'Happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.'

Yevgeny Zamaytin’s We (1920-21) is often cited as the first dystopian novel and was acknowledged by George Orwell to have inspired both Animal Farm and 1984. We is a powerfully inventive tale that foreshadowed some of the worst oppression perpetrated in Soviet Russia and remains a resounding cry for individual freedom.

In a glass-walled world in the twenty-sixth century, the totalitarian OneState is a society where individuality is suppressed and conformity is enforced through strict rules and surveillance. Through the journal entries of Mathematician D-503, the narrative explores the protagonist’s journey from unquestioning obedience to the state to questioning its rigid control to experiencing human emotions and discovering he has a soul.

A hugely influential dystopian novel that was suppresssed in Russia for decades, We is a haunting tale of rebellion against totalitarian control.

Russian author and political dissident Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884–1937) was a former Bolshevik who became a critic of Soviet conformity, and was censured for his uncompromising literary defiance. When We was blacklisted by the Soviet censorship board, Zamaytin arranged for it to be smuggled to the West for publication, an act that ultimately led to his exile from his homeland. He died in poverty in Paris.