We

by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Gregory Zilboorg (Translator)

Overview

In the One State of the great Benefactor, there are no individuals, only numbers. Life is an ongoing process of mathematical precision, a perfectly balanced equation. Primitive passions and instincts have been subdued. Even nature has been defeated, banished behind the Green Wall. But one frontier remains: outer space. Now, with the creation of the spaceship Integral, that frontier-and whatever alien species are to be found there-will be subjugated to the beneficent yoke of reason.

One number, D-503, chief architect of the Integral, decides to record his thoughts in the final days before the launch for the benefit of less advanced societies. But a chance meeting with the beautiful I-330 results in an unexpected discovery that threatens everything D-503 believes about himself and the One State. The discovery-or rediscovery-of inner spaceand that disease the ancients called the soul.

A page-turning SF adventure, a masterpiece of wit and black humor that accurately predicted the horrors of Stalinism, We is the classic dystopian novel. Its message of hope and warning is as timely at the end of the twentieth century as it was at the beginning.

"we is one of the great novels of the twentieth century."(— Irving Howe)

"One of the best!"(— New York Review of Books)

"As the first major anti-utopian fantasyhas its own peculiar wryness and grace, sharper than the pamphleteering of 1984 or thephilosophical scheme of Brave New World, its celebrated descendants."(— Kirkus Reviews)

"Fantastic."(— The New York Times)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781434105363
Publisher:	Waking Lion Press
Publication date:	12/15/2023
Pages:	266
Sales rank:	503,659
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937) was a naval architect by profession and a writer by nature. His favorite idea was the absolute freedom of the human personality to create, to imagine, to love, to make mistakes, and to change the world. This made him a highly inconvenient citizen of two despotisms, the tsarist and the Communist, both of which exiled him—the first for a year, the latter forever. 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, yet it first appeared in Russia only in 1988. It is the archetype of the modern dystopia, or anti-utopia; a great prose poem on the fate that might befall all of us if we surrender our individual selves to some collective dream of technology and fail in the vigilance that is the price of freedom. George Orwell, the author of 1984, acknowledged his debt to Zamyatin. The other great English dystopia of our time, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, was evidently written out of the same impulse, though without direct knowledge of Zamyatin’s We.

Clarence Brown (translator/introducer; 1929-2015) was the editor of The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader, which contains his translation of Zamyatin's short story "The Cave."

Masha Gessen (foreword) is the author of more than ten books, including the National Book Award-winning The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. A staff writer at The New Yorker and the recipient of numerous awards, including Guggenheim and Carnegie fellowships, Gessen teaches at Bard College and lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

First Entry

T0PICS:A Proclamation
The Wisest of Lines
A Poem

I shall simply copy, word for word, the proclamation that appeared today in the One State Gazette:

The building of the Integral will be completed in one hundred and twenty days. The great historic hour when the first Integral will soar into cosmic space is drawing near. One thousand years ago your heroic ancestors subdued the entire terrestrial globe to the power of the One State. Yours will be a still more glorious feat: you will integrate the infinite equation of the universe with the aid of the fire-breathing, electric glass Integral. You will subjugate the unknown beings on other planets, who may still be living in the primitive condition of freedom, to the beneficent yoke of reason. If they fail to understand that we bring them mathematically infallible happiness, it will be our duty to compel them to be happy. But before resorting to arms, we shall try the power of words.

In the name of the Benefactor, therefore, we proclaim to all the numbers of the One State:

Everyone who feels capable of doing so must compose tracts, odes, manifestoes, Poems, or other works extolling the beauty and the grandeur of the One

State.

This will be the first cargo to be carried by the In

tegral.

Long live the One State, long live the numbers,

long live the Benefactor!

I write this, and I feel: my cheeks are burning. Yes, to integrate the grandiose cosmic equation. Yes, to unbend the wild, primitive curve and straighten it to a tangent-an asymptote — a straight line. For the line of the One State is thestraight line. The great, divine, exact, wise straight linethe wisest of all lines.

1, D-503, Builder of the Integral, am only one of the mathematicians of the One State. My pen, accustomed to figures, does not know how to create the music of assonances and rhymes. I shall merely attempt to record what I see and think, Or, to be more exact, what we think (precisely so-we, and let this We be the title of MY record) . But since this record will be a derivative of our life, of the mathematically Perfect life of the One State, will it not be, of itself, and regardless of my will or skill, a poem? it will. I believe, I know it

I write this, and my cheeks are burning- This must be similar to what a woman feels when she first senses within herself the pulse of a new, still tiny, still blind little human being. It is 1, and at the same time, not 1. And for many long months it will be necessary to nourish it with my own life, my own blood, then tear it painfully from myself and lay it at the feet of the One State.

But I am ready, like every one, or almost every one, of us. I am ready.

Second Entry

TOPICS:Ballet
Square Harmony
X

Spring. From beyond the Green Wall, from the wild, invisible plains, the wind brings yellow honey pollen of some unknown flowers. The sweet pollen dries your lips, and every minute you pass your tongue over them. The Ups of all the women you see must be sweet (of the men, too, of course). This interferes to some extent with the flow of logical thought.

But the sky! Blue, unblemished by a single cloud. (How wild the tastes of the ancients, whose poets could be inspired by those absurd, disorderly, stupidly tumbling piles of vapor!) I Iove — I am certain I can safely say, we love-only such a sterile, immaculate sky. On days like this the whole world is cast of the same impregnable, eternal glass as the Green Wall, as all our buildings. On days like this you see the bluest depth of things, their hitherto unknown, astonishing equations-you see them even in the most familiar everyday objects.

Take, for instance, this. In the morning I was at the dock where the Integral is being built, and suddenly I saw: the lathes; the regulator spheres rotating with dosed eyes, utterly oblivious of all; the cranks flashing, swinging left and right; the balance beam proudly swaying its shoulders; the bit of the slotting machine dancing up and down in time to unheard music. Suddenly I saw the whole beauty of this grandiose mechanical ballet, flooded with pale blue sunlight.

And then, to myself: Why is this beautiful? Why is dance beautiful? Answer: because it is unfree motion, because the whole profound meaning of dance lies precisely in absolute, esthetic subordination, in ideal unfreedom. And if it is true that our forebears abandoned themselves to dance at the most exalted moments of their lives (religious mysteries, military parades), it means only one thing: the instinct of unfreedom is organically inherent in man from time immemorial, and we, in our present life, are only consciously....

I will have to finish later: the annunciator clicked. I looked up: 0-90, of course. In half a minute she'll be here, for our daily walk.

Dear O! It always seems to me that she looks exactly like her name: about ten centimeters shorter than the Maternal Norm, and therefore carved in the round, all of her, with that pink O, her mouth, open to meet every word I say. And also, that round, plump fold on her wrist, like a baby's.

When she came in, the flywheel of logic was still humming at full swing within me, and I began, by sheer force of inertia, to speak to her about the formula I had just established, which encompassed everything — dance, machines, and all of us.

"Marvelous, isn't it?" I asked.

"Yes, marvelous." O-90 smiled rosily at me. "It's spring."

Well, wouldn't you know: spring ... She talks ,about spring. Women ... I fell silent.

Downstairs, the avenue was full. In such weathers the...

Table of Contents

CONTENTS
Record
  1. AN ANNOUNCEMENT—THE WISEST OF LINES—A POEM
  2. BALLET—SQUARE HARMONY—X
  3. A COAT—A WALL—THE TABLES
  4. THE WILD MAN WITH A BAROMETER—EPILEPSY—IF
  5. THE SQUARE—THE RULERS OF THE WORLD—AN AGREEABLE AND USEFUL FUNCTION
  6. AN ACCIDENT—THE CURSED "IT'S CLEAR"—
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
  7. AN EYELASH—TAYLOR—HENBANE AND LILY OF THE VALLEY
  8. AN IRRATIONAL ROOT—R-I3—THE TRIANGLE
  9. LITURGY—IAMBUS—THE CAST-IRON HAND
10. A LETTER—A MEMBRANE—HAIRY I
11. NO, I CAN'T; LET IT BE WITHOUT HEADINGS!
12. THE DELIMITATION OF THE INFINITE—ANGEL—MEDITATIONS ON POETRY
13. FOG—THOU—A DECIDEDLY ABSURD ADVENTURE
14. "MINE"—IMPOSSIBLE—A COLD FLOOR
15. THE BELL—THE MIRRORLIKE SEA—I AM TO BURN ETERNALLY
16. YELLOW—A TWO-DIMENSIONAL SHADOW—AN INCURABLE SOUL
17. THROUGH GLASS—I DIED—THE CORRIDOR
18. DEBRIS OF LOGIC—WOUNDS AND PLASTER—NEVER AGAIN
19. THE INFINITESIMAL OF THE THIRD ORDER—FROM UNDER THE FOREHEAD—OVER THE RAILING
20. DISCHARGE—THE MATERIAL OF AN IDEA—THE ZERO ROCK
21. THE DUTY OF AN AUTHOR—THE ICE SWELLS—THE MOST DIFFICULT LOVE
22. THE BENUMBED WAVES—EVERYTHING IS IMPROVING—I AM A MICROBE
23. FLOWERS—THE DISSOLUTION OF A CRYSTAL—IF ONLY (?)
24. THE LIMIT OF THE FUNCTION—EASTER—TO CROSS OUT EVERYTHING
25. THE DESCENT FROM HEAVEN—THE GREATEST CATASTROPHE IN HISTORY—THE KNOWN—IS ENDED
26. THE WORLD DOES EXIST—RASH—FORTY-ONE DEGREES CENTIGRADE
27. NO HEADINGS. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE!
28. BOTH OF THEM—ENTROPY AND ENERGY—THE OPAQUE PART OF THE BODY
29. THREADS ON THE FACE—SPROUTS—AN UNNATURAL COMPRESSION
30. THE LAST NUMBER—GALILEO'S MISTAKE—WOULD IT NOT BE BETTER?
31. THE GREAT OPERATION—I FORGAVE EVERYTHING—THE COLLISION OF TRAINS
32. I DO NOT BELIEVE—TRACTORS—A LITTLE HUMAN SPLINTER
33. THIS WITHOUT A SYNOPSIS, HASTILY, THE LAST
34. THE FORGIVEN ONES—A SUNNY NIGHT—A RADIO-VALKYRIE
35. IN A RING—A CARROT—A MURDER
36. EMPTY PAGES—THE CHRISTIAN GOD—ABOUT MY MOTHER
37. INFUSORIAN—DOOMSDAY—HER ROOM
38. I DON'T KNOW WHAT TITLE—PERHAPS THE WHOLE SYNOPSIS MAY BE CALLED A CASTOFF CIGARETTE BUTT
39. THE END
40. FACTS—THE BELL—I AM CERTAIN
 

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century." —-Irving Howe

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
Before Huxley's Brave New World (1932), Rand's Anthem (1938), Orwell's 1984 (1949), and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), there was We by revolutionary Russian novelist and playwright Yevgeny Zamyatin. Originally published in 1920, this dystopian classic was written in response to life in Stalinist Russia and envisions a future world where the all-powerful One State controls everything and everyone.

In the completely dehumanized world of We, there are no names, only designations. The protagonist, a mathematic philosopher identified as D-503, is nearing completion of the Integral, the great State machine's most ambitious project yet: a spaceship that will carry the divinely ordered and rational message of the One State to those intelligent beings living amongst the stars still "living in the savage state of freedom." But as the launch date approaches, D-503 meets and falls in love with a female revolutionary identified as I-330. Through a series of highly illegal encounters, I-330 introduces D-503 to a breathtaking new world, one completely hidden from the One State and filled with tolerance, individuality, imagination, love, and humor. Will D-503 fulfill his civic duty by confessing to the Guardians his unlawful involvement with I-330, or will he become part of her revolutionary scheme to destroy the One State?

After reading We, readers will be amazed by how strongly Zamyatin's dystopic vision influenced the aforementioned classics. Timeless, powerful, and still profoundly relevant after almost a century, this is a classic among classics. Paul Goat Allen

bn.com

First published in the Soviet 1920s, Zamyatin's dystopic novel left an indelible watermark on 20th-century culture, from Orwell's 1984 to Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil. Randall's exciting new translation strips away the Cold War connotations and makes us conscious of Zamyatin's other influences, from Dostoyevski to German expressionism. D-503 is a loyal "cipher" of the totalitarian One State, literally walled in by glass; he is a mathematician happily building the world's first rocket, but his life is changed by meeting I-330, a woman with "sharp teeth" who keeps emerging out of a sudden vampirish dusk to smile wickedly on the poor narrator and drive him wild with desire. (When she first forces him to drink alcohol, the mind leaps to Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel.) In becoming a slave to love, D-503 becomes, briefly, a free man. In Randall's hands, Zamyatin's modernist idiom crackles ("I only remember his fingers: they flew out of his sleeve, like bundles of beams"), though the novel sometimes seems prophetic of the onset of Stalinism, particularly in the bleak ending. Modern Library's reintroduction of Zamyatin's novel is a literary event sure to bring this neglected classic to the attention of a new readership. (On sale July 11) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In Zamyatin's 1924 futuristic novel, humankind has lost its individuality, and everyone is reduced to a number. Protagonist D-503, a mathematician for the One State, thinks he is going insane but actually is falling in love. Unfortunately for him, he's sweet on a revolutionary bent on overthrowing the government. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Zamyatin . . . did more than predict some of the specific characteristics of totalitarianism―he predicted its defining condition: the destruction of the individual. . . . [He] found the word for it: We.” ―Masha Gessen, from the Foreword

“The best single work of science fiction yet written.” —Ursula K. Le Guin

“[Zamyatin’s] intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism—human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself—makes [We] superior to Huxley’s [Brave New World].” —George Orwell
 
“At this dystopian moment in world politics, everyone’s talking about 1984, but take a look at the novel that inspired it (or, at least, which George Orwell reviewed soon before he wrote 1984)—Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. . . . The dystopia Zamyatin painted has, alas, many echoes with today’s surveillance society—just think of China’s budding ‘social credit’ program, which monitors citizens’ movements. Big Brother was a piker, compared to Xi Jinping. Zamyatin saw it coming.” —Lit Hub

From the Publisher