We

(Fourth book/fifth text for the readathon.)

It's easy to see how important We is in terms of dystopic fiction. I'm glad I got round to reading it, even if I didn't love it and found it hard to follow. Something about the writing style -- something I've encountered in most Russian fiction I've read, I think, but something that's particularly strong in this -- made it hard to read.

Character-wise, there's not much to hold onto, which is a side-effect, of course, of the fact that it portrays a society in which the individual is not important, is only a number, the tiniest fraction of a single entity. Still, given that the central characters are breaking free of this, for most of the novel, I wish there'd been more to them, more to hold onto and remember. There are some passages that stick in the mind, but it's characters I tend to find truly memorable.

Very original for its time, a bit obsolete today. Worth a read to understand the origins of the genre.

I was reading this book in the same course as I was reading "Brave New World." "Brave New World" did not hold my attention enough to read it fully. "We" did."We" is the narrator's letter of praise for his enlightened society, to be sent as cargo with a newly invented space craft to the other civilizations of the universe where the society intends to spread. Part of my preference for "We" over "Brave New World" was the dated feel of "Brave New World," and how We felt that much more estranged from society. As a dystopian novel "We" struck me as being both alien and sinister. The new ideal society feels like such an affront to our current ideas of freedom, and to hear it spoken of as such a grand and wonderful system by the narrator, coupled with knowledge that the narrator's intention is to bring this society to us. That there is no real "out" in this society as there was in "Brave New World" makes it hit that much harder.

This probably qualifies as a Book I Should Have Read Already. I'm not sure if I'd heard of it before seeing John Allen Paulos recommend it as having the best explanation of entropy he'd read.I'd read that Orwell claimed he hadn't read this and I suspect that is probably true , given the history of the book. I have no idea as to the quality of the original language writing, but the translated version is very well written, or composed, ...or translated. Zemyatin was rather brilliant. The transition of D-503 through the book, to the conclusion I won't spoil (because I generally do not spoil fiction with any synopsis for other readers). I didn't make many notes, but I did ask in a note if the use of "idiotic" so much has significance. I don't know if it was.As to that definition... Paulos might be a very good mathematics writer, and I am a mechanical engineer who is not, but who has taken a few thermodynamics classes as an undergrad and graduate student, and ... well ..., I think Zemyatin, through his character I-330, was wrong. I'll leave it to the reader of this "review" to find out why and form your own opinion.

“Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “We”: both have constant surveillance of the individual, though through different means. Both have the protagonist discovering a class in society that is free, but powerless. Both have state control over passion, albeit in rather different ways. But “1984” (the new title) is rather turgid though. “We” by contrast is actually a lot of fun, I rather prefer it of the two; it's not afraid in places to be a bit silly and it's vision of the future is somehow inspired, with their transparent dwellings and privacy granted only for your allotted hour of sex with your pre-selected partner. If one sees a figure jerking about, and one sees strings attached to its hands and feet and leading upward out of sight, one would "infer" a "manipulator" entirely internal to the figure's movements- a puppeteer. Likewise, if one saw an opinion-herd trotting this way and that, inferring that the beasts were being directed passively (even if the 'puppeteer' in this case were simply the other beasts) wouldn't be an extra "assumption", would it?Dystopias like "Nineteen Eighty-Four", “We” and “Brazil” make me wonder: sure, my opinions of a book or movie or person or whatever, and my political and spiritual commitments, my romantic infatuations, and so on, feel like they're "according to my own lights, which provide an adequate explanation for my reactions". And what else does one have to go by? Well, one thing one has to go by is the capacity for critique, the ability, perhaps the fate, to see one's own 'freedom' as a paradox.It feels as though some are merely rattling their sabres by criticising the minor flaws of a masterpiece, like complaining about the way the napkins are folded in an exquisite restaurant. Surely the stately style and sketchy characterisation perfectly suit the novel's vision of a grey, authoritarian world? Or am I simply crediting Zamyatin with more subtlety than he deserves? In any case, I think the content of “We” is sufficiently high enough to excuse any clumsiness of style. Granted, it's refreshing to re-evaluate even the greatest work of art, but why butcher a sacred cow just to have some gristle to chew over? Anyway, I must be off; the clocks are about to strike thirteen.

Well, Ursula K. Le Guin apparently liked it... guess there's no accounting for taste. Poorly written, so metaphorical as to be nearly illegible.

For fans of dystopian and/or science fiction, I consider this a must-read. Zamyatin's multi-sensory metaphors and stilted prose transport the reader immediately to his totalitarian, mechanized future. The One State is a rational world of clear, solid planes of glass, where the subjugation of nature within its walls allows ciphers (humans) to travel the predictable axes of obligation. There is so much depth and brilliant commentary within Zamyatin's words, the story is intriguing, and his writing through the voice of an increasingly unreliable mathematician narrator is wholly unique.

Dystopian novel, narrated by a human identified only by a number (D-503) who lives in a totalitarian state with very strict rules regarding what and when you can do, in which citizens are completely indoctrinated and do not want anything else. D-503 falls in love with another "number", which is proven to be a revolutionary that tries to fight the state and organize a revolution. In the end the revolution fails, and the states invents an operation to remove completely feeling from people thus making them closer to machines. The main character is caught and any emotion is removed from him. Hope is still there though as the state is represented only by a town surrounded by wilderness and other humans which live outside. Has a dystopian atmosphere given by many details like houses make completely out of glass, idea that liberty is unhappiness, omnipresence of mathematics and others. Overall a good and interesting book, with a bit outdated style and setting (technological surveillance is not present at all for example as book was written beginning of 20th century.

I never knew this book existed until recently. It goes to show, one thing, or book, leads to another - always :)

Fucking awesome.

Not usually a genre I read (sci-fi/dystopian). But, I was compelled to read with a couple others (on Litsy), We , because it was supposed to be a precursor and/or inspiration for 1984, which I had recently finished reading. We was banned in CCCP until 1988 because of the novel's assumed criticism of the government. There's a lot of colorful and descriptive prose which at times felt very satirical. We seems to have influenced other works as well, not just 1984. I was somewhat reminded at times of Anthem by Ayn Rand while reading. My translation was the one by Clarence Brown; there has been several translated versions over the years and one may want to research (maybe by "looking inside the book" on amazon) before deciding on one to read.

We is a dystopian novel set in the far future. The hero, D-503, is a true believer in the all-encompassing state:"How pleasant it was to feel someone's vigilant eye lovingly protecting you from the slightest misstep. Sentimental as it may sound, that same analogy came into my head again: the 'guardian angel' as imagined by the Ancients. How much has materialized in our lives that they only ever imagined."When D-503 meets and comes under the influence of I-330, an underground dissident, his world begins to fall apart, as he questions life as he has always known it.This book was interesting to me as an intellectual challenge. I read it because it is on the 1001 list. It is historically important (it was the first book banned by the Soviet Union), and extremely influential on later novels, such as 1984. However, I never became immersed in the story, or felt as one with the characters, as I did in 1984, with Winston and Julia.

A seminal science fiction work of a totalitarian society. Very enjoyable and easy to see the massive impact it has had on subsequent works.

This book is the great-grandaddy of all dystopian lit. 1984 is ALMOST a complete rip-off (though it is definitely good on it's own) of this book. If you liked 1984, you will without a doubt like We.

I bought the audiobook earlier this year and Grover Gardner gave his typically excellent narration. However, I find science fiction sometimes difficult to process in audiobook form and after starting this I decided I did need to have a copy of the text, so I borrowed the Kindle book from the library. The Kindle edition turned out to be a different translation but it was close enough for my purposes. Of the two translations, I had a slight preference for Brown's but they were both good. I did also appreciate the foreword in the audiobook by Brown about the history of this book & how he came to doing this translation, more so after I had finished the book. This is the sort of thing I typically skip when reading but since it wasn't labelled as an introduction or foreword, I got 'tricked' into listening to itand am glad I did (though I do think it should have been labelled rather than being called 'chapter one'!).As for the book itself, I could see why the U.S.S.R. refused to publish it back in 1921 even though in the end the government, OneState, wins out over the 'counterrevolutionaries' in a somewhat heartbreaking ending. It is tempting to compare the fictional OneState to the old Soviet Union but in fact I feel that its attempt at creating perfect happiness (at the expense of freedom and imagination) could have arisen anywhere. And I found the question of which is preferable - happiness or imagination - extremely difficult to answer personally even when I felt the answer for society as a whole was clearly imagination. Of course, what I would like is to have both!! But that wasn't one of the options...

A millennia ago One State conquered the world, now they have designs on the rest of the Universe. They are building a spaceship called Integral and the chief engineer, D-503, is writing a journal that he is intending on taking with him on its maiden journey. Even in his privileged position he has to live in a glass apartment so he is constantly visible to the Bureau of Guardians, better known as One State’s secret police. He only has a moment of privacy when his state appointed lover, O-90, is permitted to visit him on certain nights. O-90 has other lovers, including the best friend of D-503, R-13 who performs as a One State sanctioned poet at public executions.

Then one day, the safe predictable world that D-503 has known, changes in ways that he could never have conceived, and nothing can ever be the same again.

I couldn’t quite get on with this for a few reasons. The plot didn’t really move that fast, even though it is a short tome, and the characters feel as flat and two dimensional as the glass walls that they are continually viewed through. I can see where Orwell and Huxley got their inspiration from though as this is brutally chilling at times with the all-pervasive state intrusion and levels of control that are frankly terrifying. Not bad, but for me didn’t have that extra something that 1984 has. 2.5 stars

A Book With A One-Word TitleThose who have read 1984 will find Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian novel We familiar, although it is actually precedes both. Like 1984, it takes place in a totalitarian regime, the One State, that suppresses individuality, brutally if necessary, in favor of an ordered life controlled by scientific dictates. People no longer have names; they have alpha-numeric representations and are known as numbers. Life in the One State has been reduced to a schedule all numbers follow, the Table of Hours, which determines the proper time for all activity: eating, sleeping, sex - even the two hours of free time required due to an inability to solve the problem of happiness. The One State is headed by a Big Brother-like Benefactor, an all-powerful man who personally executes non-conformists.D-503, the narrator, is the lead builder of the Integral, a rocket ship destined for other inhabited planets whose populations lag behind the One State in their evolution toward reasoned life. He sets out to document what he sees and thinks leading up to the launch as an ode to the One State, but ends up documenting the challenges all totalitarian states face in subordinating individual will to the collective good. At its core, his journal is an unwitting jeremiad against uniformity, against suppression of man's natural desires and needs.As with other science fiction I've read (see my review of Ender's Game, for example), We is a book more concerned with philosophical ideas than character development and language. While there are brilliant expositions on human nature, such as the reduction of happiness to the formula bliss divided by envy, and unfreedom being man's natural desire, these are overshadowed by the writing style. D-503 continually breaks off mid-thought, leaving the reader to interpret, or more often anticipate, the meaning of his ellipses. His descriptions of action are often confusing and it's unclear whether he is describing actual or imaginary events. There are also too many coincidental occurrences where he encounters, in a city of millions, the exact character needed to advance the plot, whether that is O-90, the woman who loves him, I-330, his femme fatale, or several others who represent competing sides in the One State's battle for control.We is not necessarily a complex story, although it contains multiple Biblical references that can be outside mainstream knowledge. There is also a shadow organization, MEPHI, which I associated with Mephistopheles, the Devil's advocate in Faust (although this may just be my mistaken interpretation). I think you should read any introductory material first (something I usually forgo to avoid spoilers or being prejudiced by a summary of the story). My copy had an excellent introduction that focused on Zamyatin's experiences in post-Revolution Russia which provided an illumination on the factors influencing the novel.

We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, is a classic on a par with 1984 and Brave New World, yet few have ever heard of it. The style is a unique mixture of mathematics and poetry, with the main character, D-503, so entwined in the totalitarian mindset that he even describes his lover geometrically. I am a retired teacher and mathematician and I blog about the real math I find in the sci-fi I read. Up to now, that has involved a few lines here and there and not in every story. This novel makes up for that scarcity. Philosophy is embedded here as well, leading to Zamyatin’s saying, “There are two forces in the world, entropy and energy. One tends toward blissful peace, to happy equilibrium, and the other toward destruction of equilibrium, toward tortuously constant movement.” Zamyatin seems to favor energy, a consciously anti-Zen decision. D-503 associates dangerous instability, both emotional and political, with the square root of minus one. This may be the most significant, but not the only, symbolic treasure hidden in this story. The square root of minus one, of course, is “I”.

Set about a thousand years from the present, We shows readers a bleak vision of the future. Society is now controlled by a single entity, One State, and people, now referred to as "ciphers", live in mind-numbing conformity for the sake of efficiency.Everyone has the same hair color, wears the same drab "unif", and chews his or her food exactly fifty times before swallowing, in accordance with One State's mastication rules. Individuality is a thing of the past. Even personal names have been replaced by state-issued letter-and-number combinations.The narrative is in the form of a secret diary written by a mathematician named D-503, the designer of One State's first spaceship. He falls in love with a mysterious woman called I-330, and through her he discovers the possibilities of life beyond One State's protective glass dome and suffocating Table of Hours. Can D-503 help I-330's rebel group destroy One State, or will he end up crushed by the state's fearsome security apparatus? I know it's a classic of science fiction and the forerunner of dystopian novels such as 1984 and Brave New World, but I have to admit I had a hard time getting through We as translated by Natasha Randall. The plot is hard to follow, and there are a lot of ellipses, half-finished sentences, and startling geometric and color-based imagery. It took a lot longer to read than I expected given its mere 200-page length. At times D-503 came across as a contemporary man in the midst of a protracted nervous breakdown rather than as a man of the future living under a totalitarian regime. I can recommend this book as a slice of literary history, but not as a particularly compelling read.

I really wish I'd had the opportunity to read this book back at the age of 12 or 13 or so, when I discovered 1984 and Brave New World. I enjoyed reading this book now - but I would have been passionate about it then.

Either way, this ranks up there with the best of the classic dystopian novels. It's an incisive indictment of totalitarian states, filled with black humor and disturbing tragedy.

More interesting for its innovations and influence than as a novel (it has several flaws), but entertaining nevertheless.

Good book and foundational for much of modern dystopia. While it was very original at the time, others have done it better - notably Brave New World and 1984 among others. It served as an unheeded warning against the totalitarian and equalitarian tendencies and tides of his time.

I thought this was an interesting allegory. I don't know much about the author, just that he fell out with the Russian Communist Party almost immediately after the October Revolution, and that this work was published the year before consolidation of the soviet states started, with 3 years to go before Stalin seized total power. Part of me read it as allegory and premonition of how the soviet experiment could go badly wrong, part of me was attracted by the simplicity of a society built on logic and mathematical principles, part of me felt sad for D-503. He came close to experiencing the fullness of life, but gave in to the cultural norm, because not feeling and not questioning is safer. I thought the characters were believable, and really liked the feistiness of I-330. It was quite sobering reading.

Just blew me away. Amazing that it was written in the 1920's.I had to read the end twice just to make sure I had read I thought I had read.It would make a great movie.

very similar to 1984.

The book that was the progenitor for A Brave New World, 1984 and their ilk. A police state doesn't need to spy on citizens who are observable in their glass apartments. They are mere minions socialized to produce efficiently. A bleak look at the future.

As the first non school book I've read...in, well, too long, and I was really excited to have it be a dystopia novel! I found the unique futuristic world where everything is reduced to it's mathematical base, I think that this novel may have had something lost in translation (from the original Russian).

I wanted a little more explanation of the world that the narrator, finds himself in. On the whole, I find the novel to be a little too similar to one of my favorite novels: 1984. Same sort of authoritarian government, same male narrator who is introduced to the underworld by a woman...and similar way that the novel ends.

Overall also a very quick read--so that now it's back to my text books! (I was hoping it would take a cut longer!)

A great dystopian science fiction which condemns a mechanistic totalitarian society. D-503 is an ordinary cipher in the One State, until he meets the strangely attractive and rebellious I-330. His entire perception changes over the course of the book. Zamyatin uses mathematical language and symbology throughout, as well as curious ellipses and unfinished thoughts -- to show D-503's deteriorating(?) mindset as well as his relationships with other characters. The language is sparse ,but compelling. It's a very good effort from translator Natasha Randall.

This classic novel is elegantly written (even in translation!), timeless in its message and so perfect in its assessment of what is often called "the human condition". I am so glad I read it. "We" is not "just another dystopian novel". Zamyatin captures the inability of humans to eliminate their soul, no matter how many generations of indoctrination have taken place. The story is told as a diary by the main character, who begins as a supporter of the United State. In his writing, D-503 (yes everyone is a number) explores the concept that individuality breeds discontent and therefore never results in happiness. To avoid this unhappy state, ones life must be circumscribed by specific rules, including how many times to chew your food, in order to attain a feeling of contentment. He meets someone who totally contradicts that message and, perhaps for the first time in his life, has to confront what it means to think and act for oneself. This is devastating and leads him to seek medical help. He discovers that the happiness he thought he shared with others is not real. Other members of society have similar difficulties and fears about suppressing their individualism. Everything blows up at the end. I won't reveal what happens, but it is an amazing novel. Unforgettable and absolutely at the top of my list of all-time favorites.

In this dystopian far future, people have become like cogs in a machine, identified by number rather than name, performing the same rote tasks at the same time every day, and believing that happiness only comes from giving up freedom.We is a Russian novel written in the 1920s in response to the two Russian revolutions, as well as to the author's experiences working in the Tyne shipyards and witnessing the collectivization of labor on a large scale. It is one of the earliest examples of the dystopian novel, and it influenced both George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. For readers interested in the history of dystopian literature, it is a must-read.However, it's a bit of a frustrating read, especially for readers more interested in a riveting story. Zamyatin writes in an almost poetic style, often bordering on the surreal, and it can be difficult at times to figure out exactly what is happening. (He also has an annoying quirk of letting his sentences trail off into ellipses.) When I find myself reading a book like this, one more concerned with words and images than sense and story, I read it almost like poetry. I just let the images flow over me and absorb what I can, without bothering to parse the story too much. That's why I'm hard put to describe the plot of We.The novel takes place in a city made entirely of glass and separated from the natural world by an immense glass wall. This in itself is an overwhelming image: a city bathed in sunlight, where everyone can see everyone else at almost all times, except for the once-weekly allowed sex visits when the blinds can come down. Zamyatin plays with this juxtaposition of the sunny, beautiful city as the place of oppression. When the winds and storms come, we sense that revolution is brewing, and when the mass flocks of birds break through, we know that the walls preserving this totalitarian regime are crumbling.While We lacks the coherent, straightforward plot we're used to in contemporary dystopias, and sometimes teeters on the edge of the absurd, it is still a powerful read. It's not difficult to spot the tropes that have been appropriated and expanded upon by later authors who tackled the dystopian form. I think it's always interesting to take a look at a genre's roots, if only to realize how old, but still powerful, these ideas are.Reading the classics (2014).