
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
1000 Novels Everyone Must Read: # 1 Best Dystopias The Guardian Fantastic The New York Times A dystopian novel for the 21st century The Week Years before 1984, Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote We - a dystopian nightmare that remains eerily relevant even as Huxley and Orwell seem almost quaint. Salon
The time is around a thousand years from now, and the place is a great city-state in which a mathematically perfect society has been established. People here do not have names, but numbers only. Since they have nothing to hide from each other, they live in buildings made of glass. Their lives are regulated by The Time Tablet, a universal schedule that clearly states which number should do what at a particular hour. The novel starts with a call. As a new spaceship, called Integral, is being built, the One State calls upon its citizens to write something praising their state so that the Integral could carry this message to other civilizations in the depths of the Universe. A 32-year-old mathematician named D-503, who is a Constructor of the Integral and a sincere admirer of the One State, starts a diary to describe his life to his unknown extraterrestrial readers. He writes about FREEDOM and LOVE, CONTROL and HAPPINESS. This diary is the novel itself. EXTRACTYou are afraid of it because it is stronger than you; you hate it because you are afraid of it; you love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved. ...Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative... Yevgeny Zamyatin
Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937) was a Russian author of science fiction and political satire. The son of a Russian Orthodox priest and a musician, Zamyatin studied engineering in Saint Petersburg from 1902 until 1908 in order to serve in the Russian Imperial Navy. During this time, however, he became disillusioned with Tsarist policy and Christianity, turning to Atheism and Bolshevism instead. He was arrested in 1905 during a meeting at a local revolutionary headquarters and was released after a year of torture and solitary confinement. Unable to bear life as an internal exile, Zamyatin fled to Finland before returning to St. Petersburg under an alias, at which time he began writing works of fiction. Arrested once more in 1911, Zamyatin was released and pardoned in 1913, publishing his satire of small-town Russia, A Provincial Tale, to resounding acclaim. Completing his engineering studies, he was sent by the Imperial Russian Navy to England to oversee the development of icebreakers in shipyards along the coast of the North Sea. There, he gathered source material for The Islanders (1918) a satire of English life, before returning to St. Petersburg in 1917 to embark on his literary career in earnest. As the Russian Civil War plunged the country into chaos, Zamyatin became increasingly critical of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, leading to his eventual exile. Between 1920 and 1921, he wrote We (1924), a dystopian novel set in a futuristic totalitarian state. Thought to be influential for the works of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, We is a groundbreaking work of science fiction that earned Zamyatin a reputation as a leading political dissident of his time. With the help of Maxim Gorky, Zamyatin obtained a passport and was permitted to leave the Soviet Union in 1931. Settling in Paris, he spent the rest of his life in exile and deep poverty.
| SKU | Nicht verfügbar |
| ISBN 13 | 9781478375036 |
| ISBN 10 | 1478375035 |
| Titel | We |
| Autor | Yevgeny Zamyatin |
| Buchzustand | Nicht verfügbar |
| Bindungsart | Paperback |
| Verlag | Ingram |
| Erscheinungsjahr | 2012-08-05 |
| Seitenanzahl | 136 |
| Hinweis auf dem Einband | Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden. |
| Hinweis | Nicht verfügbar |