We (ISBN 0380633132)

Forget 1984 or Brave New World:
No need for Orwell or Huxley. If you're interested in dystopian science fiction, then this is your bag. It predates those other classic novels, for it was released in 1924, but was subject to much censorship within the Russian realm in which it was rendered. This book is a lot of fun, and carries a lot of the weight those other novels had, but with an extremely fantastic poetic prose, greatly translated by Clarence Brown. You will get a kick out the "Benefactor", "OneState", the "Greenwall", the savages beyond the wall, their glass city in which they live, The "Ancienthouse", etc. You will see how much was actually lifted from this novel by other more credited authors. Don't miss it!

We All Live in a Glasshouse:
Peering into the omniscient mind of Yevgeny Zamyatin I discovered an incurable Dystopia, a dormant civilization and an almost mirror image of our American society today. Zamyatin's strikingly modern novel seems to be more poignant and reflective of the world in which we live in now, than the early 20h century Russian oppressive government that inspired this work. When I read We the first time the characters (who were named with a letter followed by a number) seemed robotic and emotionless just as their names allowed. The protagonist D-503, however, slowly reveals his primal urges as he depicts the life he leads in this world. The obstruction to an unknown world within himself, (as well as in the physical world) which he must penetrate with deep introspection, is the barrier that he ultimately defeats. However, as the story unravels, the consequences of this come to fruition. Zamyatin's ability to not only use perfect plot devices (i.e love triangles and the heroes journey) but to relate everything in this cold and sterile mechanistic society to mathematics opens up an entirely different read. Upon my second reading I reveled in the subtleties of these numerical correlations as it began to morph into an entirely different book. Out of any science fiction novel, this book is by far my favorite. It poses the most valid and relevant questions that can be applied to any discourse regarding modern society on the cusp of dystopia. In my reading I found that the greatest question the novel will ultimately pose for the reader is: Must we sacrifice our human nature for a "utopian" world?

The square root of negative one:
I have the square root of negative one tattooed on my shoulder because of this book. We" was a predecessor to George Orwell's dysotopic novel "1984". "We" tells the story of "D-503", a mathematician and engineer living in a society where everything a person did, down to the number of times a person brushed their teeth, was controlled by a master plan and a central authority. D-503 began the novel a perfect subject of the central authority. For him, the power and organization of central authority was synonymous with the power of the rules of mathematics. Both were absolute. When he first encountered the square root of negative one though, D-503 became frustrated, because there was something that mathematics couldn't answer: a limit to knowledge, a limit to what the rules could do. In the totalitarian world that D-503 lived in, it meant that there were things that the central authority would never be able to control or understand. By the end of the novel, D-503 had come to embrace the square root of negative one. He learned that the unknown and the unknowable are as important to existence as the known and the knowable. "We" was written by Yevgeny Zamiatin at the time of the Communist Revolution in Russia. It was the first book banned in the Soviet Union, and it remained banned until 1988. The square root of negative one means that there will always be things beyond the rules. It means there are the things that will always elude control and remain wild, and there are no final revolutions.

Minimalist masterpiece of real genius:
Genius is an overworked term and should be used discriminately but We is truly the masterpiece of a real genius. Zamyatin was certainly well qualified to write this parable of a totalitarian dystopia, given his creative repression by Soviet censors during the time of Stalin. Zamyatin must be given credit for his courage to write Stalin and request self-exile since publication was impossible inside Communist Russia. And Stalin was wise to grant it because this novel is a powerhouse as a diatribe against dehumanizing government, portrayed here as OneState. One can feel the expression of the soul in the heat of the storyline and in the characters yearning for freedom despite the all-encompassing control exercised in their daily lives by OneState: "The only means to rid man of crime is to rid him of freedom." The citizens have numbers rather than names and are ruled by the Benefactor, a leader who is above the law. The hero, D-503, is the builder of a great space craft and discovers that he has become sick: "You're in bad shape. It looks like you're developing a soul." D-503 considers the unknown the enemy of man and "Homo sapiens is not fully man until his grammar is absolutely rid of question marks, leaving but exclamation points, commas and periods." The hero is a bewildered genius, like Zamyatin, whose brilliance OneState needs but whose intellect also poses a threat to OneState. "Who knows who you really are? A person is like a novel: up to the very last page you don't know how it's going to end." What is the role of the individual talent within the context of the controlling power of OneState? How does the I fit into the We? Or as Zamyatin asks: "Who is this 'we'? Who am I?" The problem for OneState is this: "The mechanism has no imagination." So does OneState value imagination among its citizens as much as it needs it? It turns out that D-503's illness is "imagination." And the cure for imagination is... well, you'll just have to read the novel to find out. The translation by Clarence Brown of Princeton is incredibly lucid, natural and inspired in leaving the careful minimalism of the novelist to understatement which has the effect of empowering the language. Lately, I've been reading the 20th century Russians who were so repressed in their time that their novels simmer and seethe with brilliance. Orwell was inspired by Zamyatin and I promise you that so will you. This novel has rare, raw power, which shouldn't be overlooked: read the genius of Zamyatin in We.

"We" is "1984"-lite (another reader's thoughts):
Much has been said about "We" - after all, it's been around since the early 1920s. While it is an established literary fact that Orwell's "1984" was inspired by Zamyatin's "We," I'd like to "caution" the reader who has already read "1984:" "We" is a "1984"-lite. If you are jonesing for an other dose of Orwellian Dystopian Goth, you won't find it in Z's "We." Zamyatin was fortunate enough to write before the Stalinist purges of the Soviet 30s - and, as a result, he had been spared the real Big Brother extremism that Orwell had witnessed USSR go through. Therefore, "We" is less dystopic in its effect. It is also a bit less philosophical than the "1984." It does, however, make a couple of intriguing "mathematical" contributions. Whereas "1984" is infamous for its "2+2=5" equation, "We" offers a psychologically astute examination of love through the following algebraic function: L = f(D), where L stands for Love and D for death. An indeed, if Love is a process of disidentification from oneself, in parallel with the growing identification with the "we" of the relationship, then it could be certainly posited that the birth of Love is accompanied by a dissolution of Self (which, in psychological terms, can be equated with a kind of phenomenological Death). Is this "L = f (D)" issue Zamayatin's criticism of Collectivism, Love or, perhaps, Buddhism (after all, Buddhism with its "Oneness" too could be viewed as a dissolution of Self; note Z. mentions Buddha at least a dozen times)? Who knows, but I certainly found this deconstruction of love psychologically intriguing. A couple of side notes: "OneState" - I think - is a very fitting translation of Edinnoye Gosudarstvo; even if not exactly correct, even if, perhaps, slightly connotationally liberal, the meme of "OneState" goes right along with the collectivist one-state-of-mind idea that pervades Z's dystopian society. Not being a Zamyatin buff, I am not sure if anything has been written about the apparent racism of Z's protagonist who seems to have an aversion to his poet-friend's African lips (the poet's name in the book is alpha-numeric, as everyone's, and starts with R). Zamyatin references in the book the great Russian poet, Pushkin, who was half-African and I wondered if R is Pushkin, a rebel-poet, and I was expecting him to die in a duel (with D-503, since Pushkin died in a duel, and there seemed to be clearly a romantic tension b/w D-503 and R, as the two were part of the triangle with I-330). But it didn't play out that way - although D-503 did wrestle I-330 out of R's arms at one of the most climactic moments of the book. Once again, not being a "We" buff, I was left wondering if the letter part of the alpha-numeric names had any connotational loading (with R, by way of poet/Pushkin association, begging for the association with romanticism, in contrast with D's own "r" of rationalism). And as a final side note about the imbedded racism of "We," allow me to note Zamyatin's first name: Evgeni - which, of course, stems from eugenics, "good genes." If we were to assume that D-503, the protagonist, is a psychological corrolary of Zamayatin himself, then D-503's struggle with his atavistically hairy hands, with his own "drop of forrest blood" might be of additional interest in terms of understanding the psychology of the author. In sum, I find the book to be, indeed, a literary/cultural treasure, but not necessarily better than its Orwellian echo. It's a little thinner on character development (protagonists are less dimensional); a bit more chaotic in terms of the plot-line (D-503's records are almost too graphomaniacally flighty to be the primary vehicle for the plot-line, in contrast with Winston's "diary" that is never more than a rib cage to the backbone of the story). In the tradition of evaluating "We" in light of "1984," I am leaning towards the following conclusion: sometimes the copy is better than the original. Pavel Somov, Ph.D. Author of "Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time" (New Harbinger, 2008)