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by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Author), Gregory Zilboorg (Translator)
First published in English in 1924 after being smuggled out of Soviet Russia, We is the foundational dystopian novel that shaped the modern totalitarian nightmare.
Written by Yevgeny Zamyatin, We is set in the twenty-sixth century, where the One State governs every aspect of human existence. Citizens are known not by names but by numbers. Their lives are mathematically regulated, their schedules prescribed, their homes constructed of glass so that privacy itself is abolished. Every need is provided for; every impulse is monitored.
The narrator, D-503, is a loyal engineer of the State who begins to experience the most dangerous contagion imaginable: imagination. Through his encounter with the enigmatic I-330, he is drawn into a quiet rebellion that challenges the absolute authority of reason, surveillance, and enforced conformity. Beneath the polished surface of this mechanized utopia lies suppressed desire, resentment, and the irrepressible human longing for freedom.
Banned in its homeland and not published in Russia until 1988, We stands as a prophetic work whose influence echoes through later dystopian fiction. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Ayn Rand's Anthem, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano all bear its imprint. Of his own novel, Vonnegut famously remarked that he had "cheerfully ripped off" a plot lineage that traces directly back to Zamyatin's vision.
A swift, unsettling, and intellectually daring narrative, We remains one of the most powerful indictments of totalitarian control ever written.
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