What it now has, though, is a handsome hardback edition from the Folio Society. That he’d even dare write such a novel in that climate says a great deal about Zamyatin’s bravery.Īlthough it’s rarely if ever been out of print in the English language since it was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in 1924, We has never quite enjoyed the widespread acclaim it’s deserved. In fact, We was the first novel to be banned by the Soviet State’s censorship bureau in 1921, and wasn’t published in that country until 1988. Zamyatin was a naval engineer and saw firsthand the Russian Revolution of the early 1900s arrested twice and exiled to Siberia, he wrote We in an era of huge political and social unrest. The story behind We is almost as remarkable as the novel itself. No matter how unbeatable a regime may look, there’ll always be a handful of revolutionaries somewhere – it’s like another law of nature. If there’s a ray of hope in We, it’s that such absolute order is impossible as long as there are human beings in the equation. Zamyatin’s One State is dominated by order and numbers – it’s the author’s impression, perhaps, of where an industrialised nation run on hard logic might logically end up in a thousand years’ time. Like the dystopias that emerged after it, We offers a satirical and disturbing glimpse of a possible future. The sense of colour and vibrancy, even among such oppressed characters as these, gives the story’s later turns an added emotional wrench that is difficult to forget.

O-90, for example, is described as short and stocky, like an O another character has a twisted posture that suggests the letter S. Zamyatin has quite a special way of boldly sketching in his characters, too, where the letters in their names reflect their physical appearance. Obviously, the quality of We‘s prose is a matter of opinion for this writer, its first-person style, full of asides and ellipses, gives the story a kind of rough urgency. Orwell also commented on the similarities between We and Huxley’s Brave New World, though he argued that the former was “less well put together” than the latter. We, in short, bears a remarkable resemblance to 1984 and Brave New World, and it’s a matter of record that George Orwell was heavily indebted to Zamyatin’s novel – Orwell obtained a copy and wrote about it in 1946, roughly three years before the publication of 1984.