We

by Yevgeny Zamyatin

226 pages

English language

Published March 17, 1993

ISBN:: 978-0-14-018585-0

We (Russian: Мы, romanized: My) is a dystopian novel by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, written 1920–1921. It was first published as an English translation by Gregory Zilboorg in 1924 by E. P. Dutton in New York, with the original Russian text first published in 1952. The novel describes a world of harmony and conformity within a united totalitarian state. It influenced the emergence of dystopia as a literary genre. George Orwell claimed that Aldous Huxley's 1931 Brave New World must be partly derived from We, but Huxley denied this.

7 editions

nerd teacher [books] reviewed We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Deeply messy, definitely dystopian.

5 stars

It's fun to know that this was basically one of the prototypes of the early dystopian (anti-utopian) novel, but it's such a good story that I wonder why it's not one of the more well-known 'classics' of the type.

And it feels like the kind of internal messiness that a person would have trying to survive in such an authoritarian space, with all the conflicting thoughts that accompany it.