Евгений Иванович Замятин

1917 thru 1977 has witnessed a great deal of literary ferment in Soviet Russia, as well as a major "third emigration" of writers to the West--including, of course, the great figure of the period, Solzhenitsyn. Marc Slonim's comprehensive critical survey of the Soviet literary scene since 1917--widely acclaimed upon its original publication in 1964--now puts into social and historical context this diffuse literary activity.

Wikipedia We is set in the future. D-503, a spacecraft engineer, lives in the One State, an urban nation constructed almost entirely of glass, which assists mass surveillance. The structure of the state is Panopticon-like, and life is scientifically managed F. W. Taylor-style. People march in step with each other and are uniformed. There is no way of referring to people except by their given numbers. The society is run strictly by logic or reason as the primary justification for the laws or the construct of the society. The individual's behavior is based on logic by way of formulas and equations outlined by the One State. We is a dystopian novel completed in 1921. It was written in response to the author's personal experiences with the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, his life in the Newcastle suburb of Jesmond and work in the Tyne shipyards at nearby Wallsend during the First World War. It was at Tyneside that he observed the rationalization of labor on a large scale.

Thirty-four contemporary short stories, most of them published for the first time in English.

Analyse : Nouvelles