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About this book

A thousand years in the future, the citizens of the One State live in houses of glass, wear identical uniforms, have numbers instead of names, and do everything at the same moment according to the Table of Hours, under the rule of the Benefactor. D-503, a mathematician building the spaceship Integral, keeps a journal in praise of this perfect, rational happiness, until he meets I-330, a mysterious woman who smokes, drinks and laughs, and who leads him to the wild world beyond the Green Wall and to a secret rebellion. To his horror, he discovers that he has developed a soul.

Context and significance

Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote the novel in Soviet Russia in 1920 and 1921; it was banned there, and its first publication was this English translation by Gregory Zilboorg, in New York in 1924. It is the first great modern dystopia, and George Orwell reviewed it before writing Nineteen Eighty-Four. Its ancestor is the optimistic Looking Backward, and Ayn Rand's Anthem follows its path.

About the author