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We:

New Edition
Front Cover
92 Reviews
Penguin Group USA, 1993 - Fiction - 221 pages

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.

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A very artificial writing style.. - Goodreads
It was a little difficult to read. - Goodreads
There were also some big plot holes. - Goodreads
The selection wasn't great at that time.) - Goodreads
Unfortunately, the writing is kind of terrible. - Goodreads
I don't mind the story so much as the prose. - Goodreads

Review: We (Ausgewählte Werke in vier Bänden #3)

User Review  - Andrea Bartlett - Goodreads

I really expected a good read here, but despite this I really didn't enjoy this book, for a couple reasons. I found the author's style vague and unclear, and several times I found myself reading ... Read full review

Review: We (Ausgewählte Werke in vier Bänden #3)

User Review  - Leo Walsh - Goodreads

I am not quite sure why, but I found Zamyatin's We , considered by many to be a classic of dytopian literature, profoundly disappointing. The narrative is poorly structured, and it traces the ... Read full review

All 87 reviews »

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About the author (1993)

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.

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