E.I. Zamyatin’s novel “We” and the scientific thought of the 20th century

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the synthesis of E.I. Zamyatin’s creative method: his deep familiarity with the advanced ideas of the natural and humanitarian sciences of the early 20th century and their rethinking in artistic form. The scope of interests of Zamyatin the writer is considered; among the areas of natural and humanitarian knowledge, towards which Zamyatin drifted, were physics (thermodynamics with the most important, key concepts of energy and entropy), sociology (taylorism, Bogdanov’s tectology), psychology (jungianism), medicine and psychiatry (autism, essentially described by Zamyatin before doctors), biopoetics (literary darwinism), historiosophy (the concepts of entropy, revolution, spiral of history), linguistics (construction of the «language» of the future, the author’s interest in skaz and stylization). In this case, both extensive critical and literary material and Zamyatin’s own journalism are used as illustrative material. The results of the study allow us to speak of the novel “We” as an organic fusion of artistic thought and natural-scientific ideas. Zamyatin, as a creator, an artist, processes concepts that come from physics, biology, medicine, sociology, psychology, etc., combines them with the mythologemes of the era (categories of the Apollonian and Dionysian – rational and irrational, evangelical and Old Testament, etc.) and transforms them in his artistic model of the world into capacious symbols and metaphors that are naturally woven into the fabric of the narrative.