�We� is the dystopia with elements of satire, written in 1920 � 1921 by Yevgeny Zamyatin. "We" is one of his most important works. �True literature can only exist when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics� (article �I am afraid�). It was a Zamyatin's literary credo. The novel became its art embodiment.

The novel has not been published in the USSR because contemporaries took it as a malicious caricature on a socialistic and communistic society of the future. Besides, the novel contained references on some events of civil war (�war between a city and village�). In the late twenties persecution campaign on the side of literary authorities fell in Zamyatin. �The literary newspaper� wrote: �Y. Zamyatin should understand that simple thought that the country of socialism which is under construction can manage without such writer�.

�We� is well-known to American and French readers where it has been published in twenties. The novel had an influence on George Orwell�s �1984� and Aldous Huxley�s �Brave New World�. In 1952 �We� was published in Russian in New York�s Publishing house named in honour of Anton Chekhov. In Russia it appeared only in 1988.

The novel�s plot develops in the twenty sixth century. The protagonist, engineer D-503 describes his life in totalitarian One State which is headed by the Benefactor. The state is situated in a city isolated from other world by the Green Wall, wild wood. Inhabitants are not allowed to visit it. The type of the One State is a traditional symbolical type of an urbanite utopia. Glass and concrete buildings remind the constructions described in Nikolay Chernyshevsky�s novel �What to do?�. The type of a "glass" city is connected also with futuristic projects of creation the handmade artificial world (for example, in creativity of Khebnikov and Kruchenych).

At the beginning D-503 (he is one of the multitude of �numbers�) describes the organization of life of society based on the mathematician with delight. He doesn�t know that there is another life Green Wall, the apartments with glass walls, without The State Newspaper, Bureau of Keepers and all-powerful Benefactor. But his life changes seriously after the meeting with revolutionary I-330.

Socially-utopian motives of the novel go back to myths about the Golden Age, to rationalistic utopias of the New Time. But the One State reminds a carefree society of the Golden Age only outwardly. There the people who saved after Two Hundred Years� War (the 0,2 percent of the population of the Earth) are provided by all necessary things. The mention that only small part of people uses the blessings of the utopia, has something in common with Peter Verhovensky�s from �Demons�  (Fyodor Dostoevsky) reasoning. He thought that only the 0,1 of  mankind would prosper. The others would work for them remaining in a primitive condition.

In the One State everybody lives under the strict laws � The Table regulating the people�s behavior of in all trifles. The life is extremely rationalized. People are completely deprived of the rights to a family and private life. Love is reduced to satisfaction of the physical needs. It is regulated by pink coupons from the doctor. Instead of names inhabitants have only numbers. In the One State there is a common strict regime. Each person is under control which is carried out by the secret police, called Keepers.

The motives of cults and the rituals the participants of which feel some kind of enthusiasm play an important role in the novel. For "numbers" the Benefactor is not only the executioner, but also a deity supporting the people. Executions in the One State are organized like magnificent celebrations. Such "festivals" become a compensation for life of fear which is led by the "numbers".

Bible motives are also traced in the novel. The Unanimity Day (elections) is named by Easter. The hero is thirty two years old; he is for one year younger than the Christ at the moment of his death. The name of the heroine begins with this missing unit. The hero is not capable to suffer for people. At the beginning of the novel looking in a mirror D-503 sees a cross on his forehead. Then he sees twice a cross on the face of I-330 who finishes her way by ascent of Golgotha. Her crucifixion is the Machine of the Benefactor. The divisions of the novel on forty records and a temporary wall on the forth avenue are not accidental. The number forty is sacral (forty day�s prayers for the dead and forty-day ordeals of the soul before the  final decision of its destiny).

Often there is a number three, going back to bible symbolic. The �numbers� are occupied with �building a God�, a conscious designing of a myth in order to create a new religion and to confirm a cult of Antichrist.

It is possible to name Zamyatin�s �We� the novel-warning. Warning against such future which becomes if all goes how has begun. The fears of the writer had the serious bases under themselves. The revolutionary society was really ready to reject all universal culture, morals and psychology as individualistic. The new "proletarian" culture, new morals and psychology were represented as entirely collectivist, absolutely not connected with the world of the person. And the "new" proletarian mass was also represented as the depersonalized, deprived individual experiences, knowing only class feelings. Researchers drew a parallel between Zamyatin�s �We� and reasoning of Gastev, one of the theorists of proletarian culture, who founded ��the amazing anonymity, allowing to qualify separate proletarian unit as A, B, C or as 375, 075, 0, etc in proletarian psychology�. Gastev predicted in the near future the rise of such working "collectives-complexes", �in which as though already there is no human individual person, and there is � faces without an expression, a soul deprived lyrics, the emotion measured not by shout, not laughter, but by a manometer�.

In the description the One State the author speak ironically about the belief in doctrines of �proletcult� which are preached by "proletarian thinkers�: a boundless possibilities of a science, a collectivism, etc. Zamyatin showed the danger of the person�s transformation in �the normalized worker� who should give all forces only to collective and a service to the prime targets, for example the conquest of the Universe by means of a science and techniques.

The site is made by Tatyana  Klushenkova and Alyona Shumkova