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Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote his novel We inspired by Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, expanding Dostoevsky’s dense and original ideas to construct his own dystopian world.
We takes place a thousand years after a great revolution that brought to power the One State—an era in which humankind has finally subdued the Earth, driven back every natural element, and enclosed itself behind protective walls to keep out the wilderness it now sees as alien and hostile. Nature, untamed and uncontrollable, remains beyond the Wall, while humanity lives within it.

In the world of We, human beings are no longer made of flesh and blood but have become numbers—geometric shapes rather than individuals. They live in glass houses, where uniformity, order, and harmony are held as the highest virtues.

The story’s protagonist, D-503, is the chief engineer and builder of the Integral, a spacecraft that the One State plans to launch into space to bring its “superior civilization” to other worlds—spreading happiness through rational order. In preparation for this mission, D-503 decides to record his thoughts in a series of diary entries. He praises the mathematical precision and mechanical rhythm of their society: the steady turning of gears, the synchronized movements of workers, and the rational beauty of a perfectly ordered life. In this utopia, everything and everyone serves a clear, logical purpose.

But an accidental encounter with a mysterious woman shatters D-503’s carefully structured world. She speaks to him about something long forgotten—the soul, a strange and dangerous condition that allows humans to imagine and dream. The awakening of this forbidden “illness” turns his world upside down, revealing cracks in the seemingly perfect order of the One State.

It is widely known that George Orwell drew inspiration from We when writing his own classic dystopian novel, 1984, refining many of Zamyatin’s ideas in his own style. Since its publication, We has profoundly influenced writers and thinkers across generations, and its extraordinary imaginative power has secured its place as a timeless masterpiece of Russian literature.