Böcker av Yevgeny Zamyatin

A radical new translation of the dystopian classic that influenced George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, introduced by Margaret Atwood

In a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, ruled over by the all-powerful 'Benefactor', the citizens of the totalitarian society of OneState live out lives devoid of passion and creativity - until D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers, makes a discovery: he has an individual soul. Set in the twenty-sixth century AD.

Written in a highly charged, direct and concise style, Zamyatin's 1921 seminal novel - here presented in Hugh Aplin's crisp translation - is a prefiguration of much of twentieth-century history and a harbinger of the ominous future that may still lay ahead of us.

From the stark depictions of rural Russia in 'Provincial Life' to the vivid portrayal of an artillery unit in 'At the End of the Earth', from stories such as 'The Cave' and 'Mamai', describing the terrible conditions endured by the citizens of Petrograd in the years of the civil war, to 'X', a light-hearted, slightly absurdist example of metafiction, through to the sombre tones of the final story in this volume, 'Flood', this volume collects some of the best fiction by the celebrated author of We.Presented in a brand-new translation by Hugh Aplin, these stories - some of them never translated before into English - show why Zamyatin's oeuvre as a whole is worthy of greater recognition today, not just for the context it affords readers of his most famous novel, but also for the light it can shed on Russian literature, culture and society of its time - as well as, most importantly, for its own intrinsic merit.

1984. Brave New World. A Clockwork Orange. These are the dystopian novels we know. But before these was the Russian masterpiece We, the novel that foreshadowed and influenced them all. In a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, ruled by the all-powerful "Benefactor," the nameless citizens of OneState live without passion or creativity, regulated and watched by their totalitarian masters. Without such order, their leaders claim, happiness is impossible. Freedom brings misery. And the collective "we" is all that matters. But one day, D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers, makes a discovery: he has an individual soul.

D-503 is the Builder of the Integral, the United State¿s first spaceship. A life of calculations and equations in the United State leaves little room for emotional expression outside of the pink slips that give one private time with another Number. The façade however starts to crack when I-330, a mysterious she-Number with a penchant for the Ancients, enters the picture.We, Yevgeny Zamyatin¿s fourth novel, was written in 1920¿21, but remained unpublished until its English release in 1924 due to conditions in the Soviet Union at the time (it was eventually published there in 1988). Its dystopian future setting predates Orwell¿s 1984 and Huxley¿s Brave New World, and it¿s now considered a founding member of the genre. It has been translated into English and other languages many times; presented here is the original 1924 translation by Gregory Zilboorg.

We is a dystopian novel written by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. Originally drafted in Russian, the book could be published only abroad. It was translated into English in 1924. Even as the book won a wide readership overseas, the author?s satiric depiction led to his banishment under Joseph Stalin?s regime in the then USSR. The book?s depiction of life under a totalitarian state influenced the other novels of the 20th century. Like Aldous Huxley?s Brave New World and George Orwell?s Nineteen Eighty-four, We describes a future socialist society that has turned out to be not perfect but inhuman. Orwell claimed that Brave New World must be partly derived from We, but Huxley denied this.The novel is set in the future. D-503, a spacecraft engineer, lives in the One State which assists mass surveillance. Here life is scientifically managed. There is no way of referring to people except by their given numbers. The society is run strictly by reason as the primary justification for the construct of the society. By way of formulae and equations outlined by the One State, the individual?s behaviour is based on logic.

Yevgeny Zamyatin's page-turningscience fictionadventure, a masterpiece of wit and black humor that accurately predicted the horrors of Stalinism,Weis the classic dystopian novel that became the basis for the tales of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Margaret Atwood, among so many others. Its message of hope and warning is as timely at the beginning of the twenty-first century as it was at the beginning of the twentieth.In the One State of the great Benefactor, there are no individuals, only numbers. Life is an ongoing process of mathematical precision, a perfectly balanced equation. Primitive passions and instincts have been subdued. Even nature has been defeated, banished behind the Green Wall. But one frontier remains: outer space. Now, with the creation of the spaceshipIntegral,that frontier -- and whatever alien species are to be found there -- will be subjugated to the beneficent yoke of reason.One number, D-503, chief architect of theIntegral,decides to record his thoughts in the final days before the launch for the benefit of less advanced societies. But a chance meeting with the beautiful 1-330 results in an unexpected discovery that threatens everything D-503 believes about himself and the One State. The discovery -- or rediscovery -- ofinnerspace...and that disease the ancients called the soul.

Set in a future under a unified totalitarian state, in a society ruled by conformity and where humans are identified by their assigned number, spaceship engineer D-503 must face his beliefs about the One Party head-on in this page-turning adventure.

But over the course of his journal D-503 suddenly finds himself caught up in unthinkable and illegal activities - love and rebellion. Banned on its publication in Russia in 1921, We is the first modern dystopian novel and a satire on state control that has once again become chillingly relevant.

"[Zamyatin's] intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism- human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself-makes [We] superior to Huxley's [Brave New World]."-George OrwellTranslated by Natasha Randall • Foreword by Bruce Sterling Written in 1921, We is set in the One State, where all live for the collective good and individual freedom does not exist. The novel takes the form of the diary of mathematician D-503, who, to his shock, experiences the most disruptive emotion imaginable: love. At once satirical and sobering-and now available in a powerful new translation-We is both a rediscovered classic and a work of tremendous relevance to our own times.