We
Glossary
D
- D-503
- The novel's narrator, chief builder of the spaceship Integral and a mathematician devoted to logic and the United State. He begins his Records as a hymn to the state's perfection but watches his own rational voice crack as he falls for I-330.
- Related: I-330, The Integral
F
- Fancy
- The United State's official name for imagination and inner emotional life, diagnosed near the novel's end as a curable disease originating in a specific brain center — the target of the Great Operation.
- Related: The Great Operation
G
- Gregory Zilboorg
- The translator of this 1924 English edition of We — the first published edition of the novel anywhere, appearing in English years before any Russian-language edition existed because Soviet censors suppressed the original.
I
- I-330
- A sharp, unpredictable woman who draws D-503 out of his ordered life and, it becomes clear, is a leader in the underground resistance against the United State. She takes him to the Ancient House and beyond the Green Wall, awakening the 'soul' the state considers a disease.
- Related: D-503, Mephi, The Ancient House, The Green Wall
L
- Lex Sexualis
- The United State's three-century-old law regulating sex: any Number may obtain a pink ticket to use any other registered Number as a 'sexual product' on their scheduled days, eliminating jealousy by eliminating romantic exclusivity.
- Related: O-90, The Table of Hours
M
- Mephi
- The name of the underground resistance movement (evoking Mephistopheles) that opposes the United State, whose name D-503 finds pasted in white sheets across walls, steps, and railway cars as its uprising begins to surface.
- Related: I-330, The Green Wall
N
- Numbers
- The United State's term for its citizens, who are identified by letter-and-digit designations (D-503, I-330, O-90) rather than names, reflecting a society organized around interchangeable, standardized units rather than individuals.
- Related: The One State, Unif
O
- O-90
- D-503's registered sexual partner, a gentle, round woman ten centimeters under the state's Maternal Norm, which disqualifies her from bearing children. Her longing for a child she is forbidden to have pushes her toward her own quiet act of defiance late in the novel.
- Related: D-503, Lex Sexualis
R
- R-13
- A State Poet with 'the lips of a negro,' D-503's old friend and O-90's other registered partner, whose verses celebrate the multiplication table and the Well-Doer — poetry as state service rather than personal expression.
- Related: O-90, The Well-Doer
S
- S-4711
- A Guardian with a double-curved, S-shaped figure who shadows D-503 throughout the novel, alternately seeming to protect and to surveil him. His true loyalties stay ambiguous until near the end.
- Related: The Bureau of Guardians
T
- The Ancient House
- A pre-revolutionary building preserved behind glass as a museum piece, cluttered with 'irrational' furniture, books, and a statue of Buddha. I-330 uses it as a meeting place and, D-503 later learns, a hidden entrance beyond the Green Wall.
- Related: The Green Wall, I-330
- The Bell
- A glass chamber used to interrogate suspected dissidents by pumping out the air until they either confess or lose consciousness, employed on I-330 in the closing chapter as she is questioned before D-503 without breaking.
- Related: The Machine of the Well-Doer, I-330
- The Bureau of Guardians
- The United State's secret police, tasked with monitoring Numbers for signs of independent thought or 'illness' and to whom citizens are expected to report both others' infractions and their own, including sexual encounters and suspicious associations.
- Related: S-4711, U-
- The Day of Unanimity
- The United State's annual 'election' day, on which every Number ceremonially votes to reconfirm the Well-Doer in office — a ritual D-503 compares to the ancients' Easter, prized for its unbroken record of total unanimity.
- Related: The Well-Doer
- The Great Operation
- A new mandatory procedure announced late in the novel, in which X-rays burn out the small brain center responsible for 'Fancy' — imagination — promising to make every Number as free of inner conflict as a machine. D-503 undergoes it in the final chapter.
- Related: The Well-Doer, The Machine of the Well-Doer
- The Green Wall
- The vast glass barrier separating the engineered, denatured city of the United State from the wild, unregulated natural world outside it. Crossing it, as I-330 leads D-503 to do, is both a literal and symbolic act of rebellion.
- Related: The One State, The Ancient House, Mephi
- The Integral
- The glass, fire-breathing spaceship D-503 is chief builder of, intended to carry the United State's 'mathematically faultless happiness' — by force if necessary — to other worlds. Its completion becomes entangled with the resistance's plan to seize it.
- Related: D-503, The One State
- The Machine of the Well-Doer
- The United State's public execution device, which reduces a condemned Number to a puddle of chemically pure water before an assembled crowd — punishment recast as a scientific process rather than a violent one.
- Related: The Well-Doer, The Bell
- The One State (United State)
- The glass-walled, totally surveilled society D-503 lives in, where citizens are Numbers rather than named individuals, days are scheduled by the Table of Hours, and mathematical Reason has replaced both religion and personal freedom.
- Related: The Well-Doer, The Table of Hours, The Green Wall
- The Table of Hours
- The United State's master schedule, which governs citizens' days down to the minute — waking, marching, eating, working, sleeping — leaving only the 'Personal Hour' unscheduled, the one space in which unforeseen things, like D-503's meeting I-330, can happen.
- Related: The One State, Lex Sexualis
- The Two Hundred Years' War
- The catastrophic war between city and countryside that preceded the United State's founding, fought over food, in which all but 0.2 percent of the world's population died before synthetic petroleum food replaced agriculture.
- Related: The One State
- The Well-Doer
- The all-powerful, unanimously 're-elected' ruler of the United State, worshipped in daily odes and approached via the Machine of the Well-Doer, the execution device used on dissenters. His authority is treated as beyond question, even in the annual sham election called the Day of Unanimity.
- Related: The Day of Unanimity, The Machine of the Well-Doer, The One State
U
- U-
- An older woman assigned to look after D-503 who becomes suspicious of his relationship with I-330 and ultimately reports him to the Bureau of Guardians, believing she is saving him from illness.
- Related: The Bureau of Guardians, D-503
- Unif
- The identical light-blue uniform worn by all Numbers, derived, D-503 notes, from the ancient word 'uniform' — one of many small details through which Zamyatin shows a society that has erased individual distinction.
- Related: The One State