Written under totalitarian rule, and smuggled out to be read by all, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We was the anti-totalitarian masterpiece that inspired Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The dystopian novel from 1924 places the reader in a futuristic society ruled by science. People are reduced to numbers, all walls are made of glass, and technocrats hover from place to place on personal ‘aeros’.
The reader follows the protagonist, D-503, builder of ‘The INTEGRAL’, an interplanetary vehicle of colonisation, as he battles with a fatal disease for people of ‘OneState’, the development of a soul.
Despite its farfetched and imaginative setting, the novel was a tool for Zamyatin to express his opposition to the Soviet government at the time, and mirrors can be seen throughout in his depiction of the inhumanity and imprisonment of totalitarian regimes.
The novel inspired many authors in the dystopian genre, most pointedly George Orwell, writer of Nineteen Eighty-Four, possibly the most revered of the dystopian novels that came out of the early 20th century, but Zamyatin himself, sadly, did not live to see much of this success.
After being blacklisted by the soviet authorities as a result of his novel, Zamyatin moved to Paris with his wife and died not long afterwards in poverty. Zamyatin was an avid Marxist and Bolshevik, however, after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, he became very disillusioned with the government, specifically disagreeing with the increasing censorship and limitation of human rights.
A legendary novel, and an insight into the mind of the suppressed peoples of Soviet Russia.
