We (novel)

What is the story?

Around the thirty-second century, in the One State, a Green Wall divides the city from nature. People are "numbers" rather than names; they rise, eat and work by a timetable, and even sex takes a pink ticket and a set hour with the blinds lowered. The ruler, the Benefactor, is "elected" with no opponent. The novel is the diary of D-503, a brilliant mathematician and builder of the spaceship Integral, begun in response to a State Gazette appeal to explain this perfect society to the inhabitants of distant planets. At first he is truly happy. He does not know another life exists.

Then he meets I-330, a woman with sharp white teeth. She has him try forbidden alcohol and tobacco, keeps asking to meet during working hours and takes him to the Ancient House, a preserved twentieth-century apartment. At the same time his regular partner O-90 turns up without a ticket and demands a child; she is too short under the norms, and pregnancy means death. Shaken, D-503 sees a doctor. The diagnosis: "a soul has formed", and such cases are on the rise.

I-330 takes him beyond the Wall, where shaggy "savages" live, and the rebel organisation Mephi plans to seize the Integral on its first flight and turn its nozzles on the city. In love, D-503 helps, but the plot is exposed in flight. The State strikes back: everyone must undergo the Great Operation to remove the "centre of fantasy" from the brain. Mephi blow up the Wall, nature pours in and the crowds go wild. O-90 escapes beyond the Wall in the chaos.

The Benefactor summons D-503 and tells him he was only used as the builder. In the chaos he is herded into an auditorium, strapped to a table and given the Great Operation. Without imagination he informs on the rebels and on I-330, whom he loved so much. His last entry is terrifyingly serene: seated beside the Benefactor he watches I-330 tortured three times under the Bell in the Gas Chamber without saying a word, and notes that it was "very beautiful". Tomorrow they will all be executed. I am certain we shall win, he writes, because reason must win.

What is it aimed at?

The easy answer is Soviet society, and contemporary critics read it so. Yet 1920 is the Civil War, not the Stalin years, and the city's discipline comes out of Taylorism and scientism. Zamyatin was close to the Left SRs during the revolution and Civil War, and the rebels' "fourth revolution" echoes the anarchist and Left SR "third revolution". His credo: "real literature can exist only where it is made not by diligent and well-meaning officials but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, sceptics".

Reactions varied. Alexander Voronsky condemned its "unfeigned fear of socialism"; Viktor Shklovsky quipped that the world resembled Zamyatin's method more than failed socialism; Korney Chukovsky wrote in his diary that he hated it and that it hit Fourierism rather than communism. The historian Yuri Zhukov called the anti-Soviet label nonsense, seeing the book as an answer to Aleksei Gastev's 1919 utopia. Solzhenitsyn called it "brilliant, sparkling with talent"; Andrei Tarkovsky found it "very weak and pretentious".

Why was it not published?

It never came out in Zamyatin's Russia. It first appeared in English in 1924. A Russian version came in the Prague journal Volya Rossii in 1927, without his consent, abridged and retranslated from Czech. At the end of the 1920s a campaign fell on him; Literaturnaya Gazeta wrote that a country building socialism could do without such a writer. Unable to publish, he left the USSR. A full Russian edition came from an emigre publisher in 1952, and Soviet readers got the book only in 1988 in the journal Znamya.

What did it give rise to?

It became a template for later dystopia, with traces in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley's Brave New World and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Kurt Vonnegut said he "cheerfully ripped off" Brave New World for Player Piano, whose plot had in turn been cheerfully ripped off from Zamyatin. In 2022 the Canadian band Arcade Fire named an album after it.