54 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I am he as you are he as you are me, August 1, 2006
This review is from: We (Modern Library Classics) (Paperback)
and we are all together.
The Beatles' "I am the Walrus" provides some flavor for the atmosphere of the futuristic society found in Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian classic "WE". Written in the fledgling Soviet Union in 1920 "WE" had a direct influence n Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Ayn Rand's Anthem. In fact, Rand's Anthem tracks "WE" so closely both as to plot and character development that one cannot help but think that Zamyatin's influence on Rand was significant, to say the least.
Zamyatin was born in 1884 and studied naval engineering as a young man. Like many young Russian intellectuals Zamyatin was something of a revolutionary. He was arrested and exiled more than once by the Tsar's secret police for revolutionary activities. During the First World War Zamyatin, by now a naval enginner, was sent to England were he supervised the construction of icebreakers for the Russian navy. He returned to Russia upon the outbreak of the October 1917 revolution. Zamyatin turned to writing full time after the revolution. Although a Bolshevik, Zamyatin chafed at the increasing censorship the Bolsheviks imposed on artists and writers. WE was the first novel to be banned by the newly formed literary censorship board, GLAVLIT. WE was not officially published in Russia or the USSR until 1988. Not able to earn a living as a writer in the USSR, Zamyatin applied for an exit visa. Zamyatin was granted an exit visa and he emigrated to Paris, were he died a sick and poverty stricken man in 1937.
WE takes place in the twenty-sixth century where a totalitarian regime has created an extremely regimented society where individual expression simply does not exist. All remnants of individuality have been stripped from its inhabitants including their names. Their names have been replaced with an alpha-numeric system. People are not coupled. Rather, each individual is assigned three friends with whom they can have intimate relations on a rigid schedule established by the state. Those scheduled assignations are the only times the shades in a citizen's glass houses can be closed. Apart from those hourly intervals everyone's life is monitored by the state. As in Orwell's 1984, language has been turned on its head. Freedom means unhappiness and conformity and the submission of individual will to the state means happiness.
D-503 is a mathematician. He is busily engaged working on the construction of a spaceship, the Integral, which will carry the wonderful benefits of "The One State" to those living on distant planets. He keeps a diary to provide a record of his feelings in the weeks before the launch. But into his perfectly well-structured life walks I-330. She evokes in D-503 feelings which he has long suppressed or never knew he had. He falls in love, can't sleep, and starts breaking rules and generally acting like most of us do today. But I-330 is a heretic, an individual who smokes, drinks, loves carnal knowledge and seeks nothing more but the dissolution of the One State. The next thing you know D-503 finds himself on the side of revolution. As the book reaches it climactic moments questions as to the failure or success of the revolution are answered.
WE was a fascinating book to read. Some of the language is a bit dated and Zamyatin's 1921 idea of what the future might look like has been outstripped by the reality the 20th and 21st-centuries. However, the underlying themes of conformity v. freedom and "the state" v the individual still have great contemporary significance that keeps WE as fresh as it was when originally written.
Some have said that WE represented Zamyatin's attack on the oppression of the Soviet system. I would have to disagree. The book was written in 1920 well before the Soviet regime consolidated enough power to be considered a totalitarian society. Further, even though WE contains some reference to the damage caused by regimes such as the fledgling USSR it also contains references (looking back from the 26th-century) to societal ills caused by both capitalism and organized religion. As such, Zamyatin believed in equal opportunity when it came to instruments of oppression.
At the end of the day it seems that what Zamyatin valued most in society were those people willing to play the role of heretic. It certainly was a trait he valued in artists. As he noted in an essay written in 1919:
True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.
Zamyatin was a heretic, a dreamer, and a rebel. WE is a worthy monument to a person who believed that the individual was more important than the state without regard to whether that state had `all life's answers'. WE should be enjoyed by anyone who has read and liked H.G. Wells (who influenced Zamyatin), Huxley, or Orwell. This is a book worth reading.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Mixed Feelings about this Classic, September 6, 2007
This review is from: We (Modern Library Classics) (Paperback)
I was very excited about reading this book. The premise sounded engaging. This book is remarkable for the time period in which this was written, and that it clearly formed the foundation and inspiration for many dystopian writers to come. The story seems visionary and predictive of many social trends that would follow. For these things, I loved the book.
However, my interest for the story and the writing style waned in the first 100 pages. It started to feel a little slow, and the cryptic style became a little repetitive after awhile. After a fast start, I found my reading pace slowing down to a crawl, and I reluctantly stopped reading. I wanted to enjoy this book much more than I did. Even though I stopped reading, I gave it 4 stars because of the groundbreaking premise and inspiration it provided. The interest clearly hasn't waned for many.
This classic is definitely worth a try - it may well catch fire for you as it has for so many others.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good, but..., October 28, 2008
This review is from: We (Modern Library Classics) (Paperback)
We is an intriguing dystopian work-in fact it is the original dystopian work. In this world, as the title suggests, there is only "we", and while "ciphers" (that is the not-so-individual individuals) use "I" as a grammatical convenience, they are merely the units of the whole. Everything is carefully regimented: times for various activities are prescribed to the second, even the number of times a piece of food is chewed is dictated and performed in unison. Everything is sterilely clean, perfectly ordered, and utterly logical.
The format of the story is that of the journal of a particular cipher, D-503, who begins writing in order to send a description of life in the One State aboard the Integral (a space ship) to the inhabitants of other planets. The plan backfires as he begins to experience emotions and realizes to his horror that he has somehow acquired a soul and an imagination. He begins to understand that everything might bot be quite as logical as it seems on the surface.
Thus it can be seen that the novel start with a very interesting premise. The reason I gave it four stars, though, is that I liked thinking about the ideas presented by the book more than reading the work itself. Allow me to rephrase that. I am very glad I read this book, but I like it better having finished reading it, and I did not enjoy the actual reading of it as much as I thought I would. The reason for this is primarily how the novel is set up. The use of journal entries is interesting, as are the first-person impressions, but they feel a bit repetitive by the middle of the book. At times the plot also drags a bit. In addition D-503, for all his logic and desire for completeness, has an annoying habit of jotting down his thoughts without finishing them. While used occasionally this device can be very effective in engaging the reader and allowing him to infer what is going on, when used multiple times in every chapter it gets rather tedious. Consider for example:
"Now I understand why I instinctively felt a certain respect for him and a sort of awkwardness, when in his presence that strange I-330 was...I should confess that that I-330 was...The sleep bell is ringing: 22:30."
That said, even if you, like me, are not particularly fond of the way the book is written it is still worth reading for the intriguing concepts it proposes as well as its importance as the foundation for the dystopian genre as a whole.
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