classic examples of dystopian novels as Zamiatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World, and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four? And is the meta-utopia of Tertz's The Trial Begins or Daniel's This is Moscow Speaking, included among Clowes's examples, indeed all that different from the intentions, attitudes, and narrative strategies of these three classics of dystopian satire? This study will answer both questions in the negative.
As for a thematically more neutral definition of this "bad place," Lyman Sargent suggests that we look at dystopia as a social structure that is worse than the present social system. If, however, we listen to postmodern criticism, relying on thinkers like Foucault, for example, any society functioning at the present time (or possibly at any other time as well) could be regarded as such a "bad place." Although I believe that the postmodern critic's overly broad use of the notion of dystopia is counterproductive to a clear definition of what is unique about dystopian thought or dystopian fiction, I also believe that Professor Sargent's definition of dystopia as a system worse than our own probably does not cover all works with a dystopian impetus. In fact, if we take a look at works of political criticism produced in Eastern and Central Europe commenting on the injustice rampant in the writer's own society during periods of dictatorship and terror, these works are still clearly expressive of the dystopian impulse, although they deal with the writer's own society "as is." In other words, there are historical phenomena that create societies that should be described as dystopic, societies where the literary imagination refuses to envisage a world worse than the existing world of reality. Therefore, before we are to arrive at a comprehensive delineation of the salient characteristics of dystopian fiction as a genre, maybe we should also define the characteristics of a society that is dystopic.
It has been said by Hungarian essayist B?la Hamvas that the modern age has been spent "under the aegis of the tension between Messianism and dictatorship." Throughout the nineteenth century the world awaited a secular Messiah to redress the ills created by the Industrial Revolution in a double incarnation: first as science, which was to create the means to end all poverty, and second as socialism, which was to end all injustice. By eagerly awaiting the fulfilment of these promises, the twentieth century allowed the rise of a false Messiah: state dictatorship.
It may not be unfair to speculate that the oscillation between the mask of the Messiah and the cruel face of an all-powerful Dictator behind the mask is what delineates the parameters of dystopian thought and creates the suspense in dystopian fiction of the protagonist's nightmare journey to "unmask" the secrets held by the "High Priest" of the political system. In Zamiatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World, and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four this nightmare journey ends invariably in the protagonist's trial, followed by retribution tantamount to his destruction or, even more horrifying, to his sinister transformation.
In the context of the Soviet experiment of building socialism, Koestler and Orwell were certainly not the first, although they were among the best-known thinkers in the 1940s who decided to show the real face of dictatorship behind the Messianic mask. This effort at "unmasking" was not well received by their confr?res, the leftist intellectuals in the West, whose virtually religious infatuation with the Soviet Union as the only country in the world that was building socialism started at the time of the 1917 revolution. For some this infatuation was sustained through Stalin's show trials in the 1930s and into the early 1950s; for many, probably right up to the violent overthrow of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, and for still others right up to the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks in 1968.
At these various junctures in history the leftist intelligentsia in the West was confronted with the disheartening fact that the Messianic promise of the age-old utopian dream of socialism as a cure for the clearly obvious pathologies of capitalism had merely led to new pathologies in the form of the virulent psychoses of totalitarian dictatorship.
What should these new pathologies be attributed to? Stalin's pathological personality? To the fact that the young Soviet Union had to struggle with potentially overwhelming external enemies? Or to the historical irony that made the Bolsheviks successors of an autocratic regime that had created a tempting precedent? Perhaps to the fact that Stalin's revolution (or counterrevolution) in 1929 gave rise to a ruthlessly self-serving new bureaucracy - a new ruling class? These are not the questions to ponder at this point. Maybe one is left frustrated discussing the flaws of socialism because, as Chesterton said of Christianity, it is something that has never been tried yet. Thus, in the case of Stalin's regime, one could argue that the slogans ostensibly drawing on Marx's theories of socialism were nothing but a camouflage for Russian nationalism and imperialism, or simply for Stalin's and his self-serving elite's thirst for power.
Other historians and political analysts, of course, concentrate on elements in Marxist theory that they see as conducive to the development and legitimization of a totalitarian regime. Some ponder whether we should not relate the terror and coercion of Stalinism to the intellectual coercion implied by Marx's notion of historical determinism. Others raise the question whether the Party's oppression of all opponents and its disregard for the universal principles of human justice are not the consequences of Marx's failure to provide a sufficient model for a political process of persuasion and for a juridical system based on respect for human rights. Marx did make the assumption that once the proletariat came to power and established socialism, the very notion of political and legal mechanisms that had been necessary to resolve conflicts created by the economic injustice inherent in a class society would become superfluous.
Be that as it may, in the field of history the shocking reversal between high utopian expectations and deep disillusionment with the Soviet attempt at socialism has been central to the nervous vacillation of the utopian-dystopian axis of our times, demonstrable not only in the more abstract realm of political thought but also in the internal and external politics of individual nations or entire power blocs.
In the realm of literature it has been a task worthy of the greatest of political satirists to comment on this reversal as having revealed the cruelty of dictatorship under the false Messiah's mask of hypocrisy, and to exhort the reader to see beyond the mask. At the same time it has also been a task awaiting the pen of the tragedian to express the emotional charge of the loss of faith and the disillusionment over what Camus called "the tragedy of our generation ? to have seen a false hope."