We: A Novel

by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Bela Shayevich (Translator), Margaret Atwood (Introduction)

Overview

The chilling dystopian novel that influenced George Orwell while he was writing 1984, with a new introduction by Margaret Atwood and an essay by Ursula Le Guin

In a glass-enclosed city of perfectly straight lines, ruled over by an all-powerful “Benefactor,” the citizens of the totalitarian society of OneState are regulated by spies and secret police; wear identical clothing; and are distinguished only by a number assigned to them at birth. That is, until D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers, makes a discovery: he has an individual soul. He can feel things. He can fall in love. And, in doing so, he begins to dangerously veer from the norms of his society, becoming embroiled in a plot to destroy OneState and liberate the city.

Set in the twenty-sixth century AD, We was the forerunner of canonical works from George Orwell and Alduous Huxley, among others. It was suppressed for more than sixty years in Russia and remains a resounding cry for individual freedom, as well as a powerful, exciting, and vivid work of science fiction that still feels relevant today. Bela Shayevich’s bold new translation breathes new life into Yevgeny Zamyatin’s seminal work and refreshes it for our current era. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063068452
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	11/02/2021
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	637,347
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

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.

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of over fifty books, including fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning television series, her works include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; The MaddAddam Trilogy; The Heart Goes Last; Hag-Seed; The Testaments, which won the Booker Prize and was long-listed for the Giller Prize; and the poetry collection Dearly. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in Great Britain for her services to literature. She lives in Toronto.

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

Though there have been numerous excellent translations of We, Shayevich’s best preserves the experimental qualities of Zamyatin’s writing. . . . With its sharp, uneven edges and chaotic originality, Zamyatin’s novel exposes the notion that human creativity is something that can be quantified, churned into an algorithm and sold as exact science for the fiction that it is.”
— New York Times Book Review

"The founding document of dystopian literature, written in the Soviet Union in 1921, comes in for a fresh translation. . . . Zamyatin’s all-seeing state is sufficiently chilling. . . . Translator Shayevich does a good job of preserving [Zamyatin's] affectless, sometimes nearly robotic prose, and the book is highly readable—and indeed should be read. A science-fiction classic, many of whose contours have become all too real." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

From the Publisher

Though there have been numerous excellent translations of We, Shayevich’s best preserves the experimental qualities of Zamyatin’s writing. . . . With its sharp, uneven edges and chaotic originality, Zamyatin’s novel exposes the notion that human creativity is something that can be quantified, churned into an algorithm and sold as exact science for the fiction that it is.”

New York Times Book Review

★ 2021-09-29
The founding document of dystopian literature, written in the Soviet Union in 1921, comes in for a fresh translation.

As Margaret Atwood notes in her introduction, this novel can be seen as a blueprint for the totalitarian regimes that would arise in the 20th century: Stalinism, fascism, Maoism, all those political entities in which the state is a machine that feeds on its people. Set in the 26th century, the novel imagines a world in which, following a Two Hundred Years’ War that concluded five centuries before—in our century, that is—the human world is organized under the aegis of the One State. Its protagonist, a “number” called D-503, is “just one of the One State’s mathematicians,” part of a crew that is building a spaceship called the INTEGRAL whose occupants will likely, the official newspaper proclaims, “encounter unfamiliar beings on alien planets who may yet live in savage states of freedom.” No such problem in the One State, where everything is under the “beneficent yoke of reason.” The One State is made up of cities walled off against nature and its “dense, green wildernesses,” all gleaming steel and glass. A smoothly turning cog of the machines that run the place, D–503 encounters a bohemian woman named I–330 who smokes cigarettes and drinks booze, all very much verboten, and who leads him to question his place in the brave new world. His unexercised loins stir, and he begins to think that visiting the other side of the wall might be a good thing. Alas, in a regime where “We sacrifice to our God, the One State, offering a calm, thoughtful, rational sacrifice,” such thoughts do not go unpunished. The plot is thin, but Zamyatin’s all-seeing state is sufficiently chilling all the same. Translator Shayevich does a good job of preserving his affectless, sometimes nearly robotic prose, and the book is highly readable—and indeed should be read.

A science-fiction classic, many of whose contours have become all too real.

Kirkus Reviews