We

by Zamyatin, Yevgeny

• ISBN13: 9780140185850
• ISBN10: 0140185852
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781101078242
• Additional ISBN(s): 9780140167108, 9780380633135, 9780525483236
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1993-08-01
• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• More Book Details

Summary

Before Brave New World... Before 1984...There was... WE In the One State of the great Benefactor, there are no individuals, only numbers. Life is an ongoing process of mathematical precision, a perfectly balanced equation. Primitive passions and instincts have been subdued. Even nature has been defeated, banished behind the Green Wall. But one frontier remains: outer space. Now, with the creation of the spaceship Integral, that frontier -- and whatever alien species are to be found there -- will be subjugated to the beneficent yoke of reason. One number, D-503, chief architect of the Integral, decides to record his thoughts in the final days before the launch for the benefit of less advanced societies. But a chance meeting with the beautiful 1-330 results in an unexpected discovery that threatens everything D-503 believes about himself and the One State. The discovery -- or rediscovery -- of inner space...and that disease the ancients called the soul. A page-turning SF adventure, a masterpiece of wit and black humor that accurately predicted the horrors of Stalinism, We is the classic dystopian novel. Its message of hope and warning is as timely at the end of the twentieth century as it was at the beginning.

Author Biography

Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (1884-1937) was a naval architect by profession and a writer by nature. His favorite idea was the absolute freedom of the human personality to create, to imagine, to love, to make mistakes, and to change the world. This made him a highly inconvenient citizen of two despotisms, the tsarist and the Communist, both of which exiled him, the first for a year, the latter forever. He wrote short stories, plays, and essays, but his masterpiece is We, written in 1920-21 and soon thereafter translated into most of the languages of the world. It first appeared in Russia only in 1988. It is the archetype of the modern dystopia, or anti-utopia; a great prose poem on the fate that might befall all of us if we surrender our individual selves to some collective dream of technology and fail in the vigilance that is the price of freedom. George Orwell, the author of 1984, acknowledged his debt to Zamyatin. The other great English dystopia of our time, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, was evidently written out of the same impulse, though without direct knowledge of Zamyatin’s We.
Clarence Brown is the author of several works on the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. He is editor of The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader, which contains his translation of Zamyatin’s short story “The Cave,” and of Yury Olesha’s novel Enpy.
Clarence Brown is the author of several works on the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. He is editor of The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader, which contains his translation of Zamyatin’s short story “The Cave,” and of Yury Olesha’s novel Enpy.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Zamyatin and the Rooster

Notes to Introduction

Suggestions for Further Reading

Announcement

The Wisest of Lines

An Epic Poem

Ballet

Harmony Squared

X

Jacket

Wall

The Table

Savage with Barometer

Epilepsy

If

Square

Rulers of the World

Pleasant and Useful Function

Accident

Damned "Clear"

24 Hours

An Eyelash

Taylor

Henbane and Lily of the Valley

The Irrational Root

R-13

Triangle

Liturgy

Iambs and Trochees

Cast-Iron Hand

Letter

Membrane

Hairy Me

No, I Can't...

Skip the Contents

Limitation of Infinity

Angel

Reflections on Poetry

Fog

Familiar "You"

An Absolutely Inane Occurrence

"Mine"

Forbidden

Cold Floor

Bell

Mirror-like Sea

My Fate to Burn Forever

Yellow

Two-Dimensional Shadow

Incurable Soul

Through Glass

I Died

Hallways

Logical Labyrinth

Wounds and Plaster

Never Again

Third-Order Infinitesimal

A Sullen Glare

Over the Parapet

Discharge

Idea Material

Zero Cliff

An Author's Duty

Swollen Ice

The Most Difficult Love

Frozen Waves

Everything Tends to Perfection

I Am a Microbe

Flowers

Dissolution of a Crystal

If Only

Limit of Function

Easter

Cross It All Out

Descent from Heaven

History's Greatest Catastrophe

End of the Known

The World Exists

A Rash

41[degree] Centigrade

No Contents - Can't

Both Women

Entropy and Energy

Opaque Part of the Body

Threads on the Face

Shoots

Unnatural Compression

The Final Number

Galileo's Mistake

Wouldn't It Be Better?

The Great Operation

I Have Forgiven Everything

A Train Wreck

I Do Not Believe

Tractors

The Human Chip

(No Time for Contents, Last Note)

Those on Leave

A Sunny Night

Radio-Valkyrie

In a Hoop

Carrot

Murder

Blank Pages

The Christian God

About My Mother

Infusorian

Doomsday

Her Room

(I Don't Know What Goes Here, Maybe Just: A Cigarette Butt)

The End

Facts

The Bell

I Am Certain

Translator's Notes

Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.