We

By: Yevgeny Zamyatin

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Set in the 26th century A.D., Yevgeny Zamyatin's masterpiece describes life under the regimented totalitarian society of OneState, ruled over by the all-powerful "Benefactor." Recognized as the inspiration for George Orwell's 1984, We is the archetype of the modern dystopia, or anti-Utopia: a great prose poem detailing the fate that might befall us all if we surrender our individual selves to some collective dream of technology and fail in the vigilance that is the price of freedom. Clarence Brown's brilliant translation is based on the corrected text of the novel, first published in Russia in 1988 after more than 60 years' suppression.

Public Domain (P)2011 Tantor

Critic reviews

"One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century." (Irving Howe)

Rough inspiration for 1984

This classic of early science fiction was the prototype for nearly every dystopian novel written since. George Orwell identified We as his inspiration for 1984, and the similarities are obvious.

Yevgeny Zamyatin's "OneState" under its "Benefactor" are not as fully developed as Orwell's Oceania and Big Brother - Zamyatin wanted to represent ideas which were (obviously) allusions to the communist regime that he had to flee, but he didn't go as far as Orwell did in creating a society meant to be believable and similar to our own. Also, the prose (allowing for the translation from Russian) is often clunky, the dialog sometimes laughable, and the plot verges into the absurd. But it is an early work of science fiction and deserves its laurels for inspiring the better novels that came after it.

Besides the obvious dystopian elements of OneState and the iconic figurehead of a "Benefactor," one can also see Orwell's inspiration in the up-is-down, black-is-white logic of OneState, which holds annual elections so everyone can vote in perfect unanimity for the Benefactor and which manages to reify ideas into what Orwell would later call "thoughtctimes."

In OneState, everyone lives in a glass apartment building. Society runs according to strict scientific algorithms, making everyone equal and everything fair. For example, human beings have been freed from lust and jealousy by the simple expedient of making everyone a public good - if you want to have sex with someone, you just put in a request for their number and at an appointed time they will show up to perform their duty.

I can see a few obvious problems with this scheme that even a dystopian police state would have trouble controlling, but again, this book is more of a thought experiment than a carefully designed setting.

Zamyatin's tale of D-503, a scientist/drone whose previously unquestioned loyalty to OneState is suddenly shaken by a desire to get laid by someone sexier than his assigned short, plain, girlfriend O-90, is at heart a fairly typical story that even has a few pulp action scenes at the end. I can see it being an inspiration not only for George Orwell but also Isaac Asimov and other writers of the generation who would have read Zamyatin's novel growing up.

It was interesting to read, but We is very much an artifact of its time, and Zamyatin's writing unfortunately fell flat for me as most Russian writers tend to.