A fable from Zamyatin’s We:
Record Thirty-four:
Keywords: The Released, A Sunny Night, Radio Valkyrie
The Three Released – a story that every schoolchild knows. It’s a story about three ciphers who, for the sake of experiment, were released from work for a month: to do what they wanted to do and go where they wanted to go.* These unlucky types loitered around the place they usually worked and peeped inside with hungry eyes. They stood in plazas for hours at a time; they performed the very movements that were appointed to that hour of the day as needed by their organism: they sawed and planed the air, they rattled invisible hammers, thumping on invisible blocks. And, finally, on the tenth day, they couldn’t bear it anymore: linking arms, they walked into the water and to the sound the March, they plunged deeper and deeper, until the water ended their torment…
* This was long ago, back in the third century after the Table.
