Novel
We
Мы
Yevgeny Zamyatin · 1924
Opening lines
Я просто списываю — слово в слово — то, что сегодня напечатано в Государственной Газете:
I am simply copying out, word for word, what was printed today in the State Gazette:
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from ru.wikisource.org
Synopsis
Six centuries from now, the One State has shut its inhabitants, the “Numbers”, inside a city of glass, behind a green Wall; everyone lives under surveillance according to a fixed timetable, under the authority of the Benefactor, and even sexuality is regulated. D-503, chief engineer of the Integral, a ship intended to carry the State's reason to other civilizations, keeps its journal. His meeting with I-330, a woman who smokes, drinks and breaks the rules, reveals to him a resistance movement and the existence of a world beyond the Wall.
Context
Written in 1920 and 1921, the novel was banned by the Soviet censorship and never appeared officially in Russian during its author's lifetime. It was first published in English, in New York in 1924, in the translation by Gregory Zilboorg; the Soviet Union did not print it until 1988. Orwell saw in it a probable source of Huxley's novel and himself followed its model. In French, the old title “Nous autres” gave way to “Nous” in Hélène Henry's translation, published in 2017.
Who it is for
A short novel, in the form of a diary kept by its narrator, of a little over two hundred pages in French.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the models of the twentieth-century dystopias, whose plot Huxley, Orwell and Vonnegut took up.