We (novel)
1924 novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin
We (Russian: Мы, romanized: My) is a dystopian novel by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin (often anglicised as Eugene Zamiatin) that was written in 1920–1921. It was first published as an English translation by Gregory Zilboorg in 1924 by E. P. Dutton in New York. The original Russian text was first published in 1952; the novel was not published in Soviet Russia until 1988. The novel describes a world of harmony and conformity within a united totalitarian state, against which the protagonist, D-503 (Russian: Д-503), rebels.
The book is considered a literary masterpiece as well as one of the greatest and most influential works of the 20th century. It influenced the emergence of dystopia as a literary genre. George Orwell said that Aldous Huxley's 1931 Brave New World must be partly derived from We, although Huxley denied this. Orwell's own Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Animal Farm were also inspired by We, as are many other contemporary dystopian novels.
Setting
We is set in the far future. D-503, a spacecraft engineer, lives in the One State, an urban nation constructed almost entirely of glass (presumably to assist with mass surveillance).
The public source identifies “We (novel)” as 1924 novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around novel, Yevgeny and Zamyatin.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q83799. The first chronological checks are 1920, 1921, 1924 and 1952.
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This entry incorporates text from “We (novel)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.