George Orwell
Review of “WE” by E. I. Zamyatin
Several years after hearing of its existence, I
have at last got my hands on a copy of Zamyatin's We, which is one of
the literary curiosities of this book-burning age. Looking it up in Gleb
Struve's Twenty-Five Years of Soviet Russian Literature, I find its
history to have been this:
Zamyatin, who died in Paris in 1937, was a Russian novelist and
critic who published a number of books both before and after the
Revolution. We was written about 1923, and though it is not about Russia
and has no direct connection with contemporary politics--it is a
fantasy dealing with the twenty-sixth century AD--it was refused
publication on the ground that it was ideololgically undesirable. A copy
of the manuscript found its way out of the country, and the book has
appeared in English, French and Czech translations, but never in
Russian. The English translation was published in the United States, and
I have never been able to procure a copy: but copies of the French
translation (the title is Nous Autres) do exist, and I have at last
succeeded in borrowing one. So far as I can judge it is not a book of
the first order, but it is certainly an unusual one, and it is
astonishing that no English publisher has been enterprising enought to
reissue it.