In this dystopia, imagination is treacherous. Each hour of daily life is dictated wholly by a group called The Table logic and numbers forge the foundations of Zamyatinic society, formed and maintained by the anonymous Benefactor. D-503 and his fellow citizens are carefully watched by the Bureau of Guardians. In classic Orwellian style, Zamyatin’s world is not merely reminiscent but presents a pivotal precursor to the surveillance state. The reader follows D-503, an engineer for the Integral, a spaceship built for the One State to conquer extraterrestrial lands, through his journal writings. After the Two Hundred Years’ War, culminating in the One State’s conquering of the world, its citizens are now reduced to numbers. How interesting then, to discover that Orwell’s novel had a (secret, at least to me) forerunner, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, published twenty-eight years previously in 1921… We’re taught that Orwell wrote with an eye firmly on the future, or at least on his own nightmarish conceptualisation of it, projecting a totalitarian bête noire into the minds of his readers. We all know that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, is considered an archetypal text in the dystopian literary genre.
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