We is set in a world built by the handful of survivors of a 200-year war, a world where individuality, imagination and privacy are no longer available. Sex, and families are tightly controlled, and set on a rigid, state-controlled schedule. Smoking, drinking and other “vices” are completely unheard of.
The storyline, though is oddly familiar.
A party functionary, who is recording his experiences in a journal, lives in a future fascist society which maintains its solidarity by compulsory attendance at public events dominated by a remote, all-powerful leader. He meets a woman, a secret rebel who expresses her revolutionary impulses through her sexuality, and the two of them carry on an affair in a room in an old house, which symbolizes what life was like in the days before the new society. The man becomes a revolutionary too, but still has doubts, and, after undergoing a mind-violating experience, betrays his lover and the revolution too.
This is the base story for We, as well as 1984, by George Orwell.
I am a huge fan of George Orwell, and have read 1984 and Animal Farm several times. 1984 has excellent concepts such as the NewSpeak, the way in which the party limits the language so people do not even have the tools for ThoughtCrime, as even thinking the ideas of revolution are dubbed a crime. The Ministry of Truth which peddles lies, the Ministry of Peace which runs the War… all great, original ideas. And set in a believable world, not far removed from a post-war Britain.
But the overarching story framework is a straight lift from We. It was used by Orwell as the framework of 1984 a good twenty-five years after Zamyatin wrote We. Orwell had read the french translation of We a few years before he wrote 1984, and reviewed it for a magazine too. He acknowledged the influence of We in interviews too.
All told, 1984 is an easier read than We, as the latter uses a lot of mathematical analogies to demonstrate the extremely logical and rational thinking of the protagonist. 1984 has an unforgettable starting sentence, and an equally unforgettable ending too.
It is worth mentioning that We was not Soviet state approved. The manuscript was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in western Europe in Russian, and also translated into several languages. It was not officially allowed to be published in the USSR until 1988, just a couple of years before USSR ceased to be.