Review: We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

This book clearly inspired George Orwell’s 1984. We was published more than 20 years before 1984, and Orwell even published a review of We a few years before publishing 1984!

Consider the basic outline of We:

• A futuristic, dystopian society called OneState
• An all controlling government that believes freedom to be evil
• The government maintains strict control over every aspect of society, such as work (everyone operates on the exact same schedule), sex (the government assigns sexual partners), fun (drinking, smoking, etc are forbidden), etc
• There are many required “events” for everyone to attend, such as public executions
• The government is ruled over by a mysterious leader called The Benefactor
• Everyone lives in glass buildings so they can constantly watched by the Bureau of Guardians
• The protagonist is enticed to rebel against this society by a woman he meets
• The two make love in an old house that resembles life before the dystopian society came about
• The protagonist writes his rebellious thoughts in a journal
• (Spoiler alert) The protagonist ends up being caught and forced to undergo a procedure to remove his rebellious tendencies

Try swapping out a few names (e.g., replace OneState with Oceania, The Benefactor with Big Brother, Bureau of Guardians with Thought Police), and bam, you’ve got 1984.

Both books explore what happens when you take nationalism and totalitarianism to their logical extremes. However, they each have different takes on it. We seems to be more influenced by industrialization, exploring a society that tries to solve all problems by treating humans as cogs in a giant machine (“tractors in human form”) and turning itself into the perfect factory:

• Instead of names, everyone in OneState has a letter followed by a series of numbers: e.g., the protagonist is named D-503, his lover is named I-330.
• Everyone in OneState operates according to the exact same schedule: waking up at the same time, going to work at the same time, taking walks at the same time, going to bed at the same time.
• Sex is also done according to a rigid schedule. Everyone is assigned sexual partners by the government and they are allowed to have sex only on a set schedule. Babies are taken away to be raised by the state.
• Anything that gets in the way of efficiency is eliminated. E.g., Smoking and alcohol are illegal; dreaming is considered a sign of a mental illness; (spoiler alert) later in the story, the “Great Operation” becomes mandatory, which uses X-rays to remove the parts of the brain responsible for emotion and imagination.

It’s an interesting tale, but has a tendency to feel absurd at parts. It’s hard to imagine humans acting as perfect, neat, orderly automatons. Real society is just too messy, unpredictable, and corrupt for that. This is where 1984 seems like the more compelling, believable tale, as most of the focus is on precisely this messiness and the way the government fights against normal human impulses: e.g., propaganda, mass surveillance, censorship, thought control, perpetual war, rewriting history, and so on.

I also found the writing style of We to be a bit jarring; D-503 has a tendency to express part of a thought and suddenly cut off, leaving many things implied, but unsaid. That can be effective in some parts, where you can see the danger of expressing the full thought and easily fill in the missing parts yourself, but it’s used so much throughout the book that it quickly gets irritating.

That said, it’s still an interesting read overall, if for no other reason than to understand some of the inspiration for 1984, which is one of my favorite books of all time.

Rating: 4 stars