We
Originally written in Russian in 1920 and first published in English in 1924, ‘We’ is a dystopian novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin, a Russian author of science fiction, philosophy, literary criticism, and political satire. Despite being the son of a Russian Orthodox priest, Zamyatin lost his faith in Christianity at an early age and became a Bolshevik.
The story takes place hundreds of years into a gloomy future, where the citizens live under the total control and surveillance of a police state, called One State. The country is made almost entirely out of glass, which makes it easier for the government to watch every move of its citizens. One State manages all aspects of the society with a rigid, scientific discipline where art and passion are restricted.
Citizens are expected to march in step, wear the prescribed uniforms, and are only able to refer to each other by their assigned numbers, rather than names. The main character is D-503, a mathematician who lives willingly under One State’s strict rules until he meets and falls in love with I-330, a rebel who lives her life with the creativity and lust prohibited and feared by One State. The novel continues to be an intriguing and vivid work of science fiction and social commentary.
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About the Author
A naval engineer by trade, Yevgeny Zamyatin was imprisoned in Siberia and then exiled from Tsarist Russia for revolutionary activities, only to return after the Communist Revolution and be imprisoned again in the same Siberian prison for authoring WE and repeatedly smuggling it to foreign publishes. He appealed directly to Stalin for permission to flee the Soviet Union, which was granted in 1931, and he died six years later in poverty in Paris.