The Dystopian Universe in E. I. Zamyatin’s Novel “We”: the Coexistence of Urban and Rural Spaces in the Context of Axiological Categories
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The article is devoted to the semiotic analysis of modern city-state spaces and an archaic pastoral area that form the author’s imaginary world in E. I. Zamyatin’s dystopia “We”, taking into account such axiological categories as “happiness” and “freedom”. The paper aims to analyze the author’s choice of combinations of signs modeling the spaces of a dystopian city and countryside separated by a Green Wall in paradigmatic and syntagmatic dimensions, the ontological relations of contradiction (city – village; happiness – freedom) and negation (city – freedom; village – happiness). The semiotic rectangle model proposed by A. J. Greimas is used as a research method. It is established that the relations between the studied spaces generate a conceptual field for the unfolding of the narrative, implicate information about the historical moment of the dystopia text creation. The article provides a semiotic interpretation of the author’s implications of the lexeme “glass”, which underlies the linguistic embodiment of the dystopian urban space and symbolizes the stability of urban isolation and the fragility of freedom and happiness of the state citizens. It is revealed that the pastoral space, on the contrary, symbolizes unbridled freedom and the happiness of gaining individuality. The author analyzes the mental transformation of the narrator who got behind the Green Wall, as a result of which his axiological ideas about the city and the countryside are radically – but temporarily – inverted. Taking into account the semiotic characteristics of urban and rural spaces, the authors summarize the arguments of the dystopian narrative as follows: rational order is based on the violent suppression of personality and its desires. The expression of these individual desires means the loss of a sense of security generated by a sense of uncomplaining integration into a stable, organic society. It is concluded that in D-503’s existential crisis, as well as in the anarchic sentiments that arose in the dystopian city after the destruction of the Green Wall (the border between the city and the countryside), there is nothing more than the reconstruction of this wall, a condition that bears a striking resemblance to the objective historical situation in which he lived and created by E. I. Zamyatin.
Authors: Igor A. Kudryashov, Alla B. Didenko
Institution: Southern Federal University
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4414561906
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