Review
"Engaging, provocative in the best sense, Cooke's is an excellent book." --George Gutsche, University of Arizona
"The virtuoso merging of sociobiological ideas and standard critical techniques is an important vindication for the whole idea of a sociobiological literary criticism. This is a highly accomplished piece of literary scholarship. It will long stand as a landmark." --Joseph Carroll, University of Missouri
From the Back Cover
The first comprehensive study of one of the most important 20th-century Russian novels, this book is also the first to apply the perspective of biopoetics to any Russian masterwork. As such, Human Nature in Utopia offers a valuable new approach to Zamyatin's We even as it explores the workings of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology in the conception, reception, and enduring interest of such fictional-especially utopian and dystopian--works.
A classic of both Russian literature and science fiction and a model for dystopian novels such as Brave New World and 1984, Evgenii Zamyatin's 1921 masterpiece depicts a world so "perfected" by social engineering as to be unfit for human habitation. More than a prescient portrayal of the incipient Soviet state (for which it became the first novel banned in the USSR), We exposes human universals central to social construction in general. Reading the novel as a deeply complex cross-matrix of psychological forces, an engine of narrative force and artistic interest, Brett Cooke identifies a number of the many, diverse ways in which the text reveals and reaches out to human nature. His theoretical framework allows him to offer compelling insights into the creation of the novel, its style, content, and genre, and its longlived fascination for readers. Along the way, Cooke draws numerous comparisons with previous utopian and dystopian literature, both Russian and non-Russian; and he makes instructive observations on contemporary and historical culture, on the craft of fiction, on narrative and narrators, and on the psychology of characters. His work, which draws on a rich array of sources-not just in Russian and utopian literature, but also in sociobiology, evolutionary biology, philosophy, psychology, and history of science-is more than a powerful new reading of We. It is a reading of the imperatives and constraints of human nature made visible in the dystopian novel.
A classic of both Russian literature and science fiction and a model for dystopian novels such as Brave New World and 1984, Evgenii Zamyatin's 1921 masterpiece depicts a world so "perfected" by social engineering as to be unfit for human habitation. More than a prescient portrayal of the incipient Soviet state (for which it became the first novel banned in the USSR), We exposes human universals central to social construction in general. Reading the novel as a deeply complex cross-matrix of psychological forces, an engine of narrative force and artistic interest, Brett Cooke identifies a number of the many, diverse ways in which the text reveals and reaches out to human nature. His theoretical framework allows him to offer compelling insights into the creation of the novel, its style, content, and genre, and its longlived fascination for readers. Along the way, Cooke draws numerous comparisons with previous utopian and dystopian literature, both Russian and non-Russian; and he makes instructive observations on contemporary and historical culture, on the craft of fiction, on narrative and narrators, and on the psychology of characters. His work, which draws on a rich array of sources-not just in Russian and utopian literature, but also in sociobiology, evolutionary biology, philosophy, psychology, and history of science-is more than a powerful new reading of We. It is a reading of the imperatives and constraints of human nature made visible in the dystopian novel.
