In the twenty-sixth century, in Zamyatin’s vision of it, the inhabitants of Utopia have so completely lost their individuality as to be known only by numbers. The atmosphere of the two books is similar, and it is roughly speaking the same kind of society that is being described, though Huxley’s book shows less political awareness and is more influenced by recent biological and psychological theories. Both books deal with the rebellion of the primitive human spirit against a rationalised, mechanised, painless world, and both stories are supposed to take place about six hundred years hence.

The first thing anyone would notice about We is the fact-never pointed out, I believe-that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World must be partly derived from it. So far as I can judge it is not a book of the first order, but it is certainly an unusual one, and it is astonishing that no English publisher has been enterprising enough to re-issue it. The English translation was published in the United States, and I have never been able to procure a copy: but copies of the French translation (the title is Nous Autres) do exist, and I have at last succeeded in borrowing one. A copy of the manuscript found its way out of the country, and the book has appeared in English, French and Czech translations, but never in Russian. We was written about 1923, and though it is not about Russia and has no direct connection with contemporary politics-it is a fantasy dealing with the twenty-sixth century A.D.-it was refused publication on the ground that it was ideologically undesirable.

Zamyatin, who died in Paris in 1937, was a Russian novelist and critic who published a number of books both before and after the Revolution. Looking it up in Gleb Struve’s 25 Years of Soviet Russian Literature, I find its history to have been this: Several years after hearing of its existence, I have at last got my hands on a copy of Zamyatin’s We, which is one of the literary curiosities of this book-burning age.

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