Written a decade before Orwell imagined Big Brother and Huxley conjured soma, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We saw the totalitarian century arriving in its glass fortress of perfect reason. The One State has abolished individual names, substituting mathematic designations. Its citizens march in synchronized rows, their lives governed by the Table of Hours, their bodies transparent beneath walls of glass. There is no privacy, no art, noprivate grief. Only the satisfaction of serving the numerical whole. But D-503, architect of the spacecraft Integral, has begun to dream. When the rebellious I-330 teaches him to feel, to question, to desire, he faces an unbearable proposition: to remain a number in the equation of happiness, or to become an irrational, unquantifiable thing called 'I.' Zamyatin's slender masterpiece cracks open the utopian lie with savage wit and genuine anguish, asking whether freedom must feel like madness, and whether the price of peace is always the same.
