Sound familiar? But our protagonist D503, even wished these away he wanted full regulation and for the all-powerful Benefactor to demand full control of the whole of his life.Īfter reading ‘We’, it’s hard not to have sympathy with the anti- lockdown freedom fighters of our own age, who challenged us to tear off our masks, embrace each other and refuse to track and trace. The only Freedom you need are two hours daily – ‘personal hours’ – for recreation and exercise. How liberating to get rid of ‘Freedom’, who needs it anyway. What better book to read during lockdown – you know where should be – minute by minute. On page 12 we’re told of the Table of Hours, where one’s life, one’s comings and goings, are mapped out in a familiar and comforting timetable and of the veneration of the railway time tables of old. I read this dystopian novel in The Second Lockdown. You look as if you’re developing a soul’. It first appeared in Russia only in 1988.Book review by Alice C: Cover of the first American edition. He wrote short stories, plays and essays, but his masterpiece is We, written in 1920-21 and soon thereafter translated into most of the languages of the world. Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937) was a naval engineer by profession and writer by vocation, who made himself an enemy of the Tsarist government by being a Bolshevik, and an enemy of the Soviet government by insisting that human beings have absolute creative freedom.

Set in the twenty-sixth century AD, We is the classic dystopian novel and was the forerunner of works such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It was suppressed for many years in Russia and remains a resounding cry for individual freedom, yet is also a powerful, exciting and vivid work of science fiction.Ĭlarence Brown’s brilliant translation is based on the corrected text of the novel, first published in Russia in 1988 after more than sixty years’ suppression. In a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, ruled over by the all-powerful ‘Benefactor’, the citizens of the totalitarian society of OneState live out lives devoid of passion and creativity – until D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers, makes a discovery: he has an individual soul. This Penguin Classics edition is translated from the Russian with an introduction by Clarence Brown.

We book yevgeny zamyatin