Zamyatin, Yevgeny

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Dystopia at its worst.
A New Modern-translation of a Great Novel Everyone Should Read to Really Appreciate the Freedom we Have
BOOK REVIEW: Zamyatin's `We' in New Translation Shows How This Russian Novel influenced `Nineteen Eighty-Four', `Brave New World
I am he as you are he as you are me

We (Modern Library Classics)
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Manufacturer: Modern Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 081297462X
Release Date: 2006-07-11

Book Description

“[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

An inspiration for George Orwell’s 1984 and a precursor to the work of Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem, We is a classic of dystopian science fiction ripe for rediscovery. Written in 1921 by the Russian revolutionary Yevgeny Zamyatin, this story of the thirtieth century is set in the One State, a society where all live for the collective good and individual freedom does not exist. The novel takes the form of the diary of state mathematician D-503, who, to his shock, experiences the most disruptive emotion imaginable: love for another human being.
At once satirical and sobering–and now available in a powerful new modern translation–We speaks to all who have suffered under repression of their personal and artistic freedom.

“One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.”
–Irving Howe

Customer Reviews:

Dystopia at its worst........2006-11-10

This book is clearly ancestral to Brave New World and 1984. A really interesting read.

A New Modern-translation of a Great Novel Everyone Should Read to Really Appreciate the Freedom we Have.......2006-09-02

A futuristic novel written in 1921 but that orbits around a fictional city (One State) that exists in the thirtieth century. Its author is the Russian revolutionary Yevgeny Zamyatin and its story has a mathematician (coded name D-303) who works as a cipher for the totalitarian government of One State, a society where all live for the collective good and individual freedom does not exist (any resemblance to communism?). D-303 is working as a member of the team building the world's first rocket. His very brain-washed small world collapses as he met a woman coded name I-330 to whom he falls in love, an emotion that briefly makes him a free man.

Absolutely a recommended reading that had a great influence and served as an inspiration for later remarkable works in literature and music. A must Read, even if you read the previous translation you should consider reading this modern-translation which delivers far better the author insights.

BOOK REVIEW: Zamyatin's `We' in New Translation Shows How This Russian Novel influenced `Nineteen Eighty-Four', `Brave New World.......2006-08-21

Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic

Hinton, WV (HNN) - Decades before George Orwell's dystopian novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four ` was published in 1949, and almost a decade before Aldous Huxley's 1932 sci-fi novel "Brave New World," there appeared in revolutionary Russia a novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin called "We" that influenced both of them.

"Appeared" is used advisedly, as the Soviet authorities of 1922 refused publication and Zamyatin's look at a future world was distributed in samizdat manuscript form, as well as in the form of books smuggled from Czechoslovakia where a Russian language pirated edition was published. "We" wasn't published in the Soviet Union until 1988.

Now we have a lively English translation of Zamyatin's "We" by Natasha Randall (Modern Library Trade Paperbacks, $12.95), who furnishes a useful introduction with background information on the author and his unusual style of writing, along with a foreward by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling that discusses Zamyatin's place in dystopian fiction. Even a quick scan of the 203-page work shows similarities to Orwell, Huxley and even Jack Finney's 1955 novel "The Body Snatchers", which was transformed the next year into the wonderful Don Siegel movie "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Here's a link to Zamyatin's life and career:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Zamyatin

Yevgeny Zamyatin
The protagonist of "We" is an engineer and mathematician -- a rocket scientist, really - called D-503 who has a girlfriend called 0-90. She wants to have his child and D-503 seems to be heading in that direction. In One State -- the name of this future society -- men are designated with odd numbers and women with even numbers. People are called "ciphers."

Everybody lives in glass-walled flats and when they have sex, a monitor closes the blinds of the apartment for privacy. D-503's monitor is a woman called U - we don't get the rest of her name - who has a comic interlude with D-503 toward the end of the book. The "Big Brother" character of Orwell's novel is called the "Benefactor" in "We."

D-503 - the predecessor of Orwell's Winston Smith -- is the chief designer of a spaceship called the Integral, which is only about 120 days away from launching as the novel begins. Zamyatin (1884 -1937) was a naval engineer whose varied career included designing icebreakers in England for use in Czarist Russia. He dressed in English tweeds and was nicknamed "The Englishman." On his return to Russia, he supervised translations from writers as varied as Jack London and H.G. Wells. English writer Jerome K. Jerome's "A New Utopia" (1891) is often cited as an influence on Zamyatin's creation of "We."

He was imprisoned by both the Czarist regime and the Bolsheviks. Stalin allowed him to leave the Soviet Union in 1931 and he died in poverty in Paris. "We" is his only novel, but what a work it is, especially to those who see invasions of privacy in the form of wars against terrorism and the Germanic sounding "Homeland" Security!

Everything is going fine until D-503 meets The Other Woman - the lovely and intriguing I-330. She's much like Julia in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and the two even have trysts in a place called the "Ancient House" - very similar to the old-fashioned apartment where Winston and Julia meet in Orwell's novel. The similarities are really amazing and we know from his biographies that Orwell read a translation of "We" and contrasted it to Huxley's dystopic work. If you want to learn more about dystopias (the word was coined by John Stuart Mill about 1865) check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dystopia. There's a related literary form called alternate history; the best web site I've found on this genre is: http://www.uchronia.net. It covers the works of Harry Harrison, Harry Turtledove, Philip K. Dick, Jack London, and many, many other authors. Uchronia lists the winners of the Sidewise Awards for Alternate History, the alternate history equivalent of the Edgars, the Oscars and the Emmys.

Here's a definition of alternate history from the site: "In an alternate history, one or more past events are changed and the subsequent effects on history somehow described. This description may comprise the entire plotline of a novel, or it may just provide a brief background to a short story. Perhaps the most common themes in alternate history are `What if the Nazis won World War II?' and `What if the Confederacy won the American Civil War?'"

The Nazi theme was explored in Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle" and Harry Harrison wrote several alternate history novels about Confederates winning the War Between the States, most notably "A Rebel in Time." The definition of "alternate history" excludes works by writers like Huxley, Zamyatin and Orwell because there must be a point where the divergence takes place. A recent alternate history novel by a "mainstream" writer is "The Plot Against America" by Philip Roth, which I reviewed when it came out in 2004.

If you're familiar with Orwell's classic "Nineteen Eight-Four", the plot of "We" is similar, but with a twist at the end. A novel in the form of 40 diary entries by D-503, "We" is a magnificent classic and Randall's translation makes it wonderfully accessible to present-day readers.

Web site: www.modernlibrary.com

I am he as you are he as you are me.......2006-08-01

and we are all together.

The Beatles' "I am the Walrus" provides some flavor for the atmosphere of the futuristic society found in Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian classic "WE". Written in the fledgling Soviet Union in 1920 "WE" had a direct influence n Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Ayn Rand's Anthem. In fact, Rand's Anthem tracks "WE" so closely both as to plot and character development that one cannot help but think that Zamyatin's influence on Rand was significant, to say the least.

Zamyatin was born in 1884 and studied naval engineering as a young man. Like many young Russian intellectuals Zamyatin was something of a revolutionary. He was arrested and exiled more than once by the Tsar's secret police for revolutionary activities. During the First World War Zamyatin, by now a naval enginner, was sent to England were he supervised the construction of icebreakers for the Russian navy. He returned to Russia upon the outbreak of the October 1917 revolution. Zamyatin turned to writing full time after the revolution. Although a Bolshevik, Zamyatin chafed at the increasing censorship the Bolsheviks imposed on artists and writers. WE was the first novel to be banned by the newly formed literary censorship board, GLAVLIT. WE was not officially published in Russia or the USSR until 1988. Not able to earn a living as a writer in the USSR, Zamyatin applied for an exit visa. Zamyatin was granted an exit visa and he emigrated to Paris, were he died a sick and poverty stricken man in 1937.

WE takes place in the twenty-sixth century where a totalitarian regime has created an extremely regimented society where individual expression simply does not exist. All remnants of individuality have been stripped from its inhabitants including their names. Their names have been replaced with an alpha-numeric system. People are not coupled. Rather, each individual is assigned three friends with whom they can have intimate relations on a rigid schedule established by the state. Those scheduled assignations are the only times the shades in a citizen's glass houses can be closed. Apart from those hourly intervals everyone's life is monitored by the state. As in Orwell's 1984, language has been turned on its head. Freedom means unhappiness and conformity and the submission of individual will to the state means happiness.

D-503 is a mathematician. He is busily engaged working on the construction of a spaceship, the Integral, which will carry the wonderful benefits of "The One State" to those living on distant planets. He keeps a diary to provide a record of his feelings in the weeks before the launch. But into his perfectly well-structured life walks I-330. She evokes in D-503 feelings which he has long suppressed or never knew he had. He falls in love, can't sleep, and starts breaking rules and generally acting like most of us do today. But I-330 is a heretic, an individual who smokes, drinks, loves carnal knowledge and seeks nothing more but the dissolution of the One State. The next thing you know D-503 finds himself on the side of revolution. As the book reaches it climactic moments questions as to the failure or success of the revolution are answered.

WE was a fascinating book to read. Some of the language is a bit dated and Zamyatin's 1921 idea of what the future might look like has been outstripped by the reality the 20th and 21st-centuries. However, the underlying themes of conformity v. freedom and "the state" v the individual still have great contemporary significance that keeps WE as fresh as it was when originally written.

Some have said that WE represented Zamyatin's attack on the oppression of the Soviet system. I would have to disagree. The book was written in 1920 well before the Soviet regime consolidated enough power to be considered a totalitarian society. Further, even though WE contains some reference to the damage caused by regimes such as the fledgling USSR it also contains references (looking back from the 26th-century) to societal ills caused by both capitalism and organized religion. As such, Zamyatin believed in equal opportunity when it came to instruments of oppression.

At the end of the day it seems that what Zamyatin valued most in society were those people willing to play the role of heretic. It certainly was a trait he valued in artists. As he noted in an essay written in 1919:

True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.

Zamyatin was a heretic, a dreamer, and a rebel. WE is a worthy monument to a person who believed that the individual was more important than the state without regard to whether that state had `all life's answers'. WE should be enjoyed by anyone who has read and liked H.G. Wells (who influenced Zamyatin), Huxley, or Orwell. This is a book worth reading.

Average customer rating:

Powerful stuff
One of the finest pieces of dystopian literature
Beautiful Dystopia
Compare to "Brave New World"
A Fabulous and A Compelling Read

We (Twentieth-Century Classics)
Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Brave New World

ASIN: 0140185852

Book Description

<B>Before Brave New World...
Before 1984...There was...

WE</B>

</CENTER>

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 1-330 results in an unexpected discovery that threatens everything D-503 believes about himself and the One State. The discovery -- or rediscovery -- of inner space...and 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.

Customer Reviews:

Powerful stuff.......2007-05-01

'We' was first published more than eighty years ago. I suspect its impact is heavier now than it was then. Set five hundred years in the future, the book describes life inside Onestate, a huge city shut off from the 'other side of the wall'. Everything is clean, organized. There is no want, no dirt. Everyone (or everynumber)is looked after by the Benefactor. It sounds ghastly.

To the narrator, D-503, this is just how the world is supposed to be. He's well aware that he's a cog in a machine, and he has no problem with that. Until a woman named I-330 makes his aquaintance. Within a week his entire world-view is turned upside down.

The book raises some questions. Can you call people oppressed, if they themselves don't think so? Is there a difference between having your desires fulfilled and having no desires in the first place? If you have no desires and no imagination, are you really 'happy', or just the walking dead?

At a time when more people seem willing to turn all the decision making over to the state, even as they gobble up more stuff, it's very disturbing. Everyone should be reading this book.

One of the finest pieces of dystopian literature.......2007-03-10

...and that's saying something. In the canon of dystopian novels, we have the good and the bad; We, 1984, Brave New World (a good dystopia but not a very good novel; the characters are two-dimensional puppets created to prove a point), A Clockwork Orange, A Handmaid's Tale, and many more. We stands out not only for its groundbreaking nature (it is one of the first, if not the first, to explore the setting of a future dystopia) but also for its literary merits. Zamyatin writes in an almost phantasmagorical style and his characters are richly written an well-developed. This book is a classic of that oft-derided genre, science fiction, as well as being a generally great book and an enjoyable one to read.

Beautiful Dystopia.......2007-01-16

The book has as its obvious shelfmates Anthem by Ayn Rand and 1984 by George Orwell, but it is more lyrical, more hysterical, more stream-of-consciousness. I suppose Orwell's prose is stronger and Rand is certainly more direct, but I actually loved its dreamy and confusing style, and didn't mind not knowing what the hell was going on a lot of the time. It seemed more true that a journal entry from this future world, with its strange premises and priorities, would read as confusing and boggling to me. Sometimes I didn't know which end was up, and it almost felt like the narrator was writing blind. I think that was intentional and masterful. One of the best and most convincing aspects of the book was that the narrator didn't always seem in control.

This book begins with the narrator not only a willing part of this world without individuals, but an enthusiastic supporter of these ideas. He isn't grimy and hopeless about it all (ahem, Winston Smith?); he's a cheerleader for the system. Of course, it all goes terribly awry.

It occurred to me as I was comparing those three books that the oppressive, dystopian system never seems to break down for these people because of acquisition of material wealth. It doesn't break down because they don't like being told what pants to wear either. These characters, denied property, denied privacy, denied choice, do not rebel to get their own TV or to get their own bank account or their own window shades. They rebel to get their own girl. It's always love that breaks the system down, that sends the main character tangentially off, destroying himself to be alone with the woman he loves. Interesting. I wonder if that is really true. Maybe it just makes good books, to say that people will give up fortunes but not give up a mate. We'd have a harder time cheering for the grey little cog in the machine, who breaks out of his place so he can triumphantly and emotionally buy a Corvette. Love makes a good novel. But is that really how it would work? The characters in We are allowed to bed whoever they want -- they just have to register and receive a "pink coupon" to make it happen. Would people really bring the world down around their ears just to reinstate monogamy?

Compare to "Brave New World".......2006-10-15

Read it to compare it to Huxley's work. I don't think this matches "Brave New World", but make your own determination.

A Fabulous and A Compelling Read.......2006-08-01

By the way, I must thank fellow reviewers L. Fleisig (Vanya1) and M. Alcat (Bel_78) for pointing out this novel. I acknowledge and thank them. This is an excellent novel and worth the time to read. For those looking in a library, you will find it in the science fiction section, not in the literature section.

This is a terrific but short book, and I read it in about 4 hours.

I have read some Russian literature including a few of the modern writers such as the novel "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Also, I have read a number of the 19th century works by Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. The 19th century was perhaps the glory years of Russian literature. The writers of the 20th century faced terrible censorship and it was difficult to publish - as outlined in the introduction to the present book and by Solzhenitsyn in his forward in "One Day..." The present book was published in Europe and in the present translation a number of words are missing. In any case, that does not detract from the read.

The story is similar in some ways to Orwell's "1984" in that it involves a man and a woman in a future utopian state that attempts to control the life and thoughts of all the citizens. They revolt and the woman wants to return to the old fashion life style, similar to the apartment that the couple used in "1984" to get away from the state and to explore a private relationship. Beyond that, read the book to learn more about the story.

After reading the present book, I realized that the originality we see in "1984" is really not Orwell's originality, but rather he takes the ideas from the present book - and he acknowledges the present book - and he translated them into a post 1945 setting with more realism, i.e.: Orwell goes away from the science fiction aspects and towards what the reader thinks of as realism as we see in novels by Flaubert, Zola, etc. Orwell's 1984 novel is better written and it is a more coherent story in my humble opinion. The present novel has some mild and crude science fiction overtones that take the novel away from being classified as literature. But it is a great short read, and it leaves the reader shaking their head, laughing, and reading the story with a certain degree of amazement.

The present book "We" is in fact more compelling that "1984." But, it is a short book and we read a stream of short chapters each five or six pages long, and each of which grabs our attention. There are no dull moments in the book.

Based originality and the tempo of the novel, this must be among the better novels ever written, especially in the science fiction area. The technological ideas are crude, but they are not central to the theme, and it does not age the novel or make it less interesting in any way.

I highly recommend the novel: 5 stars.

As a side note, there is a new translation available: We (Modern Library Classics) (Paperback) by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Natasha Randall.

We - A Novel of the Future - In a New Translation By Mirra Ginsburg

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We - A Novel of the Future - In a New Translation By Mirra Ginsburg
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Manufacturer: Bantam Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000CRYDT0

Product Description

The long-suppressed Russian masterpiece that goes beyond "Brave New World" and "1984." "A bitter indictment against regimentation, conformity and the depersonalization of the individual.." - Thomas Lask, New York Times

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The Dragon: Fifteen Stories
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Manufacturer: Univ of Chicago Pr (T)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0226978680

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My (we)
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A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin

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A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Evgenii Ivanovich Zamiatin , and Yevgeny Zamyatin
Manufacturer: Northwestern Univ Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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A Soviet Heretic. Essays
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