We

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is not as well known as George Orwell’s 1984, but it served as inspiration for Orwell’s novel. Both concern totalitarian societies ruled by iron-handed leaders. For We, this is “One State” ruled by the “Benefactor.” For 1984, it is “Oceania” ruled by “Big Brother.” In both, the citizen is under the ever-watchful eye of the state. In 1984, this is because of pervasive video technology. In We, it is because all buildings are made of transparent glass. And in both novels, the protagonist becomes momentarily free because of love for a woman, only to be dragged back into line by the state at the end.Zamyatin was Russian, and he wrote We in the early years of the Soviet Union, though it was first published in England in 1924. In fact, Soviet authorities didn’t allow it to be published there officially until 1988. To an extent, therefore, it can be read as a critique of Soviet totalitarianism. Soviet authorities harassed Zamyatin sufficiently that he requested permission to leave the country and went into exile in 1931. He died in 1935.And yet, as translator Clarence Brown makes clear in his Introduction, the setting could just as well be England’s industrialized north, where Zamyatin had spent two years building ice-breaker ships during World War I. In both England and the USSR, the time-and-motion studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor were in vogue. Taylor taught that industrial workers use of time and their bodily movements on the shop floor should be calculated precisely for the most efficient production. In that sense, human workers were just parts in an industrial machine, a theme that pervades We. Indeed, the novel explicitly mentions “Taylorism.” Every activity of the day is rigidly outlined in the “Table of Hours.” The depersonalization of human beings is so thorough that the novel refers to them as “Numbers.” The narrator and protagonist of the story is D-503, for example.Of course, persons—as opposed to Numbers—are bound by what C. S. Lewis called “the tether and pang of the particular.” They long for love and personal intimacy. They form families. They make babies. Not for nothing, then, marriage is proscribed by OneState. Sexual access to any other Numbers is guaranteed by the state. One simply has to apply for a ticket. Reproduction is carefully controlled. What upsets this control in D-503’s case is his love for I-330, which surprises even him. And he is further surprised by O-90’s love for him, so strong that she desires to have his baby without OneState’s permission. Love, marriage, and family, it seems, are always a threat to totalitarians because it creates an identity and allegiance that supersedes the state’s authority.Moreover, OneState is opposed to independent thinking by individuals. This is why I-330 is such an intriguing character. She dresses as she wants, plays music that she likes, and leads an organization (“Mephi”) that desires freedom from OneState. This kind of independent thinking is why OneState eventually forces all Numbers to undergo lobotomies to remove their “imagination.”In the end, OneState wins, at least in D-503’s case, just as Winston Smith returns to—or is returned to—the fold in 1984. While I think 1984 reads better, I enjoyed We too. Or perhaps enjoyed isn’t the right word. I learned from it. The human person is not a machine and cannot be perfected through scientific management by all-powerful experts. The tether and pang of the particular is too strong.

Banned by the Soviets!One thousand years after the One State has conquered the world, the survivors live in a city of glass and steele, enclosed behind a giant Green Wall, and outside the wall is destruction from the Two-hundred Years War, an unknown, wild and forbidden place. The city is designed for mass surveillance of the citizens, and the Bureau of Guardians (secret police) watch everything. Logic controls society completely, and an individual’s behavior is based on formulas and equations created by the One State - thus ensuring security and happiness for all citizens. (Sound familiar to another novel?)A man called D-503 (everyone is a number, no proper names) is a scientist heading the creation of the spacecraft Integral, which will allow the One State to invade and conquer the other planets. His lover, O-90, has been assigned to D-503, and they have Sexy-time on scheduled nights. O-90 cannot have children and this makes her deeply sad.But one day D-503 meets another woman, I-330, and is attracted to her. I-330 smokes cigarettes, drinks alcohol, and flirts with D-503, and all of this is highly illegal. But D-503 becomes obsessed with the new woman, his strange dreams confuse him. I-330 reveals to him that a secret society is planning a revolt, and she wants D-503 to assist because of his his position while building the Integral spacecraft.No more from me, I’d just be giving spoilers. But this short novel was excellent, and both George Orwell and Aldous Huxley were obviously taken with it. Totalitarian government mixed with in-the-future Science Fiction - what’s not to love?

“Dystopian literature is a genre of fictional writing used to explore social and political structures in ‘a dark, nightmare world’.”‘We’ by Yevgeny Zamyatin is a dystopian novel set in the distant future. Published first in 1924 in New York, it was not published in Zamyatin’s native Russia for a further six decades due to the political nature of the narrative and the fear the Soviets had over free thought.The plot of the novel is about a nameless – faceless ‘Number’ in a society perfectly planned by a world government, following a cataclysm which killed more than 99% of the world’s population. In the aftermath of the apocalypse the state decided that each person’s life would be perfectly planned in ‘train schedule’ like precision – moments for waking and eating and working and sleeping; organized for the good of society and using the fear of the apocalypse that came before as justification for the tyranny.The thing that interests me about early 20th century dystopian literature (‘Brave New World’, ‘1984’, ‘We’, ‘Anthem’) is the ‘bee hive’ nature of their view of perfected society. The underlying assumption is that the collectivists (fascists, communists, socialists) were going to be able to get the “planning” right to be able to order the world – and the only thing that was really objectionable about this was the destruction of self which accompanied; as if ‘self’ were this nasty little seed which, we agree, is not to be lightly sacrificed but if it was things would finally work! That the collectivists could achieve their goals – the elimination of poverty and hunger – but with the unfortunate (but necessary) sacrifice of the ‘ego’.Today we know that even this dystopian literature was a vehicle for utopianism. The planners will never be able to order the world; even should they enslave us all. The experiments in Cuba and North Korea and USSR and Venezuela all prove to us the fundamental “knowledge problem” associated with the human condition and made real by distant, intrusive government. Ergo, modern dystopian literature (‘Hunger Games’, ‘The 100’, and even my own ‘Dreams of the Defeated’) display mostly post-apocalyptic worlds where elites live in opulent seclusion while controlling a desiccated and barren planet where the ‘proles’ fight it out on the streets of their messy worlds.Literature shows the spirit and mood of our times. Early dystopian literature taught us to think “We can achieve a perfect society, but at what cost?” Modern dystopianism is more realistic, “Humanity is imperfectable, but there are still those who try – though this is usually a desperate attempt to find a seat on the new Noah’s Arc by admittance to a new elite. The resulting tyranny no longer promises clockwork precision, but only populism;” all this while also acknowledging that continuing on our path of debt and consumption will take us exactly where we think we are going.

We is a strong contender for my favourite book of all time. It's vision of a dystopian future is as vivid as 1984 or Brave New World, but it's also written in a beautiful poetry. Some critics have read it as a schizophrenic's downfall into psychosis, some have read it as a criticism of academia, some of the Soviet state or modern life in general. There's also a huge emotional depth to it, and the awkward, outsider-ness of the protagonist feels very contemporary today. It's a book that rewards re-reading and an effort to interpret, but at the same time it's also pretty easy and quick reading. I recommend this book to pretty much everyone I talk about books with and it's probably my most frequently loaned book. I've read that the rights to the movie have been being passed around Hollywood for a few decades, I for one hope that movie never gets made, as nothing could do justice to this incredible text.

The translator of the We (Momentum Classic Science Fiction) Kindle edition isn't mentioned. After some detective work, using information at the back of the eBook, I found that "Momentum Classic Science Fiction" is part of Pan Macmillan Australia. The book is a reprint of the Dutton, 1924 First Edition. The manuscript was smuggled to the firm of E. P. Dutton, who arranged for a translation by Kiev-born Gregory Zilboorg, a medical student at Columbia University who had already published an English version of a novel by Leonid Andreyev. The original was written in Russian, in Russia, in 1921, but not published there until 1988. WE has the distinction of being the first work to be banned by the Soviet censorship board.Note there are questions surrounding the authenticity of Zilboorg's Russian source. It was the 1929 French edition Nous Autres that Orwell drew on for 1984.Zilboorg later authored several works on the history of psychology, and treated a number of celebrities, including George Gershwin and Lillian Hellman; the musical LADY IN THE DARK is based on Moss Hart's experience undergoing analysis with Zilboorg.The difficulties people are having with the book may be due to it drawing on expressionist aesthetic theory and Jungian psychology, rather than the translation. But I'll leave those who have read other translations to comment on that, and on the authenticity question. This document is certainly of note given that it is the first English translation of the first banned work to escape to the West.

It's hard to believe that this book was written almost a hundred years ago.While some of the vocabulary is rather archaic, coloured also with a 1920's idea of how language might develop in the far future, it's not a hard read.The biggest surprise was just how many of the characters and situations clearly foreshadow Orwell's 1984, written almost thirty years later.While more utopian, the society D503 lives in works just as hard to erase individuality and control citizens as Orwell's.It's impossible not to draw parallels between D503 and Winston Smith, or I330 and Julia, while the Well-doer and his Guardians presage Big Brother and the Thought Police.However, We itself clearly shows its roots in the Garden of Eden, I330's Eve offering D503 the Apple of self-determination.The climactic emotionless scene where D503 watches the treatment of I330 couldn't help but make me recall the scene where a rehabilitated Winston meets Julia for the final time. "Under the spreading chestnut tree"For its age, much of the tech references do not sound as out of place or wide of the mark as some older predictive science fiction.Well deserving of your attention, even though it was overshadowed by books it later inspired, I definitively recommend 'We'

We is really an amazing book. It is said to be the inspiration for 1984 and I can believe it. The story follows a similar arc of a government employee in a highly ordered society who falls in love with a mischievous woman and is torn apart by his emotions until he eventually submits to the state. Set in a future communist utopia on the verge of revolution, the visual descriptions remind me alot of JG Ballard. A must read if you are interested in dystopian fiction.

‘We’ is a classic Russian science-fiction dystopian novel published in 1924 that influenced many following writers, such as George Orwell and Kurt Vonnegut.It is generally considered to be the grandfather of the satirical futuristic dystopia genre.Writing in response to his personal experiences with the Bolsheviks but without a direct link to the communists, We takes place in a post apocalyptic world in which pockets of “civilized” humanity survive in a totalitarian state.Today, this book is obscure and almost forgotten, but it still deserves to be read for its novel treatment of the themes of individual freedom and totalitarian control.