We

First written in Russian in 1920 and first published in English in 1924, 'We' is a dystopian novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin, a Russian author of science fiction, philosophy, literary criticism, and political satire.

The story takes place hundreds of years into a gloomy future, where the citizens live under the total control and surveillance of a police state, called One State. The country is made almost entirely out of glass, which makes it easier for the government to watch every move of its citizens.

Citizens are expected to march in step, wear the prescribed uniforms, and are only able to refer to each other by their assigned numbers, rather than names. The main character is D-503, a mathematician who lives willingly under One State's strict rules until he meets and falls in love with I-330, a rebel who lives her life with the creativity and lust prohibited and feared by One State.

Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884 - 1937) was a Russian author best known for his science fiction and political satires. After his 1921 futuristic novel, 'We', was banned by the Soviets for its politics, it was surreptitiously published in the West. The original manuscript was also smuggled to Prague, creating a controversy in the USSR. Zamyatin, who also worked as an editor and who was responsible for translating writers such as Jack London, was then blacklisted from publishing in his native country. In 1931, Zamyatin was exiled to Paris and died in poverty. His most famous work, We, is credited as the inspiration behind George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ayn Rand's Anthem, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano.