We
-
- $8.99
-
- $8.99
Publisher Description
Originally written in Russian in 1920 and first published in English in 1924, “We” is the dystopian novel by Russian science-fiction writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. “We” takes place hundreds of years into a bleak future, where the citizens live under the total control and surveillance of a police state, called One State. The country is made almost entirely out of glass, which makes it easier for the government to watch every move of its citizens. One State manages all aspects of the society with a rigid, scientific discipline where art and passion are outlawed. Citizens are expected to march in step, wear the prescribed uniforms, and are only able to refer to each other by their assigned numbers, rather than names. The main character is D-503, a mathematician who lives willingly under One State’s strict rules until he meets and falls in love with I-330, a rebel who lives her life with the creativity and lust prohibited and feared by One State. “We” is widely viewed as the forerunner to such dystopian classics as “Brave New World” and “1984” and continues to be a fascinating and vivid work of science fiction and social commentary.
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)
