Translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney; Introduction and Bibliographical Note by Michael Glenny
We Translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney; Introduction and Bibliographical Note by Michael Glenny
Jonathan Cape, 1970.
First UK edition. Publisher's grey cloth, lettered gilt to the spine, in the striking pictorial dustwrapper by Stanley Chapman. Top edge black. A fine copy in a fine dustwrapper, remarkably bright and crisp with virtually no wear.
The first appearance of Zamyatin's hugely influential dystopian novel in Britain.
Zamyatin completed the novel in 1920, but as it was censored by the Russian state the first printing of it in any language was an English translation made by Gregory Zilboorg and published by Dutton in New York in 1924. An edition in the original Russian (discounting an erroneous early Czech piracy), did not appear until 1952, and it is from this that Bernard Guerney did the present translation.
It is difficult to overstate the influence of Zamyatin's novel on twentieth century literature, particularly on the landmark dystopian novels Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Huxley owed to Zamyatin not just the conceptual critique of a Utopian future based on disturbing elements of the present, but also the observation of "man's enslavement to the demands of a society whose rationale is that of technology" (Glenny). Orwell, who first read We in a French translation and considered it in some ways superior to Huxley's, saw the book as "a study of the Machine, the genie that man has thoughtlessly let out of its bottle and cannot put back again" - Nineteen Eighty-Four's debt to it requires little further elaboration.
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