We

First published in the West in 1924, We is an adventurous story of the future nameless "numbers," the two-tenths of the world's population that survived the Great Two Hundred Years War. Their food is derived from petroleum, and they believe that their totally restricted existence under the watchful eye of the Benefactor is the ideal. They do not mourn the passing of the creative human spirit; indeed, they are hardly aware it ever existed. More than half a century later, We remains a strange and telling tragicomedy of love and death. The author, an acknowledged satirist in his own right, set the stage for Orwell's 1984. 'WE,' written in 1921 and 1922, was circulated clandestinely, and even though it was denied publication, 'WE' became one of the most influential and talked-about novels of this century. Zamyatin was exiled under Stalin and died in Paris in 1937.