The leader is called the Benefactor and is elected (unanimously, of course) and there are Guardians, a sort of police/Soviet commissar, but they do not seem to intervene too much. However, it does not seem too aggressive, as in 1984. Everyone does everything at the same time (eat, sleep, make love). The society in which they live is highly regimented. He has a girlfriend – O-90 – as well as a male friend, the poet, R-13. D-503 is a mathematician and his vague obsession with the square root of -1 may indicate the futility of this project but, apart from that, all seems to be going well.
D-503 is the chief builder of the Integral, an interplanetary spaceship which is about to be launched for the first time. All the people – they are, in fact, called numbers and not people – have a letter followed by a series of numbers, with no personal name. The story is told in the form of a diary by D-503, builder of the Integral. Like those two novels, it is a novel set in the future, where individual freedom is severely curtailed and, like those two novels (and Karin Boye‘s Kallocain), can clearly be seen as a criticism of the Soviet Union. It was influenced by the writing of H G Wells and, in turn, very much influenced George Orwell‘s 1984 and Aldous Huxley‘s Brave New World. He did not, of course, live to see its full publication in Russian.įrom the literary history point of view this book is interesting. The full version was not published in Russian till the Chekhov Press, an émigré publisher in New York, published it in 1952, though it had circulated in samizdat in the Soviet Union before that. He tried to have it stopped but without success. Selections appeared in a Russian magazine, published in Prague, without Zamyatin’s authorisation or, indeed, his knowledge. It was then published in Czech translation in 1926. It was first published in English translation in New York as the Soviets would not publish it.
Zamyatin’s best-known novel had a difficult publishing history, as it clearly was not welcomed by the Soviet authorities. Home » Russia » Yevgeny Zamyatin » Мы (We) Yevgeny Zamyatin: Мы (We)
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