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What It's About

Centuries in the future, the One State has replaced individual names with numbers, individual homes with glass-walled apartments, and individual will with the Table of Hours, a rigid schedule that governs every waking moment. D-503, a mathematician and engineer working on a rocket meant to carry the One State's ideology to other worlds, begins keeping a diary intended as propaganda for that mission. His orderly world starts to unravel when he meets I-330, a woman connected to an underground resistance, and finds himself drawn into feelings, doubts, and desires that the state has no place for.

Key Concepts

The novel explores the conflict between reason and feeling, mapping the One State's obsession with mathematical order and predictability against the messiness of human desire and imagination. It's a foundational critique of enforced collectivism and mass surveillance, written as a direct response to the direction of early Soviet society, and it established many of the tropes later used in dystopian fiction, including glass architecture as a metaphor for total transparency and a numbered, deindividuated citizenry.

About the Author

Yevgeny Zamyatin was a Russian novelist and naval engineer, trained in St Petersburg. Though he was an early Bolshevik and was arrested and exiled under the Tsarist regime, he became increasingly disillusioned with the authoritarian direction of the Soviet state after the revolution. His writing brought him into direct conflict with Soviet authorities, leading to censorship and blacklisting. He was eventually granted personal permission from Stalin to leave the country, and he died in Paris in 1937, in poverty.

About This Edition

This is a 1924 translation by Gregory Zilboorg.