We: The Forgotten Beginning of the Dystopian Novel

 

I finally read Yevgeny Zamyatin's We at the urging of a friend, and I am glad I did.  As I was reading, I knew I had found the source that of the stream of dystopian novels I have loved. Written in 1920–21 during the earliest years of the emerging Soviet state, the novel was considered too dangerous to publish in Russia. It first appeared in English translation abroad in 1924 and was not officially published in the Soviet Union until 1988, just before the Soviet system itself collapsed. That history alone makes We sadly typical of Soviet repression. It is one of the earliest warnings that a revolution promising perfect equality could end in brutal tyranny.

Reading We today, however, requires adjusting one's expectations. If I had read it before reading George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, or Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, I might have stopped reading. Instead, I often found it strange, dreamlike, and structurally uneven. The plot is weaker than the novels it inspired, and at times the symbolism overwhelms the story. George Orwell reached much the same conclusion in his 1946 review, praising the book's originality while acknowledging that it was not entirely successful as a novel.

Yet dismissing We because of its shortcomings would be a mistake. Its historical importance and flashes of brilliance more than justify reading it.

The novel follows D-503, the chief engineer of the spaceship Integral, who lives in the mathematically ordered One State. Citizens have numbers instead of names. Glass buildings eliminate privacy. Daily life is governed by precise schedules. Individual freedom has been sacrificed for collective happiness. D-503 begins as a loyal servant of the state, convinced that reason has solved every human problem. His orderly existence begins to unravel after he meets the mysterious I-330, whose unpredictability introduces him to imagination, passion, and rebellion. 

[Aside on names: In the novel men are consonants, women are vowels. Their apartment number and name are the same. In translation, this caused a small difficulty because the first-person narrator is "I" in English. His lover is also "I" short for I-330 and confusing to an English reader.  In Russian the narrator uses Я to refer to himself.  His lover is И-330 or И for short.  The work of translation is endlessly complex.]

The central conflict is not merely political but philosophical. Can human beings ever be completely happy if they are not free? Can reason eliminate the irrational parts of human nature without destroying humanity itself?

One of the novel's finest moments comes during D-503's conversation with I-330 about revolution. D-503 assumes that history can eventually reach perfection, a final state beyond which no further change is necessary. I-330 calmly dismantles this assumption. Revolution, she argues, is never finished because there can never be a final number. Just as there is no largest number, there can be no final revolution. Every system claiming perfection eventually becomes another system needing to be overthrown. It is a remarkable passage because it transcends its Soviet setting and becomes a meditation on every ideology that promises permanent political perfection.

The dialogue:

D-503:  Do you realize what you are suggesting is revolution?

I-330: Of course it's revolution. Why not?

D: Because there can't be a revolution. Our revolution was the last and there can never be another. Everybody knows that.

I: My dear, you're a mathematician: tell me, what is the last number?

D: What do you mean the last number?

I: Well, then, the biggest number?

D: But that's absurd. Numbers are infinite. There can't be a last one.

I: Then why do you talk about the last revolution?

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Reading We, it quickly becomes apparent how deeply it influenced later dystopian fiction. Orwell's debt is unmistakable. The surveillance state, suppression of individuality, manipulation of language, and psychological control all anticipate 1984. Huxley borrowed different elements. The sacrifice of individuality for social stability, the management of desire, and the preference for engineered happiness over freedom all echo through Brave New World. 

Margaret Atwood, who wrote the introduction to my edition translated by Bela Shayevich, rightly places We among the foundational works of modern science fiction. Without Zamyatin, it is difficult to imagine the dystopian literature that followed throughout the twentieth century.

Even the newest entries in the genre continue to explore questions Zamyatin first raised. Vince Gilligan's Pluribus imagines a world transformed by an alien phenomenon that leaves almost everyone peaceful, cooperative, and genuinely happy—but at the cost of individual identity and independent will. Unlike Orwell's nightmare of oppression, or Huxley's world of engineered pleasure, Pluribus asks whether humanity might willingly surrender its individuality for universal harmony. The question is strikingly similar to the one at the heart of We: If freedom disappears but conflict, hatred, and war disappear with it, have we created paradise—or simply another prison? 

I kept reading not because of the plot itself but the atmosphere of uncertainty. Throughout the novel I remained genuinely unsure who would betray whom. Loyalties constantly shift. D-503 cannot even trust his own thoughts as his awakening consciousness places him increasingly at odds with the One State. That suspense carried me through passages that otherwise felt obscure or overly symbolic.
In the end, We is probably more important than it is enjoyable. Its influence far exceeds its literary polish. Orwell and Huxley would write more disciplined novels with stronger narratives, Atwood would bring dystopian fiction into the modern era through the experiences of women, and Gilligan has carried many of the same philosophical questions into the twenty-first century. Yet all of them owe a debt to Zamyatin's astonishing act of imagination.

For readers who have already experienced 1984, Brave New World, The Handmaid's Tale, and now Pluribus, We is not simply another dystopian novel. It is the spring from which much of modern dystopian fiction flows. Despite its uneven plot and occasional obscurity, it deserves to be read for its originality, its courage, and the remarkable prescience of its warning. Reading it more than a century after it was written, and decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union that once suppressed it, I admire how clearly Zamyatin saw the dangers that lay ahead.