We: A Novel

We (1924) is a dystopian novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Written between 1920 and 1921, the novel reflects its author’s growing disillusionment with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the Russian Civil War. Smuggled out of the country, the manuscript was translated into English by Gregory Zilboorg and published in New York in 1924.

In a series of diary entries, D-503, an engineer in charge of building the spaceship Integral, reflects on life in the One State. In this totalitarian society, people live within glass structures under direct, constant surveillance by the Benefactor and his operatives. When he is not working on the Integral, D-503 visits with his state-appointed lover O-90 and spends time with his friend R-13, a poet who reads his works at executions. On a walk with O-90, D-503 meets a free-spirited woman named I-330, who flirts with him and eventually convinces him to transgress the rules he has followed his whole life. Although he plans to turn her over to authorities, he cannot bring himself to betray her trust, and begins to have dreams for the first time in his life. Struggling to balance his duty to the state with his strange new feelings, D-503 moves closer and closer to the limits of law and life.