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Publisher Description
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.
This edition of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is a classic of Russian literature and dystopian science fiction reimagined for modern readers.
Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.
With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
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)
