This day in history: Yevgeny Zamyatin died on this day in 1937. He wrote the book We which foreshadowed Ayn Rand's Anthem and George Orwell's 1984, about a world in which the State, animated by a collectivist ideology attempts to eradicate individuality. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s "We" was first published in English in 1924 (he wrote it in Russian, but it was suppressed in the USSR). In "We", the mathematician D-503 records his thoughts in a world in which individuals are reduced to mere numbers. The slogan of the OneState is “Long live OneState! Long live the numbers! Long live the Benefactor!”
We has often been discussed as a political satire aimed at the police state of the Soviet Union.
George Orwell believed that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) must be partly derived from We. However, in a 1962 letter to Christopher Collins, Huxley says that he wrote Brave New World as a reaction to H.G. Wells' utopias long before he had heard of We. Kurt Vonnegut said that in writing Player Piano (1952) he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We."
In 1994, We received a Prometheus Award in the Libertarian Futurist Society's "Hall of Fame" category.
We, the 1921 Russian novel, directly inspired:
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932)
Ayn Rand's Anthem (1938)[Mayhew R, Milgram S. 2005. Essays on Ayn Rand's Anthem: Anthem in the Context of Related Literary Works. Lexington Books, p.134]
George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952)
Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974)
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