We
Rare first, in seldom seen original jacket, 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.
The novel follows D-503, a mathematician and chief engineer of the Integral in the totalitarian OneState, whose encounter with the subversive I-330 cracks open the engineered certainty of his world. Zamyatin's vision of glass-walled cities, omnipresent surveillance, numbered citizens, and the surgical suppression of imagination established the template that Orwell, Huxley, and generations of dystopian writers would draw from. Its influence on Nineteen Eighty-Four is direct and documented. Orwell read We in French in 1944 and wrote a substantial review-essay on it the following year, acknowledging it openly.
No copies in the original dust jacket are recorded in institutional holdings or in the principal rare book auction databases. The survival of any example in jacket must be considered of the utmost rarity.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth, stamped and ruled in gilt. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1924. #11385.
Good copy with some wear and a short split at the rear hinge, in a good original dust jacket with some professional restoration. A small chip on the front panel has been filled using a piece from a facsimile jacket, and there is some infill to minor loss at the base of the spine. Expert mends with Japanese tissue have been applied along the folds and edges where light wear or loss had occurred. The restoration is of high quality, and the jacket presents beautifully. An exceptional example of an exceedingly rare jacket, seldom encountered in any state.
The novel follows D-503, a mathematician and chief engineer of the Integral in the totalitarian OneState, whose encounter with the subversive I-330 cracks open the engineered certainty of his world. Zamyatin's vision of glass-walled cities, omnipresent surveillance, numbered citizens, and the surgical suppression of imagination established the template that Orwell, Huxley, and generations of dystopian writers would draw from. Its influence on Nineteen Eighty-Four is direct and documented. Orwell read We in French in 1944 and wrote a substantial review-essay on it the following year, acknowledging it openly.
No copies in the original dust jacket are recorded in institutional holdings or in the principal rare book auction databases. The survival of any example in jacket must be considered of the utmost rarity.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth, stamped and ruled in gilt. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1924. #11385.
Good copy with some wear and a short split at the rear hinge, in a good original dust jacket with some professional restoration. A small chip on the front panel has been filled using a piece from a facsimile jacket, and there is some infill to minor loss at the base of the spine. Expert mends with Japanese tissue have been applied along the folds and edges where light wear or loss had occurred. The restoration is of high quality, and the jacket presents beautifully. An exceptional example of an exceedingly rare jacket, seldom encountered in any state.
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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