45 pages 1 hour read

Yevgeny Zamyatin

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Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1921

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Chapters 11-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 11 Summary: Record 11, No, I Can’t; Let It Be Without Headings!

The following evening, R-13 arrives at D-503’s flat. D-503 praises R-13 for his poem the previous day about the execution. However, R-13 says that he is sick of talking about that poem, and instead wants to discuss a new poem that he wrote for the Integral’s launch. This new poem is about the “ancient legend of paradise” (22) of Adam and Eve, man’s fall into unhappiness by choosing freedom, and the reclamation of his happiness through the un-freedom of the One State. R-13 then reveals that he knows that D-503 has seen I-330. He asks D-503 if he still wants to carry on seeing O-90 and D-503 becomes irrationally angry and jealous. In his journaling of the event, D-503 describes how his other, “wild, hairy” (23) self confronted R-13. D-503 later apologizes to R-13 as he leaves but this incident leaves him with a sense that the triangle between R-13, O-90, and himself is irrevocably fractured.

Chapter 12 Summary: Record 12, The Delimitation of the Infinite—Angel—Meditations on Poetry

The next day, D-503, following a dreamless sleep, starts to believe that his anxiety and feelings of strangeness on the preceding days were the result of an illness from which he will recover.