Russian Dystopia Some Dystopias of Essay

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Envy

In a somewhat more imaginative work, Yury Olesha explores more extreme actions and motives for rebellion against the new regime. His 1927 novel Envy is at once a critique of the lack of individuality and emotion in Soviet Russia and a lamentation for the failures of the human spirit in the face of the large Communist machine. Again, it is expressly and simply difference that leads to the primary conflict in this novel and the ultimate failure of the hoped-for-utopia, at least in the minds and lives of some. Kavalerov, the hero of the novel, at one point muses, "If I were a child…how many poetical, magical fabrications would flow out of my childish imagination…I'm a grown up now, and now I grasp only the general outline" (Olesha 1927, pp. 341). This can be seen as a comment on the Soviet way of making all minds the same, where individual imaginations are quashed under shared and generalized ideals.

We

In 1921, Yevgeny Zamyatin completed his hugely forward thinking novel We, which was similar to and several decades ahead of Brave New World and 1984. Difference is quite explicitly addressed and attacked by the government in this novel; all human beings are assigned letter-number combinations instead of names, and the glass-encased way of life allows for constant monitoring by the police and other citizens. Zamyatin seems to see some hope in this situation, however; just as difference is untenable in the Soviet system, the system -- in literature and in life -- was untenable in the face of difference.

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Heart of a Dog

The more recent and somewhat backward-looking film Heart of a Dog, directed by Vladimir Bortko and based on a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, takes another look at a similar issue, with the direct Soviet influence more a background feature of the work. The film's protagonist attempts to create a new human being by implanting certain human parts in a dog, but the creation has all of the man's worst qualities -- it is impossible to create a fully obedient and trainable man, is one major implication of the film. Again, this can be seen as boiling down to the issue of individualistic difference. There is simply no way to break down the human spirit, will, or mind in a way that will allow for the creation of a fully equal and altruistic society; man by his very nature has the capacity for selfish desire, laziness, passion, jealousy, and many other qualities -- including the simple capacity to develop different ideas -- that by definition bar the emergence of a collective utopia.

Conclusion

The most successful utopia's -- or the least dystopic dystopias, perhaps -- that are seen in the above-described works are those that exert the most overt and extreme control over society. It is only through the true and complete eradication of difference that a totalitarian regime could actually produce a utopia (according to a very select definition of "utopia"). This eradication could never….....

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