(361 words) The semantic core of Zamyatin’s dystopian novel “We” is the theme of love. The protagonist - the engineer D-503 - spiritually and carnally belongs to the system of the One State, and only a bright feeling briefly opens his eyes to the squalor of this world order.
Zamyatin masterfully observes one detail - the hero’s hairy hands: “I can’t stand it when they look at my hands: everything is in my hair, shaggy - some kind of ridiculous atavism.” The author three times touches on this motive in the novel. D-503 despises this outer trait in himself, comparing his hands with monkey paws. The secret of the hero’s charm (after all, women have a special attraction for him) is revealed by I-330: “- Your hand ... After all, you don’t know - and few know that women from here, from the city, happened to love those. And you probably have a few drops of sunny, forest blood ... ” Thus, the external detail conveys the deep nature of the hero. It becomes clear why the D-503 speaks with such hatred about its own hands: this is what makes it related to the world beyond the Green Wall. But D-503 is so tuned internally under the rules of the One State that the feeling of awakening his own soul scares him. In the space of glass houses, where love is limited to copulation on pink coupons, the existence of anything real, especially intimate feelings, is impossible. Therefore, such an artistic detail as an old abandoned house left over from previous people is important. It is there that D-503 and I-330 come together. This monument of the past is opposed to the enclosed spaces of the United State.
I-330 fills the hero’s mind with a delicate, fragrant feeling. Love here acts as a revitalizing energy. Concentrated sensory flow absorbs the D-503, erasing all the old mind settings. And rationality immediately breaks through sensuality: "We love - only such a sterile, impeccable sky." But if you pay attention to the metaphorical character of the hero’s language, you get the feeling that all these thoughts come to his mind as if out of habit, in fact, the mechanism is started, and the natural savagery, sensuality gradually capture his whole being. But the fear of not being like everyone else makes the D-503 come to its senses and return to the previous order of things.
Love in the novel "We" becomes a driving force. It makes the hero evolve from a rational citizen of the One State to a sensual, loving creature, discovering in himself the wildness, naturalness, passion of the human principle. However, love is not sovereign, and in a world where people are not able to feel the truth, it loses its rights. The story of D-503 is a tragedy of a person who is locked up in rational solitude from the fear of being real, and therefore another.
