We by Yevgeny Zamyatin Search Amazon for other books by or about Yevgeny Zamyatin. Rating: Reviewed by: John Walsh

We has long been recognised as one of the most important, seminal works in modern science fiction. Written in or around 1920, it was not made available in its original form in Zamyatin's homeland of Russia for decades and its overseas publication led to him seeing out his later years in western Europe. It is a dystopian novel and one which inspired 1984 among many other works. As such, it follows the tradition of Samuel Butler's Erewhon and, subsequently, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and all the other dystopian visions that have been expressed. The term "dystopia" is intended to be the opposite of "Utopia," which had been the subject of Sir Thomas More's imaginative essay of the same name supposedly concerning the perfect human society organised to provide stability, equality and humanity to all on a secular (but not irreligious) basis. In the dystopian tradition, it has become customary for the author to display a society which was intended to be a form of Utopia but the vision had become corrupted and vitrified by the imperfect nature of humanity and society and of planning. Often, the dystopian vision was intended to pass negative comment on contemporary society.

Zamyatin follows this basic pattern but his formative experiences in this respect seem to have derived from his time in Britain rather than in post-revolutionary Russia. Even so, revolutionary leaders are customarily paranoid about what people are saying and writing (often justifiably so given the propensity of certain governments to mount offensive espionage campaigns against them). In We, a city-state is walled off from the rest of the world, which is considered to be a wilderness and place of great misery and ignorance. The city is ruled by the Benefactor, who is a tyrannical figure who rules by the fear inspired by his Machine and by the self-discipline that is instilled by living in a police state. That discipline is fostered by The Book of Hours, which is itself a distant descendant of the railway timetable. The Book of Hours informs people, all people, exactly what they should be doing and where at every hour of the day. There is precious little of what would be considered freedom in modern western societies--but freedom today is generally defined as a form of "negative freedom"--that is, we are free when nobody tells us that there are things we cannot do. People in certain other societies define freedom in a "positive" way--that is, we are free when we have the right to do what we want to do (i.e. through laws providing freedom to worship, freedom to work, freedom to watch television and so forth). Since the daily schedule is not too arduous and there are various compensations, it is not hard to imagine that many people, especially those living lives of toil and poverty today, who would find such a society a great improvement on what they have to suffer. One of the principal compensations is that it is possible to schedule an hour for a sexual encounter with anyone with whom one would like such a dalliance--it is not clear to what extent people are able to refuse this but then again there is no ideological reason in this society why anyone would want to refuse. Of course, this being the 1920s, only heterosexual relationships can be mentioned.

In this society, the scientist D-503 is living a life of quiet enjoyment and progress, working as he does as one of the leaders of the project to build the spaceship Integral. The spaceship, of course, has the potential to overturn the worldview inculcated by the Benefactor and so must be handled with care. However, there is a greater threat and that is posed by the free spirit I-330, a woman who seems able effortlessly to break the rules of society and to inspire others to do so as well. Just being in the vicinity of I-330 seems to cause D-503 to rebel, albeit unwillingly, from his schedule and his work and, when it becomes evident that out-of-city infiltrators may also be active, it is clear that the story is going to end more with tragedy than with comedy. If all of this sounds forbidding, then the book itself certainly is not. It is a joyous, compelling tale of human people (albeit people without names) and rushes through its narrative in just over 200 pages. One caveat with this particular volume is in the translation: the translator, Clarence Brown, appears to be an extremely American-centric individual and has allowed this prejudice to infuse the translation, which rings false on a number of occasions. Still, the quality of the original allows it to overcome this defect. Recommended.