SOURCE: Galtseva, Renata, and Irina Rodnyanskaya. “The Obstacle: The Human Being, or the Twentieth Century in the Mirror of Dystopia.” South Atlantic Quarterly 90, no. 2 (spring 1991): 293-322.

In the following essay, Galtseva and Rodnyanskaya discuss the role of the human being in the works of several modern dystopian authors, arguing that the individual always retains inner freedom even in the most regimented futuristic societies.

… one should not become so stupefied as to become used to everything.

—Franz Kafka, The Castle

The landscape after the battle. … When it finally arrives, the long-awaited has a tendency to disappoint. Already printed in our journals are Zamiatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World, Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading, Kafka's The Castle, Orwell's Animal Farm, as well as his 1984, which has entered our cultural vernacular. These are books that were used as monsters to frighten children for an entire half century. But the children who...