WE (A Dystopia): Enriched edition. The Precursor to George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World (The Original 1924 Edition)

By Yevgeny Zamyatin, Gregory Zilboorg and Camille Bishop

Yevgeny Zamyatin's 'WE' is a groundbreaking work of dystopian fiction that explores a totalitarian society where individuality is suppressed in favor of conformity and surveillance. Written in a unique literary style that combines elements of science fiction and philosophy, the novel provides a chilling glimpse into a future where the government controls every aspect of its citizens' lives, including their thoughts and emotions. Zamyatin's use of symbolism and vivid imagery creates a haunting and thought-provoking reading experience that challenges readers to question the value of freedom and individuality in the face of oppressive regimes. 'WE' holds significant literary importance as a precursor to iconic dystopian works like George Orwell's '1984' and Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World.'

In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience:
- A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes.
- The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists.
- A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing.
- An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text.
- A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings.
- Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life.
- Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance.
- Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Musaicum Books
• Release date: Aug 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9788027201594

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Yevgeny Zamyatin was born in Russia in 1884. Arrested during the abortive 1905 revolution, he was exiled twice from St. Petersburg, then given amnesty in 1913. We, composed in 1920 and 1921, elicited attacks from party-line critics and writers. In 1929, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers launched an all-out attack against him. Denied the right to publish his work, he requested permission to leave Russia, which Stalin granted in 1931. Zamyatin went to Paris, where he died in 1937. Mirra Ginsburg is a distinguished translator of Russian and Yiddish works by such well-known authors as Mikhail Bulgakov, Isaac Babel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Editor and translator of three anthologies of Soviet science fiction, she has also edited and translated A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, and History of Soviet Literature by Vera Alexandrova.

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Yevgeny Zamyatin

WE

(A Dystopia)

Enriched edition. The Precursor to George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World (The Original 1924 Edition)

Introduction, Studies and Commentaries by Camille Bishop

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Edited and published by Musaicum Press, 2017

ISBN 978-80-272-0159-4

Table of Contents

Introduction

Synopsis

Historical Context

Author Biography

WE (A Dystopia)

Analysis

Reflection

Memorable Quotes

Notes

Introduction

Table of Contents

In a world of glass and numbers, a human heartbeat refuses to keep time. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (A Dystopia) opens not with explosions but with an immaculate order so complete that the first tremor of doubt feels seismic. The novel’s clarity is disquieting: everything is quantified, scheduled, observed. In that crystalline environment, a single deviation becomes a revelation. This introduction invites you to consider how a writer trained as an engineer imagined a society engineered to an exacting ideal—and why that ideal, once realized, exposes the irreducible remainder of human unpredictability. The result is a landmark of modern fiction whose cool surfaces conceal burning questions.

We holds classic status because it established, with startling coherence, the template of the twentieth century dystopia. Its power does not depend on topical satire alone; instead, the novel articulates durable tensions between security and freedom, reason and passion, collective harmony and individual voice. Zamyatin’s narrative is lean yet polyphonic, fusing scientific diction with lyrical turns that reveal contradictions at the system’s core. This synthesis proved formative for later literature, not as a mere warning but as a meditation on what human beings are when stripped to measurable parts. The book endures because it asks questions that no regime, however efficient, can conclusively answer.

The author, Yevgeny Zamyatin, was a Russian writer and engineer whose early career in shipbuilding sharpened his fascination with design, structure, and control. He composed We in the early 1920s, in the wake of revolution and amid intensifying censorship. The novel could not appear openly in his homeland; it was smuggled abroad and first published in English translation in the 1920s. This circumstance shaped the book’s reception: readers first met it as a prohibited vision from within a new political order. That fraught context is important, yet the book’s concerns exceed any single nation or time, reaching into the mechanics of modernity itself.

The premise is elegantly simple. In a future city of transparent buildings and synchronized schedules, citizens live as numbers under the administration known as the One State. The protagonist, D-503, a chief engineer, is tasked with completing the Integral, a spacecraft intended to carry the One State’s rational gospel beyond Earth. He begins composing a series of records to explain the society’s perfection. His reasoning is rigorous, his pride sincere. Then the tidy alignment between self and system begins to misalign. Without divulging the plot, it is enough to say that D-503’s careful equations encounter variables he did not anticipate.

Formally, the book is presented as a sequence of entries—accounts that are both technical and intimate. Zamyatin exploits the diary-like structure to stage a philosophical experiment: what happens when language designed for certainty tries to capture indeterminacy? The voice oscillates between mathematical precision and sudden eruptions of imagery, creating a restless texture that mirrors the narrator’s changing state. This narrative method allows the reader to witness the inner workings of ideology and feeling, not in abstraction but as lived experience. The effect is to make the reader complicit, evaluating data alongside desire, and discovering how the two cannot be neatly reconciled.

We attains its force by dramatizing the seduction of perfect order. The One State promises a calculus of happiness, a world in which error and pain are eliminated through planning, surveillance, and the replacement of names with numbers. This vision is not painted as caricature; it is, at first, persuasive. The subtlety lies in Zamyatin’s demonstration that the pursuit of absolute certainty converts ethics into arithmetic and people into functions. The novel does not conclude that reason is an enemy of humanity. Rather, it exposes how reason, when separated from ambiguity, imagination, and dissent, becomes a machine that erases the very ends it seeks.

The novel’s imagery of glass, light, and measured time anticipates later debates on transparency and control. In the One State, visibility is an instrument of virtue and power alike; to be always seen is to be always corrected. Public ceremonies choreograph collective assent, while the Table of Hours orders movement with mechanical grace. Yet the same materials that promise purity render the slightest flaw unmistakable. Zamyatin’s architectonics—bridges, engines, domes—double as metaphors for social design, suggesting that structural beauty can conceal structural cruelty. The city becomes a diagram of intention, and the tension between plan and life is what sets the book in motion.

The political resonances of We have echoed across a century, but the novel’s influence is literary as much as ideological. It is widely regarded as a foundational text for later dystopias, and critics have long compared it with works such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The lineage is not simply thematic; it encompasses narrative stance, the calibration of bureaucratic language, and the exploration of personal rebellion against systemic logic. Whether taken as precursor or peer, Zamyatin’s book articulated a vocabulary—numbers, schedules, walls, rituals—that later writers expanded, revised, and contested.

Zamyatin’s craft is exacting. He composes scenes as if drafting blueprints, then floods them with unexpected color. The prose can pivot from clinical report to fable, from civic proclamation to private rapture. This stylistic volatility is central to the novel’s design: it challenges a reader schooled in consistency to accept contradiction as a sign of life. The book also engages myth and scripture, recasting ancient narratives within modern apparatuses of control. In doing so, it argues that even the most scientifically managed civilization cannot abolish archetypal longings, nor can it prevent those longings from reorganizing the meaning of facts.

We is also a story about writing itself. D-503’s records are meant as a testament to perfection, yet the act of testimony becomes a site of slippage. Words stray, metaphors proliferate, and the narrator’s attempt at clear exposition becomes evidence for what cannot be contained. Zamyatin shows how language, even when disciplined, opens cracks in a façade of unanimity. This self-reflexive dimension makes the novel more than a cautionary tale; it is a study in how art operates under pressure, how imagination navigates strictures, and how narrative can trace the outline of what official discourse refuses to name.

The book’s tumultuous publication history testifies to its unsettling power. Banned for decades in the Soviet Union, it circulated abroad and gathered readers who recognized both its specificity and its universality. The circumstances of prohibition shaped Zamyatin’s career, narrowing his opportunities at home, yet the work’s survival affirmed its necessity. Today, read free of immediate censorship, We remains disquieting because its concerns are not reducible to one regime or century. It addresses the perennial temptation to resolve the human into policy, and the equally durable impulse to resist being resolved.

For contemporary readers, We feels uncannily current. Our lives are increasingly quantified, scheduled, and rendered transparent by digital systems that promise safety and convenience. The novel does not predict our world in detail, but it illuminates the logic that makes algorithmic governance attractive—and perilous. Zamyatin’s achievement lies in showing that the conflict between order and freedom is not a problem to be solved once but a condition to be navigated continually. That is why this book endures: it speaks to any era that mistakes control for truth, and to any reader who suspects that truth demands risk.

Synopsis

Table of Contents

We, written by Yevgeny Zamyatin in the early 1920s, unfolds as a sequence of personal records by D-503, a mathematician and chief engineer of the spacecraft Integral. Commissioned to carry the One State’s rational order to other worlds, D-503 addresses imagined readers beyond the Green Wall and beyond Earth. At the outset, his tone is confident, even celebratory, seeking to demonstrate the beauty of a perfectly regulated collective. The entries stitch together technical progress, civic ideals, and intimate observations, establishing both the narrator’s meticulous mind and the official purpose behind his writing: to present an exemplary civilization on the eve of expansion.

The One State is a transparent, meticulously scheduled society encased in glass architecture, where citizens are known as Numbers and privacy has been engineered away. Life proceeds according to the Table of Hours, a universal timetable that coordinates work, rest, exercise, and leisure. An elected figure called the Benefactor presides, while the Guardians monitor conformity and protect the social order. The Green Wall separates the urban rational world from the unpredictable realm of nature. Relationships are codified through pink tickets authorizing sexual visits, and art and poetry function as instruments of clarity, harmony, and collective purpose rather than individual expression.

D-503’s records initially celebrate the elegance of mathematical certainty and the serenity he attributes to total transparency. He takes pride in the Integral’s construction, which symbolizes the One State’s mission to extend reason to the cosmos. His social circle includes R-13, a poet who crafts loyal odes to the state, and O-90, a partner within the sanctioned system of visits. D-503’s self-understanding depends on equations and routine, and he views ancient, unregulated life as chaotic. Subtly, however, the diary form allows traces of unease to surface, suggesting a mind that is exact but not invulnerable to doubt.

The pivotal disruption arrives with I-330, a woman whose composure and audacity unsettle D-503’s well-ordered world. She violates small prohibitions with ease, smokes and drinks with ritual defiance, and engages him in conversations that challenge the premises of collective happiness. Through her, D-503 encounters the Ancient House, a museum of pre-One State artifacts, where the persistence of the past troubles his faith in progress. His previously sterile emotions acquire heat and contradiction, and he begins to experience dreams—an occurrence treated as a symptom of illness. The encounter reshapes his sense of time, history, and selfhood.

Drawn into I-330’s orbit, D-503 finds his routines perforated by appointments he cannot record and promises he barely understands. He becomes aware of clandestine pathways through the city and of citizens who seem to live double lives beneath glass. R-13’s poetry, once soothing, strikes new and dissonant notes, while O-90’s quiet devotion highlights what the system allows and what it withholds. A persistent Guardian shadows D-503, embodying the state’s attentiveness to deviation. The Integral’s progress continues, but the engineer’s confidence falters as private impulses and public duties begin to collide within his increasingly conflicted entries.

As civic pageantry reaches its apex, D-503 witnesses the Day of Unanimity, a ritualized re-election of the Benefactor designed to affirm total consensus. The spectacle of synchronized bodies and voices promises perfect agreement, reinforced by solemn ceremonies that dramatize the consequences of transgression. In his records, D-503 strives to chronicle the day’s precision and beauty, yet he registers faint misalignments—hesitations, looks, and silences that do not fit the algorithm. The event crystallizes the novel’s central tension: unanimity as an ideal versus the unruly interior life that resists seamless incorporation into the machine of the state.

In the wake of growing unrest, the authorities announce a medical solution to disorder: a procedure to eliminate the capacity for imagination, described as the root of discontent. The promise of painless clarity appeals to many, aligning with the One State’s biomedical view of social harmony. For D-503, who has been diagnosed with a newly discovered soul understood as pathology, the operation represents both salvation and threat. Surveillance intensifies, regulations harden, and propaganda extols the curative benefits. The diary registers oscillation—reason tugging toward stability, desire and curiosity tugging toward risk—without settling the conflict.

Approaching the Integral’s launch, rumors of sabotage intermingle with official reassurances. D-503’s clandestine excursions widen his field of experience, including glimpses beyond the Green Wall and intimations of an underground current challenging the status quo. His attachment to I-330 deepens even as it complicates loyalties, while O-90 confronts a personal crisis that exposes the limits of institutional compassion. The Guardians tighten their net, interrogations loom, and public rituals grow sterner. The records accelerate, jumping between engineering milestones and private confrontations, positioning the protagonist at the nexus of competing imperatives that cannot be reconciled without cost.

We culminates in a meditation on the trade-offs of absolute order: security versus freedom, happiness versus dignity, rational transparency versus the opacity necessary to a genuine inner life. Zamyatin’s formally inventive narrative—an engineer’s diary gradually overtaken by unruly feelings—invites readers to weigh what is lost when human beings are engineered to fit a flawless design. Without disclosing outcomes, the novel’s enduring significance lies in its early, incisive anatomy of totalizing systems and its influence on later dystopias. It remains a cautionary exploration of how the pursuit of perfect harmony can estrange people from history, nature, and themselves.

Historical Context

Table of Contents

We was conceived in the early 1920s in Soviet Russia, a time and place defined by revolutionary upheaval and the consolidation of a one-party state. The Bolshevik government sought to remake society through centralized institutions: the Communist Party, emergency security organs, economic planning bodies, and cultural administrations. Against this backdrop, Zamyatin set his narrative in a future city governed by a single, mathematically ordered state, where glass, geometry, and surveillance symbolize perfect transparency. The imagined order reflects a real historical moment when leaders promised to rationalize life, eliminate chaos, and subordinate the individual to collective goals in the name of social justice and progress.

The 1917 revolutions dismantled the old imperial regime, and civil war followed from roughly 1918 to 1921. The conflict militarized politics and normalized exceptional measures: requisitions, forced mobilizations, and harsh repression. The Cheka, founded in late 1917, pursued enemies of the new regime; fear and informants became facts of daily life. These wartime habits lingered after victory. We echoes this environment in its portrayal of a society trained to treat dissent as illness and nonconformity as treason. The novel’s controlled marches, tribunals, and public rituals recall a culture accustomed to emergency rule and mass mobilization during and immediately after the civil war.

Economic policy swung dramatically during these years. Under War Communism, the state seized grain, centralized distribution, and regimented labor. Shortages were endemic. In 1921, the New Economic Policy introduced limited markets and small private trade, acknowledging the costs of total control. The oscillation between absolute planning and tactical retreat forms a crucial context for We. The novel’s dream of a flawless, planned life can be read against a reality in which planning was both an ideal and a difficulty, with real-world scarcity, corruption, and improvisation undercutting the promise of perfectly rational administration.

Control over the printed word intensified as the new state matured. Early decrees curtailed anti-government publications, and in 1922 the Main Administration for Literature and Publishing (Glavlit) was created to oversee censorship. Institutions such as the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) supervised education and the arts, balancing support for experiment with political oversight. By the mid-1920s, militant literary organizations demanded strict ideological conformity. Within this system, We could not be published inside the Soviet Union. Its depiction of absolute social transparency and legalized coercion ran counter to official optimism, and the work’s circulation became an object of surveillance and sanction.

Zamyatin’s engineering background shaped his imagination. Born in 1884, he studied naval architecture in St. Petersburg and worked as a ship designer. During the First World War he was sent to Britain (1916–1917) to supervise construction in northern shipyards, an experience that exposed him to large-scale industrial discipline, standardized procedures, and the regimentation of workers by the clock. He returned to Russia after the revolutions. The precision of machines, the allure and terror of mass production, and the impersonality of factory time inform We’s imagery, where human lives are synchronized like mechanisms and individuality risks being treated as a manufacturing defect.

Scientific management entered Russian debates well before and after 1917. Frederick Taylor’s time-and-motion studies attracted attention among reformers and Bolsheviks. Lenin in 1918 wrote favorably about adopting methods of efficient labor organization, and the Central Institute of Labour, founded in 1920 by Aleksei Gastev, promoted metronomes, drills, and standardized movements. The quest to engineer the worker’s body and eliminate waste resonated across factories. We translates these tendencies into a total schedule, where hours, meals, and desires appear subject to calculation. The book questions whether a society modeled on the workshop can preserve freedom without sacrificing the very efficiency it celebrates.

Architecture and urban planning mirrored the drive for order and transparency. Russian Constructivists explored functional forms, standardized housing, and communal services. Across Europe, glass was hailed as a modern, hygienic material; ideas about glass architecture circulated from the 1910s. In Russia, the push for collective living and visibility aligned with political goals of surveillance and socialization. We imagines a city of glass where privacy dissolves, literalizing a cultural program that sought to rebuild domestic life in communal terms. The transparent city also critiques the faith that open visibility alone guarantees virtue, pointing to the tyranny that constant exposure can impose on inner life.

Scientific optimism colored the period. The state’s electrification plan (GOELRO, adopted 1920) symbolized modernization, summed up in Lenin’s formula linking communism with electrification. Russian interest in rocketry and cosmism, associated with thinkers like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (active from the early 1900s), fed popular fascination with space travel. Although practical rocketry would come later, such ideas circulated widely. We situates a spacecraft at the center of a grand civilizing mission, blending faith in technological progress with anxiety about exporting an ideology by force. The novel thus absorbs the era’s scientific confidence while questioning the moral costs of turning science into a universalizing instrument.

Public health campaigns expanded in response to war, revolution, and epidemics, including the influenza pandemic of 1918–1920. Soviet authorities built sanitary services, promoted hygiene, and regulated urban life to prevent disease. Alongside this, eugenics societies and debates about heredity and social engineering appeared in the 1920s before later being curtailed. Discussions of sexuality and family reform were prominent. We reflects a climate in which the state claimed competence over bodies: who meets whom, when and how lives are organized, and how society justifies medicalized interventions. Its regulated intimacy satirizes the belief that rational administration can or should extend into private desire.

Mass spectacles and propaganda accompanied politics. Theatrical reenactments—such as the 1920 public Storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd—mobilized thousands to restage revolutionary triumphs. Parades, banners, and synchronized performances turned the city into a stage of collective unity. We echoes this aesthetic of mass choreography: the power of ritual to bind individuals, the music of marching feet, and the seductive feeling of being part of a whole. Yet the novel also registers a danger in spectacle—the ease with which beauty and order can mask coercion, and how public ceremonies teach citizens to equate unanimity with truth.

Struggles over literature intensified during the 1920s. Narkompros protected many experiments, but rival groups insisted on a distinctly proletarian art. The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), founded in 1925, attacked works it considered insufficiently ideological. Zamyatin defended artistic autonomy in essays from the early 1920s, arguing that real art disrupts rather than obeys. He encouraged young writers like the Serapion Brothers to avoid utilitarian subservience to politics. This stance, amid tightening controls, framed the reception of We. The novel’s skepticism toward enforced harmony contradicted calls for literature that would serve as a straightforward tool of construction.

Publishing history underscores the conflict. Written around 1920–1921, We was refused by Soviet censors. A typescript was smuggled abroad; the first book edition appeared in English translation in 1924, followed by other foreign editions, including a Czech version in 1927. The original Russian text was published outside the Soviet Union decades later, and it did not appear domestically until the late 1980s. Because of his foreign publication and broader dissent, Zamyatin faced pressure and banning of his works. In 1931 he petitioned Joseph Stalin for permission to emigrate; approval was granted, and he left for Paris, where he died in 1937.

We also engages a longer intellectual tradition. Russian readers knew Chernyshevsky’s mid-19th-century dream of a rational, crystal-palace society, and Dostoevsky’s critique of that dream. Western utopias and dystopias, including H. G. Wells’s speculative societies, had been avidly read in Russia. Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian calculus and the Panopticon offered emblematic images of rational surveillance. Zamyatin refracts these sources through a post-revolutionary lens, turning the ambitions of scientific and social engineering into a narrative question: when does the calculus of the greatest good become a justification for silencing dissent, and what remains of the person once life is redesigned as a formula?

Everyday life in the early 1920s bore the marks of scarcity and control. Rationing systems determined access to food and fuel. Communal apartments multiplied in cities as housing was redistributed. Factory whistles, queues, and workers’ canteens punctuated the day. The state sought to rationalize consumption and production, but informal economies and barter persisted. We converts such experience into the image of a perfectly timed city: fixed meals, scheduled walks, and standardized leisure. By pushing these familiar practices to an extreme, the book illuminates the gap between the messy compromises of real life and the imagined cleanliness of total order.

Laws on family and sexuality changed rapidly after 1917. The early Soviet state legalized civil marriage and divorce, expanded women’s rights, and in 1920 legalized abortion—framed as a public health measure. Figures such as Alexandra Kollontai advocated new relations between the sexes, freer from economic dependence. The state also promoted childcare and communal services to socialize domestic labor. These reforms, and the debates they provoked, created a climate in which the boundary between private and public was unsettled. We reflects this uncertainty by depicting intimacy as an administrative matter, exposing the paradox of legislating freedom through registries, permits, and schedules.

Ahead lay a deeper turn to centralized planning and leader cults. Although We was written before the first Five-Year Plan (launched in 1928), its concerns anticipate the rhetoric of total mobilization that followed: factories built at speed, collectivization, and campaigns for uniform labor discipline. Later experiments such as the continuous work week (introduced in 1929) intensified efforts to reshape time itself. Personality cults around leaders also grew in the late 1920s and 1930s. The novel’s Benefactor and ritualized public votes resonate with these trajectories, though they arise from earlier post-revolutionary habits of unanimity and obedience.

Taken together, the book functions as a mirror and warning. It distills the early Soviet drive to rationalize society—through planning, science, hygiene, and culture—while exposing how these aspirations can slide into surveillance and coercion. Drawing on lived experience of revolution, industrial regimentation, and censorship, We turns the faith in transparent systems against itself. Its city of glass, numbered citizens, and calculated happiness reflect genuine projects of the era; its narrative asks whether such projects can honor human complexity. In doing so, Zamyatin crafted a critique not only of his country’s trajectory, but of modernity’s broader temptation to perfect life by decree.

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884–1937) was a Russian novelist, short-story writer, critic, and essayist whose work bridged the late imperial and early Soviet eras. Trained as an engineer but renowned