Zamyatin We

About We

Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1924) is the first great dystopian novel of the twentieth century — the direct ancestor of both Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, which Orwell acknowledged explicitly. In the glass-walled One State, citizens have numbers instead of names and every hour is scheduled; the mathematician D-503 begins writing a log in praise of the system and ends by falling in love, which the One State treats as a disease. Written in Russia in 1920–1921, banned by Soviet censors, and first published in English translation, We cost Zamyatin his literary career and his country. It remains the most important work of Russian science fiction and one of the foundational texts of twentieth-century political literature.