# We (Мы) (novel)
**We** (Мы) is a dystopian novel by the Russian writer [Yevgeny Zamyatin](https://www.edgepedia.org/yevgeny-zamyatin) (1884–1937), generally recognized as the first modern anti-utopian novel and a forerunner of the dystopian genre.[1](https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/annotated-we-9781611461787/) • [2](https://revistaseug.ugr.es/index.php/sendebar/en/article/view/2371) Written in 1920–1921, it was first published in English in New York in 1924 and did not appear in full in Russian in the Soviet Union until 1988.[3](https://scholarship.richmond.edu/mlc-faculty-publications/33/) • [4](https://www.svoboda.org/a/24509204.html) The novel is widely believed to have supplied thematic elements for [Aldous Huxley](https://www.edgepedia.org/aldous-huxley)'s *Brave New World* and [George Orwell](https://www.edgepedia.org/george-orwell)'s *Nineteen Eighty-Four*.[1](https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/annotated-we-9781611461787/)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Author | Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (1884–1937), Russian writer, critic, and trained naval architect[5](https://ast.ru/book/my-836252/) |
| Written | 1920–1921[6](https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/zamiatins-we-9781853993930/) |
| First publication | English translation by Gregory Zilboorg, New York, 1924[3](https://scholarship.richmond.edu/mlc-faculty-publications/33/) |
| First full Russian edition | 1952, Chekhov Publishing House, New York[7](https://ast.ru/news/evgeniy-zamyatin-my-kratkoe-soderzhanie-istoriya-sozdaniya-kontekst/) |
| First Soviet publication | 1988, in the journal *Znamya*[4](https://www.svoboda.org/a/24509204.html) |
| Setting | The One State, a walled city of the distant future under total regulation[8](https://arzamas.academy/materials/1851) |
| Form | First-person diary of the mathematician D-503, in 40 entries[6](https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/zamiatins-we-9781853993930/) |
| Influence | Cited as a source for Huxley, Orwell, Vonnegut, and Nabokov[7](https://ast.ru/news/evgeniy-zamyatin-my-kratkoe-soderzhanie-istoriya-sozdaniya-kontekst/) |
## Plot and setting
The action takes place in the distant future in the One State (Единое Государство), a city isolated from the rest of the world by the Green Wall, a glass barrier.[8](https://arzamas.academy/materials/1851) Life there is governed by the Table of Hours (Часовая Скрижаль), a schedule under which all citizens rise, eat, work, and study at the same moments; two personal hours a day remain for walking, reading, mathematics, or love, and even love is scheduled by a system of pink tickets and lowered blinds.[8](https://arzamas.academy/materials/1851) Citizens have no names, only letter-and-number designations: the narrator D-503, his lover I-330, his other lover O-90, and his friend the poet R-13.[8](https://arzamas.academy/materials/1851) Everyone wears the same garment, the unif, and the state head, called the Benefactor (Благодетель), is re-elected each year at the Day of Unanimity, at which the single newspaper reports unanimous approval regardless of the actual vote.[8](https://arzamas.academy/materials/1851)
D-503, a talented mathematician, keeps a diary intended as a hymn to the state, which he is helping to build into the spaceship Integral. His life changes when he falls in love with I-330, who turns out to be a member of a conspiracy operating beyond the Green Wall.[7](https://ast.ru/news/evgeniy-zamyatin-my-kratkoe-soderzhanie-istoriya-sozdaniya-kontekst/) The heroine O-90, denied children because she falls short of the state's maternal height norm, chooses to risk death in order to conceive and is eventually able to leave the One State.[8](https://arzamas.academy/materials/1851)
## Narrative form and style
The novel consists of the 40 numbered entries of D-503's diary, a first-person journal format that lets the reader watch the narrator's ideology break down as he writes.[6](https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/zamiatins-we-9781853993930/) • [9](https://www.jlls.org/index.php/jlls/article/view/5546) Critics have identified its narrative techniques as the juxtaposition of personal and collective narratives, mathematical precision, deliberate contradictions, fragmentation, visual symbolism, and unreliable narration.[9](https://www.jlls.org/index.php/jlls/article/view/5546) Mathematical imagery runs through the text: the Integral names the spaceship, the square root of minus one stands for the irrational, and the cube square is the sacred place of the One State.[10](https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/1425917) Zamyatin, who called the novel at once his most serious and his most humorous work, built comic episodes into the horror, including a scene in entry 35 that openly reworks the murder plot of Dostoevsky's *Crime and Punishment*.[8](https://arzamas.academy/materials/1851)
## Publication history and censorship
Zamyatin wrote the novel in Petrograd in 1920–1921 and hoped to publish it, but no publisher or journal brought it out in the early 1920s.[8](https://arzamas.academy/materials/1851) In 1922 his name was placed on lists for expulsion from Soviet Russia, and on 17 August he was arrested with the resolution "expulsion deferred until further orders".[11](https://rusidea.org/25031005) By 1924 censorship difficulties made publication in Soviet Russia impossible.[12](https://csdfmuseum.ru/history/122-%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%BE-%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%BC%D1%8F%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0-%D0%B8-%D0%BF%D0%B8%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BD%D1%8F%D0%BA%D0%B0)
The first publication was abroad: an English translation in America in 1924.[8](https://arzamas.academy/materials/1851) A shortened Russian text appeared in 1927 in Prague, in the émigré journal *Volya Rossii*, camouflaged as a translation from the Czech and marked "published without the author's knowledge", although Zamyatin in fact participated in preparing that edition.[13](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vladimir-Glebkin/publication/320148343_Theory_of_conceptual_integration_J_Fauconnier_and_M_Turner_Experience_of_system_analysis/links/6044a5fc92851c077f212dee/Theory-of-conceptual-integration-J-Fauconnier-and-M-Turner-Experience-of-system-analysis.pdf) • [8](https://arzamas.academy/materials/1851) In September 1929 the Prague publication triggered one of the first scandalous press campaigns against Soviet writers, in which Zamyatin and [Boris Pilnyak](https://www.edgepedia.org/boris-pilnyak) were accused of publishing uncensored works abroad; after 1929 no Russian writer dared publish a novel abroad until [Boris Pasternak](https://www.edgepedia.org/boris-pasternak) in 1957.[8](https://arzamas.academy/materials/1851) Zamyatin was removed from all his posts in Soviet literary organizations and barred from publication.[7](https://ast.ru/news/evgeniy-zamyatin-my-kratkoe-soderzhanie-istoriya-sozdaniya-kontekst/) In 1931 he emigrated to Paris with [Maxim Gorky](https://www.edgepedia.org/maxim-gorky)'s help and died there in 1937.[10](https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/1425917) • [5](https://ast.ru/book/my-836252/)
The first full Russian edition, as Zamyatin intended it, appeared in 1952 at the Chekhov Publishing House in New York.[7](https://ast.ru/news/evgeniy-zamyatin-my-kratkoe-soderzhanie-istoriya-sozdaniya-kontekst/) The novel was first published in the Soviet Union in 1988, in the journal *Znamya* with a preface by Vladimir Lakshin, under the cultural openness of Gorbachev's glasnost policy.[4](https://www.svoboda.org/a/24509204.html) • [3](https://scholarship.richmond.edu/mlc-faculty-publications/33/) It has since been repeatedly reissued, including in single volumes together with Huxley's *Brave New World* and Orwell's *Nineteen Eighty-Four*.[4](https://www.svoboda.org/a/24509204.html)
## Influence and reception
The novel is regarded as the founding work of twentieth-century dystopian fiction, preceding the anti-utopias of Huxley (*Brave New World*, 1932) and Orwell (*Animal Farm*, 1945; *Nineteen Eighty-Four*, 1949).[11](https://rusidea.org/25031005) Orwell read the novel in French and reviewed it in 1946, while already conceiving *Nineteen Eighty-Four*, and stated that Huxley had borrowed from it; Huxley publicly denied having read it.[14](https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/k-voprosu-o-zapadnyh-issledovaniyah-vliyaniya-my-e-zamyatina-na-angliyskie-romany-antiutopii.pdf) Zamyatin's influence is also traced in [Kurt Vonnegut](https://www.edgepedia.org/kurt-vonnegut), Vladimir Nabokov, and other writers.[7](https://ast.ru/news/evgeniy-zamyatin-my-kratkoe-soderzhanie-istoriya-sozdaniya-kontekst/)
Despite this influence, the Russian writer has not enjoyed the same recognition as the British authors he inspired, a gap scholars connect to the novel's decades-long unavailability in its original language and its traditional classification as science fiction, which led translators to smooth away some of its striking formal features.[2](https://revistaseug.ugr.es/index.php/sendebar/en/article/view/2371) English translations include Gregory Zilboorg's 1924 version, [Clarence Brown](https://www.edgepedia.org/clarence-brown)'s 1993 version, and Natasha Randall's 2006 version, which have been compared in detail for their handling of Zamyatin's language, a synthesis of scientific, ideological, and artistic elements.[15](https://journals.rcsi.science/2409-8698/article/view/392803)
## References
1. [The Annotated We: A New Translation of Evgeny Zamiatin's Novel, Lehigh University Press / Bloomsbury](https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/annotated-we-9781611461787/)
2. [Valeria Kiselova Savrasova, David Marín Hernández. Spanish Translation and Reception of Evgeny Zamyatin's We. Sendebar](https://revistaseug.ugr.es/index.php/sendebar/en/article/view/2371)
3. [Yvonne Howell. "WE (1924)". University of Richmond](https://scholarship.richmond.edu/mlc-faculty-publications/33/)
4. [Свобода в обмен на стабильность, Радио Свобода](https://www.svoboda.org/a/24509204.html)
5. [«Мы» Замятин Евгений Иванович, Издательство АСТ](https://ast.ru/book/my-836252/)
6. [Robert Russell. Zamiatin's We. Bristol Classical Press / Bloomsbury](https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/zamiatins-we-9781853993930/)
7. [Евгений Замятин, «Мы»: краткое содержание, история создания, контекст, Издательство АСТ](https://ast.ru/news/evgeniy-zamyatin-my-kratkoe-soderzhanie-istoriya-sozdaniya-kontekst/)
8. [Замятин. «Мы». Расшифровка эпизода, Arzamas](https://arzamas.academy/materials/1851)
9. [K. Shanmuga Sundara Raj. A Study On Narrative Techniques In We By Yevgeny Zamyatin. Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies](https://www.jlls.org/index.php/jlls/article/view/5546)
10. [A Study of Zamyatin's We, Dergipark](https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/1425917)
11. [Об актуальности романа "Мы" Евгения Замятина, Издательство Русская Идея](https://rusidea.org/25031005)
12. [Дело Замятина и Пильняка, Музей «Цензура в истории»](https://csdfmuseum.ru/history/122-%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%BE-%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%BC%D1%8F%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0-%D0%B8-%D0%BF%D0%B8%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BD%D1%8F%D0%BA%D0%B0)
13. [Vladimir Glebkin. Theory of conceptual integration (publication history of We)](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vladimir-Glebkin/publication/320148343_Theory_of_conceptual_integration_J_Fauconnier_and_M_Turner_Experience_of_system_analysis/links/6044a5fc92851c077f212dee/Theory-of-conceptual-integration-J-Fauconnier-and-M-Turner-Experience-of-system-analysis.pdf)
14. [К вопросу о западных исследованиях влияния «Мы» Е. Замятина на английские романы-антиутопии, CyberLeninka](https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/k-voprosu-o-zapadnyh-issledovaniyah-vliyaniya-my-e-zamyatina-na-angliyskie-romany-antiutopii.pdf)
15. [Aladyshkin V.A., Pavlenko E.A. Lexical-semantic features of the translations of E. I. Zamyatin's novel "We". Litera](https://journals.rcsi.science/2409-8698/article/view/392803)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Literature and written works › Science fiction (literature) › Science fiction works › English-language SF novels*
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