We, Yevgeny Zamyatin
We, Yevgeny Zamyatin
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We
The book that inspired Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World

Author: Yevgeny Zamyatin

Narrator: Charles Featherstone

Unabridged: 7 hr 14 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/07/2024


Synopsis

In a utopian future society, where all social unrest has been engineered away, a man has an awakening. Starting as a happy worker drone, he meets a woman who reveals to him the reality of life outside the state's control - the glories of chaotic nature in the world and in the heart. They become entwined with a conspiracy against the state, and eventually try to escape beyond the walls of the state's control... only to meet betrayal, failure, and a dark ending in the glorious light of the state's total control.
Sound familiar? It's probably because you've read Orwell's nineteen eighty-four, which he wrote eight months after he read We, wrote a review of it, and said he was taking it as the model for his next novel. Or Huxley's Brave New World.
Or maybe you've read Vonnegut's Player Piano, which of Vonnegut said he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We". You might even have come across other plays on the theme, such as Ayn Rand's Anthem or Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading, written while Nabakov was reading We. Or even possibly Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed.
The tale is familiar, but the satirical and farcical comedy is a delight all of its own.

Author Bio

Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937) was a naval architect by profession whose lifetime spanned both tsarist and communist Russia, both of which forced him into exile. He wrote short stories, plays, and essays, but is best known for his dystopian masterpiece We, which was written in 1920-21 and soon translated into most of the world's languages, but did not appear in Russia until 1988. Other notable works include The Islanders, A Fisher of Men, and A Provincial Tale.

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