We
First British edition, 1970
We first appeared in English in Gregory Zilboorg's 1924 American translation for E. P. Dutton, which remained the only English-language version available for nearly fifty years. This Jonathan Cape edition of 1970 is the first British publication of the novel and introduced a new translation by Bernard Guilbert Guerney, accompanied by an introduction and bibliographical note by Michael Glenny, one of the foremost scholars of Russian literature of his generation. Glenny's contributions give this edition particular scholarly weight: his bibliographical note was among the first serious attempts in English to document the novel's complicated publication history and its long suppression in the Soviet Union. Guerney's translation, which aims for greater fidelity to Zamyatin's modernist prose style than Zilboorg's earlier rendering, was the standard British text until subsequent translations appeared in later decades.
Despite being published forty-six years after the American first edition, the Cape edition represents the novel's genuine introduction to British readers in book form and is the natural collecting landmark for the British side of the novel's publishing history.
Hardcover. First British Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth, stamped in gilt on spine. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970. ISBN: 022461794x. #10432.
Fine in a near fine dust jacket, lightly rubbed with minor edgewear.
Despite being published forty-six years after the American first edition, the Cape edition represents the novel's genuine introduction to British readers in book form and is the natural collecting landmark for the British side of the novel's publishing history.
Hardcover. First British Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth, stamped in gilt on spine. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970. ISBN: 022461794x. #10432.
Fine in a near fine dust jacket, lightly rubbed with minor edgewear.
Additional Details
Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote We in 1920-21, in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution, drawing on his own experience as a man who had lived under both tsarist and Bolshevik authority and found neither tolerable. He had been exiled under the tsar for revolutionary activity; the Bolsheviks would eventually exile him too, for writing this book. The manuscript circulated privately in Russia and was translated into several languages during the 1920s, but Soviet censors blocked any domestic publication. Zamyatin was subjected to a sustained campaign of official harassment and suppression, and in 1931, with Stalin's permission secured through a personal letter appealing directly to him, he left the Soviet Union for Paris, where he died in 1937, largely forgotten, having published nothing of significance in his final years.
The novel takes the form of a diary kept by D-503, builder of the Integral, a spacecraft being constructed by the United State to carry its ideology of mathematical perfection to other worlds. D-503 begins his records as a true believer. The United State, ruled by the Well-Doer, has achieved what its citizens consider the ultimate human accomplishment: the elimination of freedom. Citizens are known by numbers rather than names. Their days are regulated by the Table of Hours. Their living quarters are transparent glass. Sexual partners are assigned by the Council of Eugenics on designated Sex Days, with pink coupons authorizing the temporary lowering of blinds. The operative logic is that the curve is inferior to the straight line, the individual inferior to the collective, and that freedom is the root of unhappiness rather than its cure.
The novel's psychological engine is D-503's gradual disintegration as a reliable narrator. He meets I-330, a woman of deliberate, almost theatrical defiance, who drinks alcohol, smokes cigarettes, and wears an ancient dress to taunt the State. She draws him into a conspiracy connected to the Mephi, a rebel movement seeking to breach the Green Wall that separates the city from the natural world beyond. As D-503 is pulled deeper into complicity and feeling, his mathematical certainties begin to crack. He discovers he has a soul, which his doctors describe as a disease. He cannot integrate his new experience into the equations he has always used to understand the world.
Zamyatin constructs the novel's structure around D-503's records, numbered and subtitled in the manner of a bureaucratic report, a formal choice that systematically undermines itself as the entries grow more fractured and desperate. The language shifts from the clipped, geometric prose of a man who thinks in formulas to something increasingly broken, associative, and frightened. The style is literary modernism in service of political argument: the form of the narration is itself a record of a consciousness being destroyed by the forbidden experience of individuality.
The book's intellectual sources are wide. Zamyatin drew directly on Frederick Winslow Taylor's theories of scientific management, which had fascinated Russian industrialists and planners in the early Soviet period, and which he saw as a blueprint for the mechanization of human beings as well as labor. He drew on H. G. Wells, whose scientific romances he had reviewed and translated, and on Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, whose Underground Man anticipates D-503 as a figure driven to irrationality by the suffocation of systematized reason. The ancient house, the only opaque building remaining in OneState, where D-503 and I-330 meet in secret, is Zamyatin's image of everything the regime has tried to bury: memory, privacy, the past.
The novel's influence is pervasive and well-documented in some cases, disputed in others. Orwell read We in French before writing Nineteen Eighty-Four and left a detailed essay on it, noting both its power and what he saw as its weaknesses relative to Huxley. Huxley always maintained he had not read We before writing Brave New World, though the structural parallels are substantial enough that the claim has been widely doubted. Ayn Rand's Anthem, written in 1937, shares its numbered protagonist and collectivist future state, though Rand also denied direct knowledge of the book. Whether through direct influence or the shared air of the 1920s and 30s, We sits at the origin point of an entire literary tradition.
Gregory Zilboorg, who produced this first English translation, was a Russian-born American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who would later become one of the most prominent figures in American psychiatry. His translation work on We was done early in his American career, and it remained the only English version available for nearly fifty years, until Mirra Ginsburg produced a new translation for Viking Press in 1972. Zilboorg's rendering has its peculiarities, as translations of the period often do, but it is the text through which the English-speaking world first encountered the novel, and the version that shaped its initial reception and reputation.
The novel takes the form of a diary kept by D-503, builder of the Integral, a spacecraft being constructed by the United State to carry its ideology of mathematical perfection to other worlds. D-503 begins his records as a true believer. The United State, ruled by the Well-Doer, has achieved what its citizens consider the ultimate human accomplishment: the elimination of freedom. Citizens are known by numbers rather than names. Their days are regulated by the Table of Hours. Their living quarters are transparent glass. Sexual partners are assigned by the Council of Eugenics on designated Sex Days, with pink coupons authorizing the temporary lowering of blinds. The operative logic is that the curve is inferior to the straight line, the individual inferior to the collective, and that freedom is the root of unhappiness rather than its cure.
The novel's psychological engine is D-503's gradual disintegration as a reliable narrator. He meets I-330, a woman of deliberate, almost theatrical defiance, who drinks alcohol, smokes cigarettes, and wears an ancient dress to taunt the State. She draws him into a conspiracy connected to the Mephi, a rebel movement seeking to breach the Green Wall that separates the city from the natural world beyond. As D-503 is pulled deeper into complicity and feeling, his mathematical certainties begin to crack. He discovers he has a soul, which his doctors describe as a disease. He cannot integrate his new experience into the equations he has always used to understand the world.
Zamyatin constructs the novel's structure around D-503's records, numbered and subtitled in the manner of a bureaucratic report, a formal choice that systematically undermines itself as the entries grow more fractured and desperate. The language shifts from the clipped, geometric prose of a man who thinks in formulas to something increasingly broken, associative, and frightened. The style is literary modernism in service of political argument: the form of the narration is itself a record of a consciousness being destroyed by the forbidden experience of individuality.
The book's intellectual sources are wide. Zamyatin drew directly on Frederick Winslow Taylor's theories of scientific management, which had fascinated Russian industrialists and planners in the early Soviet period, and which he saw as a blueprint for the mechanization of human beings as well as labor. He drew on H. G. Wells, whose scientific romances he had reviewed and translated, and on Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, whose Underground Man anticipates D-503 as a figure driven to irrationality by the suffocation of systematized reason. The ancient house, the only opaque building remaining in OneState, where D-503 and I-330 meet in secret, is Zamyatin's image of everything the regime has tried to bury: memory, privacy, the past.
The novel's influence is pervasive and well-documented in some cases, disputed in others. Orwell read We in French before writing Nineteen Eighty-Four and left a detailed essay on it, noting both its power and what he saw as its weaknesses relative to Huxley. Huxley always maintained he had not read We before writing Brave New World, though the structural parallels are substantial enough that the claim has been widely doubted. Ayn Rand's Anthem, written in 1937, shares its numbered protagonist and collectivist future state, though Rand also denied direct knowledge of the book. Whether through direct influence or the shared air of the 1920s and 30s, We sits at the origin point of an entire literary tradition.
Gregory Zilboorg, who produced this first English translation, was a Russian-born American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who would later become one of the most prominent figures in American psychiatry. His translation work on We was done early in his American career, and it remained the only English version available for nearly fifty years, until Mirra Ginsburg produced a new translation for Viking Press in 1972. Zilboorg's rendering has its peculiarities, as translations of the period often do, but it is the text through which the English-speaking world first encountered the novel, and the version that shaped its initial reception and reputation.
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