We

Description

The classic Russian dystopia that inspired Nineteen Eighty-Four and influenced writers from Nabokov to Rand to Vonnegut. In a glass city composed of absolute straight lines, ruled over by the all-powerful 'Benefactor', the citizens of OneState live their lives without passion or agency. That is until D-503, a man tasked with bringing the Revolution to the stars, meets a remarkable woman . . . Supressed in Russia for decades, Zamyatin's dystopian masterpiece prophesised the worst excesses of the Soviet Union, while creating an enduring and vivid vision of what future societies might look like - a vision which would inspire George Orwell's 1984 and many subsequent dystopias.

Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937) was a naval engineer by profession and writer by vocation, who made himself an enemy of the Tsarist government by being a Bolshevik, and an enemy of the Soviet government by insisting that human beings have absolute creative freedom. He wrote short stories, plays and essays, but his masterpiece is We, written in 1920-1921 and soon thereafter translated into most of the languages of the world. Clarence Brown was a pioneer of Russian literature studies and translation. His brilliant translation of We was based on the corrected text of the novel, first published in Russia in 1988 after more than sixty years' suppression.

The best single work of science fiction yet written -- Ursula K. Le Guin We is a shapely work of the imagination. As the first major anti-utopian fiction it famously stood both the Soviet Union and the Wellsian scientific romance upside down. * Kirkus *