How were these expressed in the original Russian of Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We"? [closed]

Question

Warning: Potential Spoilers of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We!

My book club recently finished reading an English translation of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, originally published in 1924 in Russian. We don't know any Russian (even its alphabet), but we were very curious how certain elements were expressed in the original. We'd be so grateful if someone, whether familiar with the novel or not, could describe the translation of these elements for us, the best they can. I imagine the full Russian text should be easy to find, somewhere online.

Since this is a fairly involved question, I'll upvote answers to any one of the below. Thanks on behalf of all of us!

1. In the fourth paragraph of chapter ("Record") 36, the translation reads

   Only when He had stopped talking did I regain consciousness again and I saw: the hand moved ahundredton-ly, slowly crawling, a finger was fixing toward me.

   I love this invented word, ahundredton-ly. What was it in Russian? If also an invented word, does it sound similarly strange as the English word here? Or is there no strangeness at all in Russian, and the translator added his / her own zest?

2. In chapter ("Record") 8, the English translation repeatedly mentions the "Irrational Root," i.e. what we in America typically call the imaginary root. My hypothesis is that either Zamyatin or the translator intentionally departed from mathematical correctness to use the word "Irrational" in contrast to rationality. What Russian word is used, and is it the same word used to describe the square root of -1 (imaginary)? Or the square root of 2 (irrational).

3. In the English translation, the characters names appear to be consonants for men, vowels for women. How was this done in the Russian alphabet? (I'll give brief descriptions of each character to aid matching them up in the Russian text.) We especially wondered if there was any significance to the letter "I" and "U," given the book is called "We"; we imagine Russian pronouns would work too differently for this to have been intended; or did Zamyatin do something entirely different yet symbolic in his original?

   • D-503: Narrator and main character.
   • R-13: D-503's friend; suggested to be black; speaks gutturally.
   • S-4711: D-503's "Guardian"; follows him everywhere; "squishy" footsteps.
   • O-90: D-503's original partner; often described "pink"; innocent and devoted to D-503.
   • I-330: Leader of rebellion; disappears mysteriously; has D-503 wrapped around her finger.
   • U: Older woman; takes care of children; motherly figure to D-503.

Answer 1

1. The word used is стопудово, it's a adverb from a phrase сто пудов - a hundredpuds. For the time it could have well been a neologism (as those were the days of revolutionary innovations in the language), today it's a slang word meaning certainly, 100%. Generally adverbs derived from measures is a rare thing in Russian.

2. It's a literal translation of иррациональный корень. Google gives examples of the English phrase irrational root.

3. D-503 = Д-503
   О-90 = О-90 or just O
   I-330 = I-330
   R-13 = R-13
   S-4711 = S-4711
   U = Ю (sounds the same)

I'm not aware of the plot, but the machine-like names hint at a possibility of its being set somewhere in the future. Is that so?

Answer 2

1. The used word is "стопудово". It consists of "сто" (hundred) and "пуд" (a unit of weight which is about 16 kg). It sounds strange in this context. I would understand it as "very slowly and heavily". It's hard to say how strange the word itself was meant to be by the author hundred years ago because this word exists in modern (slang) Russian and means "definitely, for sure, 100%!" and it sounds normal nowadays (but as said not in this context).

2. It's irrational as in square root of two.

3. Latin letters are used for all characters except D-503 and U. Narrator's letter is Д which stand for "D" in Russian and U's letter is Ю which is pronounced exactly as English standalone "U".

Answer 3

3. No, there is no symbolism in I and U (Russian Ю), at least not in the sense you interpreted them: they cannot be read as Russian personal pronouns. For the record, the Russian personal pronouns are: I=я, you=ты (informal) or вы (formal), we=мы.

Answer 4

2. I think, no translation errors here. Both irrational numbers and imaginary numbers exist, in Russian it is "иррациональные числа" (the word "иррациональный" is borrowed, it is "irratsionalnyj" in transliteration) and "мнимые числа" (the word "мнимый" is Russian, it means "imaginary", "seeming", "virtual").