Shaping of the genre canon of the dystopian novel in the novel by E. I. Zamyatin “We” against the background of the historical and literary quest of the era and the internal laws of the evolution of the novel form

In modern literary criticism, no one doubts the special role of the novel by E. I. Zamyatin “We” in the dystopian literary tradition. Among the illustrative studies on the topic, we mention S. S. Romanov, who determines why the appearance of the novel “We” “marked a new stage in the development of anti-utopianism, and its author was recognized as the first classic of the genre.”This article proposes to consider the named work not only in the aspect of its direct historical and literary factuality, but to study the hidden patterns of the literary process and the mechanisms of the evolution of genre forms that have developed at the junction of the novel form and the (anti) utopian model of reality. As follows from the results of the study, the key role in these processes of the novel by E.I. Zamyatin’s “We” is determined precisely by the fact that there is a connection and complete merging of the utopian and dystopian concepts with the novel form and the formation of the genre canon of the dystopian novel. At the same time, previous significant appeals to the utopian or dystopian (by F. M. Dostoevsky, H. Wells or in Russian religious philosophy at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries) do not create such a special genre subtype of the novel, and subsequent appeals to the problem by A. P. Platonov, O. Huxley, J. Orwell, R. Bradbury and others directly or indirectly rely on Zamyatin’s canon of form.

utopia, dystopia, novel, genre canon