Free Thinking 2013 - Zamyatin's We
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 30 October 2013
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Yevgeny Zamyatin's experiences in the Tyne shipyards fed into his dystopian fable "We", which was published in 1919. It depicts a city of glass where citizens are spied upon. Fans of the book have included George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Wolfe and it increasingly resonates with today's concerns about surveillance techniques. Matthew Sweet and an audience at The Free Thinking Festival from Sage Gateshead discuss the novel with poet Sean O'Brien, columnist David Aaronovitch and Radio 3 New Generation Thinker Sarah Dillon. Recorded on Sunday 27 October 2013.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.4 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids |
| 0:25.5 | the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.9 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.1 | This is a special download from the BBC Free Thinking Festival. |
| 0:35.9 | For more information and our terms of use, go to |
| 0:38.3 | BBC.co.uk.com.com. Radio 3. Hello and welcome to free thinking. Free thinking. Sounds terrific, |
| 0:45.9 | doesn't it. Cunjures up bright, clear images of the air and the sky and the clouds. We can see them |
| 0:51.9 | now from inside Sage Gateshead, a great glass chamber on the banks |
| 0:56.5 | at the time, into which it's quite possible to gaze from the other side of the water. Its transparency |
| 1:02.1 | is part of its appeal. It's open, it's clear, it's free. This program, however, will explore |
| 1:09.2 | a world in which transparency is an instrument of tyranny, |
| 1:13.0 | a surveillance state, a state with no privacy, a state in which the population lives in glass houses. |
| 1:20.2 | It's a world built by Evgeny Zamyatin, the only significant Russian novelist ever to have been employed building icebreakers in the Swan |
| 1:28.2 | Hunter Yard. It's called Wee, and though he wrote it while thinking of the social mechanisms of Lenin's |
| 1:34.4 | Soviet Union, Zamiyatin's future haunts our present preoccupations, with the CCTV cameras on our |
| 1:41.1 | streets, with what the whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed about the |
| 1:45.3 | gargantuan scale of American state intelligence gathering, and with the way that voluntarily, |
| 1:51.0 | without the involvement of spies, we seem more keen than ever before to allow our lives |
| 1:56.3 | to be gazed upon or broadcast. Are we us? Are we them? Well, here with me are three who will, |
| 2:04.2 | for the next 45 minutes, keep nothing to themselves. They are the author and times columnist |
| 2:09.1 | David O'Ronovich, the poet and playwright Sean O'Brien, winner of the T.S. Eliot and the |
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