The novel "We" is a dystopian novel written by Russian writer Evgeny Zamyatin in 1921. It is no secret that at the beginning of the last century the political situation in the world left much to be desired, therefore such works were popular not only in Russia but also abroad. It is interesting that in Russia the novel was released only after many years in 1988, since earlier the work was published only in Czech and English in other countries. Work on the novel "We" took place during the Civil War.
The deep, but obvious meaning that E. Zamyatin put into his novel is revealed to the reader from the title: behind the simple pronoun “we” is the Bolshevik collectivism, when an individual did not mean anything, and group decisions and collective activity played a more important role. Heroes of dystopia live in the future of Russia in a thousand years. One of the main topics covered in the novel is human life in the context of totalitarianism. The novel itself is written in the form of entries in a diary owned by an engineer named D-503. Despite this form of writing and the fact that events take place in the distant future, E. Zamyatin, the novel “We” and his characters raise important problems of human life that will always be relevant.
The leading problem is the path to human happiness. The heroes of the novel "We" live in a world that has emerged as a result of the search for a happy life. It would seem that the world dominated by technocracy and collectivism is ideal, however, it is imperfect, as a person loses his personality and is just another cog in a huge mechanism. Lives of people are subordinated to mathematics and are painted by the clock. Man is impersonal. Moreover, instead of names, people are assigned a code in the form of letters and numbers. Importantly, people got used to such orders, they forgot about the naturalness and the need to hide something from each other.
Another problem that the reader encounters is the problem of power. E. Zamyatin puts forth his ideas when describing the Day of Unanimity and the election of the Benefactor. It is strange that people do not even think about choosing someone other than the Benefactor to the position of Benefactor. In addition, they find it strange that once the election results were known after the election.
E. Zamyatin also introduces the situation of revolution into the plot of the dystopian novel. Some workers are not reconciled with the existing state of affairs and are ready to fight the ruler in order to free people from such power.
The protagonist joins the revolutionaries and finds a soul. At the end of the novel, the hero’s beloved woman dies, and he returns to his former “equilibrium” and “happiness” after the operation to remove fantasy.
Thus, E. Zamyatin described the development of totalitarianism. His novel “We” is a warning about what the rejection of personality can lead to. The writer, revealing important issues, showed how destructive a totalitarian state can be and how tragic the lives of those who have fallen to be part of it. The novel "We" (a brief summary can be found on the Internet) is an example of the genre of dystopian novel and makes the reader think about a number of important problems.