Résumé
Résumé de We
À qui s’adresse-t-il ?
For readers who like ideas as much as plot, and anyone curious about where later dystopias such as Nineteen Eighty-Four came from. For anyone drawn to surveillance, forbidden desire and the price of freedom.
De quoi parle ce livre ?
We is a novel by the Russian writer Evgenii Zamiatin, written around 1920 and 1921 in the years after the Russian Revolution and the civil war. It was kept out of print in the Soviet Union and first appeared in English in 1924, then in Russian abroad a few years later. It imagines a state, many centuries from now, in which every person lives in a glass apartment and follows a timetable set by the government.
The story is told through the private notebooks of D-503, a gifted mathematician who builds a spaceship called the Integral. He starts the notebooks as a loyal citizen, proud of the order around him. Then a woman breaks into his calm, and the notebooks begin to record something the State calls an illness. In this summary you will meet the world he lives in, the people who pull him in different directions, and the ideas about freedom and happiness that run under the plot. First, the world of glass and numbers.
Dans ce résumé
- 1A city of glass and numbersFree
- 2Happiness is arranged by the hour
- 3A stranger who laughs at the rules
- 4Reason begins to crack
- 5What the book says about freedom
- 6How the notebooks are written
Point clé 1 sur 6
A city of glass and numbers
The novel opens in the One State, a society that has walled itself off from the natural world behind a great Green Wall. Its people are not called by names. They are Numbers, with a letter and digits, men marked by consonants and women by vowels. They live in apartments with transparent walls, so that anyone can see what they do at any hour.
The narrator, D-503, is the chief builder of the Integral. This ship is meant to carry the message of the One State to other planets, and to bring their people to the same logical happiness, by force if needed. D-503 starts writing his notebooks as a kind of public duty. He wants to describe his world to the unknown beings who will one day read of it.
From the first pages, his voice is proud and exact. He loves straight lines, squares, and the clean beauty of machines. He describes the daily life of the State as a perfect mathematical poem, and he is sure that no reasonable person could want anything else.
The reader soon sees what he does not. The State has a ruler called the Benefactor, who is chosen in an election where there is only one candidate. Its citizens are watched by officials called the Guardians. The calm of D-503 rests on a great deal of fear, and he does not yet know it.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
- Nothing to pay today · Renews every year
- We email you before you pay
- Cancel online in two clicks
Questions about We
Did Orwell copy We when he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four?
Orwell read and reviewed We and wrote that it had likenesses to his own idea. Both show a total state, but the books differ in plot, tone and setting. Most scholars treat We as an important forerunner.
Why was We banned in the Soviet Union?
Soviet censors saw it as a satire on the new state and its demand for obedience. It was refused publication at home, and it first appeared abroad, in English in 1924, then in Russian in the later 1920s.
What does the Integral mean in We?
The Integral is the spaceship that D-503 builds to carry the One State's message to other planets. It stands for the State's belief in reason, machines and the spread of mathematical order.
Is We hard to read?
Its style is quick, odd and full of images and broken sentences. Readers usually find it easy to follow.