Over the course of his career Zamyatin wrote about forty books, a few of which were quite influential in their time, but he is remembered primarily for one he could not publish. Although he was a naval architect by training, when he was in Great Britain (1916–1917) to supervise the building of Russian icebreakers, he published The Islanders, a satire of the English.

Zamyatin's critical posture was not limited to Russia. The son of a Russian Orthodox priest and a mother who had received a liberal education, he was a constant critic, siding with the Bolsheviks before the revolution and chiding the new government after their victory. It first appeared in Russia only in 1988.Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (1884–1937), who was born in Lebedyan, Tamov district, Russia on February 1, is best known for having written We (1920), the archetypal anti-utopian novel. 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. Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937) was a naval engineer by profession and writer by vocation, who made himself an enemy of the Tsarist government by being a Bolshevik, and an enemy of the Soviet government by insisting that human beings have absolute creative freedom. It was suppressed for many years in Russia and remains a resounding cry for individual freedom, yet is also a powerful, exciting and vivid work of science fiction.Ĭlarence Brown's brilliant translation is based on the corrected text of the novel, first published in Russia in 1988 after more than sixty years' suppression. Set in the twenty-sixth century AD, We is the classic dystopian novel and was the forerunner of works such as George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. In a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, ruled over by the all-powerful 'Benefactor', the citizens of the totalitarian society of OneState live out lives devoid of passion and creativity - until D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers, makes a discovery: he has an individual soul. This Penguin Classics edition is translated from the Russian with an introduction by Clarence Brown.

A seminal work of dystopian fiction that foreshadowed the worst excesses of Soviet Russia, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We is a powerfully inventive vision that has influenced writers from George Orwell to Ayn Rand.