Russian and East European Science Fiction

I liked Hilary’s comment about the possibility of time travel and time distortion in the novel, this post builds off of her idea a little bit and some other things mentioned in class and on this blog.
Although it isn’t explicitly stated in the novel, it seems to me that there is certainly an element of time travel or at least time distortion in the story that serves to emphasize D-503’s newfound capacity for self-reflection and newly developed soul. It makes sense that his soul and all of his constant thinking and internal dialogue would take away from the fluidity of time in the story, having a soul would inherently cause D to lose himself in thought (especially since he is new to a soul) much like people do in real life. And as a result all of the ellipses and incomplete thoughts in the story make sense; D was thinking to himself about something, loses track of the events taking place in real life and the time that has passed and eventually resurfaces at a new portion of the story. I can’t remember the chapter where this happens but there is a moment in the story where D is contemplating his inability to sleep at night and as he falls asleep in the early morning he has a dream where he looks into this shining reflection from the mirror and sees I-330 and eventually goes to her and obvious things happen (followed by a bunch of ….). During the entire subconscious moment that he is going through the reader doesn’t understand the time frame and D himself doesn’t understand what is going on he only knows his unquestionable desire for I-330 and thus time is not an element in the chapter. Similarly, many of the events that occur in the Ancient House have a sense of timelessness and distortion with this golden light washing over everything D-503 experiences. To me this golden light as well as other surreal observation that D-503 goes through during his “sickness” also reflect his timeless and distorted subconscious prevailing of his former sense of reality.
Also I want to mention the significance of the Integral and its extraterrestrial capacity as a machine that will teach primitive civilizations how to become a seemingly perfect and mechanical society like the One State. Throughout the book D refers to the reader as a member of a society that has not yet reached the perceived perfection of the One State. But it seems that as the story unfolds D-503 refers to the integral as a mechanism to teach a civilization living in the past of the perfection humanity has seemingly discovered in the future, this always led me to believe that the integral has some time traveling functionality. It reminds me of Planet of Apes in a way, in the beginning of the original planet of the apes the astronauts are unaware that they have landed on Earth only to realize later that they has simply gone into space and travelled through time to arrive on earth thousands of years in the future. Maybe Zamyatin had some sort of idea about the time bending effects of space travel? Obviously they weren’t derived from Planet of the Apes which came after this book, but maybe Zamyatin speculated. Nowadays physicists like Michio Kaku are constantly speculating the existence and possibility of time travel as the manipulation of the space time continuum, maybe Zamyatin did the same. Additionally, an Integral is mathematical operation that takes the area under a curve, which can also be thought of as the sum of the values of a function over a given interval, in this case the Integral D-503 has built is meant to be the sum of all human developments over the history of mankind. It would makes sense that if the Integral could time travel they would want to escape the interval of time for which they can account for (i.e. Integrate) and send humanities collective knowledge to another time either past or future.

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