We
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- 0,99 €
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- 0,99 €
Publisher Description
Written in 1921, We is set in the One State, where all live for the collective good and individual freedom does not exist. The novel takes the form of the diary of mathematician D-503, who, to his shock, experiences the most disruptive emotion imaginable: love. At once satirical and sobering-and now available in a powerful new translation-We is both a rediscovered classic and a work of tremendous relevance to our own times.
The story is set in an urban glass city called OneState, regulated by spies and secret police. Citizens of the tyrannical OneState wear identical clothing and are distinguished only by the number assigned to them at birth. The story follows a man called D-503, who dangerously begins to veer from the 'norms' of society after meeting I-330, a woman who defies the rules. D-503 soon finds himself caught up in a secret plan to destroy OneState and liberate the city.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884 - 1937) was a Russian author best known for his science fiction and political satires. After his 1921 futuristic novel, 'We', was banned by the Soviets for its politics, it was surreptitiously published in the West. The original manuscript was also smuggled to Prague, creating a controversy in the USSR. Zamyatin, who also worked as an editor and who was responsible for translating writers such as Jack London, was then blacklisted from publishing in his native country. In 1931, Zamyatin was exiled to Paris and died in poverty. His most famous work, We, is credited as the inspiration behind George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ayn Rand's Anthem, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First published in the Soviet 1920s, Zamyatin's dystopic novel left an indelible watermark on 20th-century culture, from Orwell's 1984 to Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil. Randall's exciting new translation strips away the Cold War connotations and makes us conscious of Zamyatin's other influences, from Dostoyevski to German expressionism. D-503 is a loyal "cipher" of the totalitarian One State, literally walled in by glass; he is a mathematician happily building the world's first rocket, but his life is changed by meeting I-330, a woman with "sharp teeth" who keeps emerging out of a sudden vampirish dusk to smile wickedly on the poor narrator and drive him wild with desire. (When she first forces him to drink alcohol, the mind leaps to Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel.) In becoming a slave to love, D-503 becomes, briefly, a free man. In Randall's hands, Zamyatin's modernist idiom crackles ("I only remember his fingers: they flew out of his sleeve, like bundles of beams"), though the novel sometimes seems prophetic of the onset of Stalinism, particularly in the bleak ending. Modern Library's reintroduction of Zamyatin's novel is a literary event sure to bring this neglected classic to the attention of a new readership. (On sale July 11)
