We () is a dystopian novel by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin (often anglicised as Eugene Zamiatin) that was written in 1920–1921.Brown, p. xi, citing Shane, gives 1921. Russell, p. 3, dates the first draft to 1919. It was first published as an English translation by Gregory Zilboorg in 1924 by E. P. Dutton in New York. The original Russian text was first published in 1952; the novel was not published in Soviet Russia until 1988. The novel describes a world of harmony and conformity within a united totalitarian state, against which the protagonist, D-503 (), rebels.
The book is considered a literary masterpiece as well as one of the greatest and most influential works of the 20th century. It influenced the emergence of dystopia as a literary genre. George Orwell said that Aldous Huxley's 1931 Brave New World must be partly derived from We, although Huxley denied this. Orwell's own Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Animal Farm were also inspired by We, as are many other contemporary dystopian novels.
Setting We is set in the far future. D-503, a spacecraft engineer, lives in the One State,The Ginsburg and Randall translations use the phrasing "One State". Guerney uses "The One State"—each word is capitalized. Brown uses the single word "OneState", which he calls "ugly" (p. xxv). Zilboorg uses "United State". All of these are translations of the phrase Yedinoye Gosudarstvo (Russian: Единое Государство). an urban nation constructed almost entirely of glass (presumably to assist with mass surveillance). The structure of the state is Panopticon-like, and life is based upon Frederick Winslow Taylor's principles of scientific management. Society is run centrally by a power known as the Benefactor, and is run according to a strict timetable—people march in step with each other and are uniformed. There is no way of referring to people except by their given designations (referred to as "numbers" in the novel.) The society in which We is set uses mathematical logic and reason for its scheduling and as justification for its actions.George Orwell by Harold Bloom pg 54 Publisher: Chelsea House Pub Zamyatin's We: A Collection of Critical Essays by Gary Kern pgs 124, 150 Publisher: Ardis The individual's behaviour is based on logic by way of formulae and equations outlined by the One State.The Literary Underground: Writers and the Totalitarian Experience, 1900–1950 pgs 89–91 By John Hoyles Palgrave Macmillan; First edition (15 June 1991)
Plot A few hundred years after the One State's conquest of the entire world, the spaceship INTEGRAL is being built in order to invade and conquer extraterrestrial planets. The project's chief engineer, D-503, begins a journal that he intends to be carried upon the completed spaceship. The book is this journal—it titles chapters as "[n]th Entry" and begins each entry with three lines of notes summarising the events therein.
Like all other citizens of the One State, D-503 lives in a glass apartment building and is carefully watched by the secret police, or Bureau of Guardians. D-503's lover, O-90, has been assigned to visit him on certain nights. She is considered too short to bear children and is deeply grieved by that status. O-90's other lover and D-503's best friend is R-13, a State poet who reads his verse at public executions.
While on an assigned walk with O-90, D-503 meets a woman named I-330. I-330 smokes cigarettes, drinks alcohol and shamelessly flirts with D-503 instead of applying for an impersonal sex visit; all of these are illegal by the laws of the One State.
Repelled and fascinated, D-503 struggles to overcome his attraction to I-330. She invites him to visit the Ancient House, notable for being the only opaque building in the One State, except for the windows. Objects of aesthetic and historical importance dug up from around the city are stored there. There, I-330 offers him the services of a corrupt doctor to explain his absence from work. Leaving in horror, D-503 vows to denounce her to the Bureau of Guardians but finds that he cannot.
D-503 begins to have dreams, which disturb him, as dreams are thought to be a symptom of mental illness. Slowly, I-330 reveals to D-503 that she is involved with the Mephi, an organisation plotting to bring down the One State. She takes him through secret tunnels inside the Ancient House to the world outside the Green Wall, which surrounds the city-state. There, D-503 meets the inhabitants of the outside world: humans whose bodies are covered with animal fur. The aims of the Mephi are to destroy the Green Wall and reunite the citizens of the One State with the outside world.
Despite the recent rift between them, O-90 pleads with D-503 to impregnate her illegally. After O-90 insists that she will obey the law by turning over their child to be raised by the One State, D-503 obliges. During the pregnancy, O-90 realises that she cannot bear to be parted from her baby. At D-503's request, I-330 arranges for O-90 to be smuggled outside the Green Wall.
In his last journal entry, D-503 indifferently relates that he has been forcibly tied to a table and subjected to the "Great Operation", which has recently been mandated for all citizens of the One State to prevent possible riots; having been psycho-surgically refashioned into a state of mechanical "reliability", they would now function as "tractors in human form". This operation removes the imagination and emotions by targeting parts of the brain with X-rays. After this operation, D-503 willingly informed the Benefactor, the dictator of the One State, about the inner workings of the Mephi. I-330 is then brought to an interrogation chamber, and subjected to torture by suffocation; D-503 expresses surprise that even torture could not induce I-330 to denounce her comrades. Despite her refusal, I-330 and those arrested with her have been sentenced to death, "under the Benefactor's Machine".
The Mephi uprising gathers strength; parts of the Green Wall have been destroyed, birds are repopulating the city and people start committing acts of social rebellion. Although D-503 expresses hope that the Benefactor shall restore "reason", the novel ends with the One State's survival against these insurgents in doubt. I-330's mantra is that, just as there is no highest number, there can be no final revolution.
Major themes
Dystopian society
The dystopian society depicted in We is presided over by the Benefactor and is surrounded by a giant Green Wall to separate the citizens from primitive untamed nature.Ginsburg trans. This term is also translated as "Well-Doer". Benefactor translates Blagodetel (Russian: Благодетель). All citizens are known as "numbers".Ginsburg trans. Numbers translates nomera (Russian: номера). This is translated by Natasha Randall as "cyphers" in the 2006 edition published by The Modern Library, New York. Every hour in one's life is directed by the "Table of Hours". The action of We is set at some time after the Two Hundred Years' War, which has wiped out all but "0.2 [20%] of the earth's population".Fifth Entry (Ginsburg translation, p. 21). The war was over a rare substance only mentioned in the book through a metaphor; the substance was called "bread" as the "Christians gladiated over it"—as in Christians killed for sport in Roman gladiator games as a form of entertainment, "bread and circuses", suggesting a war that was meant to distract the population from a power grab by the government. The war only ended after the use of weapons of mass destruction, so that the One State is surrounded with a post-apocalyptic landscape.
Allusions and references
Many of the names and numbers in We are allusions to the experiences of Zamyatin or to culture and literature. "Auditorium 112" refers to cell number 112, where Zamyatin was twice imprisoned, and the name of S-4711 is a reference to the Eau de Cologne number 4711.Randall, p. xvii.Ermolaev. Zamyatin, who worked as a naval architect, refers to the specifications of the icebreaker St. Alexander Nevsky.Shane, p 12.
The numbers [.. .] of the chief characters in WE are taken directly from the specifications of Zamyatin's favourite icebreaker, the Saint Alexander Nevsky, yard no. A/W 905, round tonnage 3300, where O–90 and I-330 appropriately divide the hapless D-503 [.. .] Yu-10 could easily derive from the Swan Hunter yard numbers of no fewer than three of Zamyatin's major icebreakers – 1012, 1020, 1021 [.. .]. R-13 can be found here too, as well as in the yard number of Sviatogor A/W 904.Myers."All these icebreakers were constructed in England, in Newcastle and yards nearby; there are traces of my work in every one of them, especially the Alexander Nevsky—now the Lenin; I did the preliminary design, and after that none of the vessel's drawings arrived in the workshop without having been checked and signed: 'Chief surveyor of Russian Icebreakers' Building E.Zamiatin." [The signature is written in English.] (Zamyatin ())
Many comparisons to The Bible exist in We. There are similarities between Genesis Chapters 1–4 and We, where the One State is considered Paradise, D-503 is Adam and I-330 is Eve. The snake in this piece is S-4711, who is described as having a bent and twisted form, with a "double-curved body"; he is a double agent. References to Mephistopheles (in the Mephi) are seen as allusions to Satan and his rebellion against Heaven in the Bible (Ezekiel 28:11–19; Isaiah 14:12–15).Russell, Jeffrey Burton. Mephistopheles: The devil in the modern world. Cornell University Press, 1990. The novel can be considered a criticism of organised religion given this interpretation.Gregg. Zamyatin, influenced by Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov, made the novel a criticism of the excesses of a militantly atheistic society. The novel displayed an indebtedness to H. G. Wells's dystopia When the Sleeper Wakes (1899).
The novel uses mathematical concepts symbolically. The spaceship that D-503 is supervising the construction of is called the Integral, which he hopes will "integrate the grandiose cosmic equation". D-503 also mentions that he is profoundly disturbed by the concept of the square root of −1—which is the basis for imaginary numbers, imagination having been deprecated by the One State. Zamyatin's point, probably in light of the increasingly dogmatic Soviet government of the time, would seem to be that it is impossible to remove all the rebels against a system. Zamyatin even says this through I-330, "There is no final revolution. Revolutions are infinite".Ginsburg, Introduction, p. v. The Thirtieth Entry has a similar passage.
Literary significance and influences Along with Jack London's The Iron Heel, We is generally considered to be the grandfather of the satirical futuristic dystopia genre. It takes the modern industrial society to an extreme conclusion, depicting a state that believes that free will is the cause of unhappiness, and that citizens' lives should be controlled with mathematical precision based on the system of industrial efficiency created by Frederick Winslow Taylor. The Soviet attempt at implementing Taylorism, led by Aleksei Gastev, may have immediately influenced Zamyatin's portrayal of the One State. In Russia, a dystopian totalitarian society before Zamyatin was described by Mikhail Saltykov in his satirical novel The History of a Town. Further, Saltykov's idea of "Utopia of the straight line" continues in We: "To unbend the wild curve, to straighten it out to a tangent — to a straight line!"Peter Petro. Beyond History: a Study of Saltykov's The History of a Town. 1972
Christopher Collins in Evgenij Zamjatin: An Interpretive Study finds the many intriguing literary aspects of We more interesting and relevant today than the political aspects: