We

The Glass City and What It Sees

The One State is built of glass. Every wall, every apartment, every surface is transparent — not as aesthetic choice but as political architecture. If you can see everything, there is nothing to hide; if there is nothing to hide, there is no privacy; if there is no privacy, there is no self. Zamyatin understood, writing in Soviet Russia in 1920–21, that the totalitarian project was not primarily about violence. It was about the elimination of interiority.

D-503’s world is organized around this principle with the precision of a mathematical proof. Citizens are not named but numbered. Their schedules are published and uniform. Sexual access to other Numbers is allocated by pink ticket, administered by the state. The few hours designated as Personal Hours feel indistinguishable from the scheduled hours, because behavior that cannot be hidden is behavior that cannot deviate. Zamyatin’s Glass City anticipates the panopticon not as metaphor but as lived architecture — and he grasped something Bentham missed: the surveillance does not need to be active to function. The knowledge that it could be watching at any moment is sufficient.

D-503 as Unreliable Narrator

D-503 is the engineer overseeing construction of the Integral, a rocket the One State intends to export its civilization to other planets aboard. He begins his diary as an act of propaganda — a record of the perfection of One State life, intended for alien readers who have not yet been rationalized. This frame is important: the diary was never meant to be honest. It was meant to be a demonstration.

What happens instead is that D-503 meets I-330, a woman who engineers feelings in him he cannot name or account for. His mathematical worldview — in which every problem has a solution, every desire can be resolved by its satisfaction, every emotion classified and discharged — has no framework for what she does to him. The prose tracks this failure in real time. Early entries are geometrically precise, the sentences demonstrating the order they describe. Later entries fragment: dashes proliferate, sentences break mid-thought, the mathematical metaphors that once organized his perception begin contradicting each other. The form of the writing is the diagnosis.

This makes D-503 one of the most carefully constructed unreliable narrators in the century. He does not lie to us in the conventional sense — he genuinely cannot see what he is describing. His certainty about One State’s perfection and his certainty that his feelings for I-330 are a sickness are both sincere and both wrong in ways the reader can identify even when D-503 cannot. Zamyatin trusts his reader to read against the narrator, and the trust is rewarded.

The Literary Ancestry

George Orwell read We in a French translation in 1946 and reviewed it for Tribune, noting its clear relationship to Huxley’s Brave New World but arguing that Zamyatin’s was the more original and more powerful book. He acknowledged the influence when writing 1984. Huxley maintained throughout his life that he had written Brave New World in 1931 without having read We; the claim is disputed, and the structural similarities — the conditioned society, the sexual freedom as control mechanism, the dissident whose rebellion is partly erotic — are substantial enough that the question remains open.

What matters for the reader is that both 1984 and Brave New World are more legible, more navigable, and in certain ways less strange than We. They inherited its architecture and smoothed it. The glass surveillance city becomes the telescreen becomes the panopticon — but the telescreen and the panopticon are additions to a world that otherwise feels comprehensible. In Zamyatin, the glass is the world. There is no before. And Zamyatin was writing from inside a system that actually existed, not speculating about one that might, which gives the terror in We a specific gravity his descendants could not replicate.

Reading We alongside 1984 or Brave New World is one of the more instructive literary exercises available: you can watch ideas transmit across decades, see what each writer kept and what they needed to normalize, and arrive at a clearer understanding of what the genre is actually for.

The Difficulty and Why It Repays Patience

We is not an easy book. The deliberate fragmentation of D-503’s prose style, the alien context of 1920s Soviet constructivism, the significant variation between available translations, and the intentional cold alienation of a narrator who has been raised to experience warmth as pathology — all of these create friction that the more accessible dystopias Zamyatin inspired do not. This is worth knowing before you begin.

It is also worth knowing that the difficulty is the book’s argument. A narrator who has had his interior life surgically removed cannot write with warmth or fluency, and a reader who feels the effort required to inhabit his perspective has experienced something the plot alone cannot deliver. The discomfort is not incidental. Zamyatin built it into the structure because he was writing about what it costs to be a self in a world organized to prevent selfhood — and that cost needed to be felt, not merely described.

Patient readers will find in We the origin of a literary tradition and a formally radical novel that remains, a century on, stranger and more unsettling than most of what it spawned.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — The founding text of literary dystopia, harder and darker than its famous descendants, with a formal intelligence that makes its horror feel inescapable rather than imagined.