Zamyatin Centenary
The Utopia of Us – celebrating 100 years of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We
By Teika Marija Smits
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My first encounter with the works of George Orwell was at school, when I read Nineteen Eighty-Four for my English Literature GCSE. Despite thirty years having passed, I still have a clear memory of standing at the front of the class and giving an impassioned talk about the horrors of the world Winston inhabits; the brutality of The Party. In some ways Orwell’s fictional world felt very personal to me, no doubt due to the fact that my mother had escaped from the U.S.S.R. just before I was born.
Two decades later, when discussing my continued fascination with Nineteen Eighty-Four on Facebook, a friend suggested I read We by Yevgeny Zamyatin because of its influence on Orwell. I promptly bought myself a copy, keen to discover what many regard as the classic dystopian novel. As I wrote in the introduction to The Utopia of Us, “It was both 1984 and not 1984. It was every dystopian film I’d watched, and yet so much deeper, richer. It was also poetic, passionate, and absurd. In other words, very Russian.”
Deeply moved by the novel and conscious of the fact that 2024, fast approaching, was to be the centenary of the first publication of We, I wanted to somehow mark the event. Having edited a number of themed speculative fiction anthologies in the past, there was an obvious project ahead of me. Right from the start, I began to call my envisaged We-inspired anthology The Utopia of Us, and although the publisher and I discussed the possibility of other titles it kind of stuck, as though the book had already claimed this name.
I asked a few science fiction authors I greatly admire if they’d like to contribute a story (which some graciously did), but the rest of the stories were chosen from an open call for submissions with a view to selecting stories that deeply resonated with me and which would sit alongside the other stories in the anthology to make a pleasing whole. The stories differ greatly in terms of plot, tone and style yet, unsurprisingly, virtually all the stories – whatever their time or milieu – feature an act of rebellion, whether that rebellion is brought about by the desire for romantic or maternal love; a longing to express oneself through art or to savour a different kind of food.
Zamyatin, who experienced life under two totalitarian regimes – the autocracy of the Russian Empire and Soviet communism – abhorred violence. A fiercely independent thinker, critical of both Tsar and State, he was imprisoned by both regimes. Given Russia’s current war with Ukraine, the publisher and I felt it only right to donate royalties from the book to the Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal.
I very much hope that this anthology directs more readers to Zamyatin’s ground-breaking novel.
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The Utopia of Us, edited by Teika Marija Smits, is published by Luna Press.
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George Orwell heard of We, but it took him considerable effort to locate a copy and read it. He published this account of it in 1946, to which the Orwell Foundation have appended Gleb Struve’s additional notes.
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