It wasn't until over half a century after its publication, in 1988, We was finally published and circulated within the USSR due to the arrival of glasnost and the decline of government censorship. Shortly after We was published in Russian in the journal Volya Rossii ( Russia's Will), causing significant political pressure for Zamyatin.
A Czech translation of the novel appeared in a Prague newspaper in 1927, bringing it to the attention of Eastern European intellectuals.
The novel had the dubious honor of being the first work banned by the institution. Directly following its completion in 1921, We was banned by the censorship bureau. This edition is translated from the Russian with a foreword by Greagory Zilboorg, an introduction by Peter Rudy, and a preface by Marc Slonim.We is the most renowned work of Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin and one of the most influential dystopian novels of the 20th century.Īlthough the novel was completed in 1921 and published in the US in 1924, it was not published in its country of origin, the USSR, until 1988. It first appeared in Russia only in 1988. 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. 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.
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". 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. A seminal work of dystopian fiction that foreshadowed the worst excesses of Soviet Russia, Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We" is a powerfully inventive vision that has influenced writers from George Orwell to Ayn Rand.
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