The 1924 diary of a mathematician who discovers he has a soul — and that the glass-walled state he serves cannot survive one.

We

Yevgeny Zamyatin · 1924

Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote We in 1920-21, and Soviet censors banned it outright — it became the first work suppressed by the Soviet censorship board, and this 1924 Zilboorg translation was the novel's first publication anywhere, in English, years before a Russian edition existed. D-503's diary of the One State — glass walls, numbered citizens, synchronized hours, love by ration ticket — is the direct ancestor of Brave New World and 1984, and its central question (can a life engineered for perfect happiness survive the appearance of an individual soul) has lost none of its force.

40 chapters · 61,841 words · ~4.7 hr read