We
First edition, Etting copy, 1924
We is widely regarded as the first fully realized archetype of the modern dystopian novel. Written in 1920-21 and suppressed by Soviet censors before it could appear in Russian, it first reached print in English in 1924 in Gregory Zilboorg's translation for E. P. Dutton. The Russian text was not published in book form until 1927, in Prague, and did not appear in the Soviet Union itself until 1988. This Dutton first edition is therefore the world first edition in any language.
This copy of the Zilboorg first edition belonged to Emlen Pope Etting Jr. (1905–1993), an American painter, sculptor, and filmmaker associated with Philadelphia's Main Line social circle. Etting signed and dated the book in 1925 on both the front free endpaper and the copyright page, placing his ownership within a year of publication. He also assembled what amounts to a small contemporary reception archive within its leaves: clippings of reviews from the New York Times (January 20, 1925) and the Harvard Crimson, carefully mounted, along with a striking portrait of Zamyatin by the Russian artist Yuri Annenkov, reproduced in the Times review. The additions give this copy an interest that goes beyond association. Etting was an engaged reader rather than a casual one, and what he preserved here documents how the novel was received by American readers and critics in the months immediately following its publication. The Annenkov portrait is a particularly evocative detail: Annenkov was himself a significant figure in the Russian avant-garde, a friend of Zamyatin's, and his portrait of the author appeared in the Western press at precisely the moment the novel was making its first impression on English-language readers.
The book shows expected wear from age but is otherwise sound. Without jacket, as is almost invariably the case with this edition.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth, stamped and ruled in gilt. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1924. #11276.
A solid copy in good condition. Spine worn with gilt lettering largely faded. Interior clean and bright, presenting well. Lacking the exceedingly scarce original dust jacket, but accompanied by a fine facsimile jacket.
This copy of the Zilboorg first edition belonged to Emlen Pope Etting Jr. (1905–1993), an American painter, sculptor, and filmmaker associated with Philadelphia's Main Line social circle. Etting signed and dated the book in 1925 on both the front free endpaper and the copyright page, placing his ownership within a year of publication. He also assembled what amounts to a small contemporary reception archive within its leaves: clippings of reviews from the New York Times (January 20, 1925) and the Harvard Crimson, carefully mounted, along with a striking portrait of Zamyatin by the Russian artist Yuri Annenkov, reproduced in the Times review. The additions give this copy an interest that goes beyond association. Etting was an engaged reader rather than a casual one, and what he preserved here documents how the novel was received by American readers and critics in the months immediately following its publication. The Annenkov portrait is a particularly evocative detail: Annenkov was himself a significant figure in the Russian avant-garde, a friend of Zamyatin's, and his portrait of the author appeared in the Western press at precisely the moment the novel was making its first impression on English-language readers.
The book shows expected wear from age but is otherwise sound. Without jacket, as is almost invariably the case with this edition.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth, stamped and ruled in gilt. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1924. #11276.
A solid copy in good condition. Spine worn with gilt lettering largely faded. Interior clean and bright, presenting well. Lacking the exceedingly scarce original dust jacket, but accompanied by a fine facsimile jacket.
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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