Description: A dystopian novel, completed in 1921 as a response to the author's experience with the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. It foreshadows the terrors of Stalinism.
Brief description:
Yevgeny Zamyatin was born in Russia in 1884. Arrested during the abortive 1905 revolution, he was exiled twice from St. Petersburg, then given amnesty in 1913. We, composed in 1920 and 1921, elicited attacks from party-line critics and writers. In 1929, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers launched an all-out attack against him. Denied the right to publish his work, he requested permission to leave Russia, which Stalin granted in 1931. Zamyatin went to Paris, where he died in 1937.
Mirra Ginsburg is a distinguished translator of Russian and Yiddish works by such well-known authors as Mikhail Bulgakov, Isaac Babel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Editor and translator of three anthologies of Soviet science fiction, she has also edited and translated A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, and History of Soviet Literature by Vera Alexandrova.
Review Quotes:
"The founding document of dystopian literature, written in the Soviet Union in 1921, comes in for a fresh translation. . . . Zamyatin's all-seeing state is sufficiently chilling. . . . Translator Shayevich does a good job of preserving [Zamyatin's] affectless, sometimes nearly robotic prose, and the book is highly readable--and indeed should be read. A science-fiction classic, many of whose contours have become all too real." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Though there have been numerous excellent translations of We, Shayevich's best preserves the experimental qualities of Zamyatin's writing. . . . With its sharp, uneven edges and chaotic originality, Zamyatin's novel exposes the notion that human creativity is something that can be quantified, churned into an algorithm and sold as exact science for the fiction that it is."
- New York Times Book Review