We

This is a tough one to review, I think most of the issues I have with the book are due to the translation not being the greatest, I think it was copied into French to hide it from the Russians and then future copies were taken from that.

This is the first Dystopian to be written apparently and it is pretty bleak, you can see how Orwell was influenced by it. The bleak Dystopia though is not the main story here, the story is all about D503 and how he breaks away from the bliss everybody is living in and falls in love, the fact that he has never had these feelings before makes the whole experience more traumatic for him.

I have enjoyed reading this even though it was tough going at times, it is worthy of 3.5 stars. Sometimes I was confused with what was going on and then I was blown away by some amazing writing....

"IT IS CLEAR TO EACH OF US THAT TAKING THEIR VOICES INTO ACCOUNT WOULD BE AS RIDICULOUS AS TAKING THE ACCIDENTAL COUGHS OF SICK PEOPLE IN A CONCERT AS A PART OF A MAJESTIC, HEROIC SYMPHONY..."

One of those books I'm glad to have read.

Great story. I love the keywords for each record, and I smiled at all of the the running mathematical analogies (especially D's fear of and trepidation at the "irrational root").

I was surprised at how much the story made me think of other stories, despite knowing before reading it that it has influenced a number of better known tales. The world of "We" is incredibly well constructed, and there are a number of jarring juxtapositions: the writing of a semi-surreptitious journal among the panopticon beehive that leaves almost no privacy; the sexual belonging of one's body to everyone except, apparently, one's self; the assignment of titles like Benefactor and Builder in a society that supposedly shuns class division and individual distinction; even the pacing of the story, from D's initial rational pursuit of his thoughts to the rapid and sometimes scattered, even fragmentary, narrative near the end.

The story is a bit confusing at times. I had to re-read the incidents aboard the Integral, and I'm still not entirely clear what happened, though I think I got enough to understand how the ending plays out.

Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote his seminal dystopian novel We (1921) based on his personal experiences during the two Russian revolutions (1905 and 1917) and the first World War. The book ended influencing dystopian authors like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. This book not only influenced the dystopian genre but could also be the influence towards the post-apocalyptic genre as this was set in a world where all was wiped out but “0.2% of the earth's population”. The book is set in ‘One State’ which has been organised to be a workers' paradise; everything has to work like clockwork and everything is based on logic and mathematics. This society is heavily surveillanced, has martial law and is heavily censored; a totalitarian world.

The protagonist, D-503, is an engineer who begins writing a journal (much like in 1984) to document Integral, the spaceship being built to invade other planets. D-503 is under constant surveillance by the Bureau of Guardians (the secret police) as is everyone else. He is assigned a lover O-90, but ends up having an uncontrollable attraction to I-330. This leads to nightmares and furthermore into what could be considered a mental illness. I-330 reveals to D-503 a world that was previously unknown to him. Will he hang onto hope or will reason get the better of him?

We was an impressive novel; not only with the themes that it explores but also with the technology and the simple fact that it was years and years ahead of its time. While some say We was released in 1920 and others 1921, there is no denying that, because of the subject matter, this was an impressive piece of literature. If it wasn’t for this book we may never of been able to enjoy Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) or even Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952). By today’s standards this book would be overlooked but something innovative and so complex to be written so long ago makes this worth a read.

This book is the first, the original novel of a dystopian future. Written in 1921, it was banned in Russia (where it was written) for 50+ years. It's told in the form of journal entries by the mathematician D-503, who lives in a completely regulated, mechanized society where every minute of every citizen's day is scheduled, and where lack of imagination and lack of individuality are seen as the highest virtues. Citizens themselves are referred to as ciphers or digits, to emphasize their lack of importance relative to the needs of the entire society.

As the book progresses, D-503 meets I-330 and is introduced for the first time in his life to strong emotions, independent thinking, and the possibility that their society is not the best solution. As D-503 becomes more confused his journal entries also become more disjointed and hard to follow in places, I am not sure how much of this is due to translation from the original Russian and how much is just representing the confusion of his thoughts.

This book was a strong influence for Orwell's 1984 and it was interesting to read for that reason alone, but it's an interesting story in its own right.