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That it inspired famous books is beyond doubt. In his fine introduction, Bruce Sterling writes that with We Zamyatin "has a sound claim to the invention of the science-fiction dystopia"; he is, therefore, to George Orwell and Aldous Huxley what Charles Lyell is to Darwin or even Georges Braque to Picasso: a man notable because of the greater men who extended his path and improved his methods.
If this sounds like rather left-handed praise, it is redeemed by the extraordinary scope of Zamyatin's influence. The first-time reader will be astonished to find in We nearly every single convention utilized in later dystopian novels. Set in One State, a thoroughly automated civilization shielded from the wilderness by the Green Wall, the book's mythic overseer is known as the Great Benefactor, a clear prototype of Big Brother. (Orwell was always candid about his debt to We.) The narration is in the form of the journal entries of our hero, D-503, a mathematician initially committed to One State and its harmonious preservation. You may recognize the barcode labeling from Anthem, Ayn Rand's dreadful collocation of anticommunist clichés. D-503 is altogether a stable unit in the One State collective, firmly persuaded by its decree that "only the rational and the useful are beautiful" and content to plight his troth to pink-mouthed O-90, a dependable mate who never misses a Sex Day. Content, that is, until he's seduced by the ravishing I-393, which precipitates his ideological disillusionment and eventual apostasy. Any resemblance to Brave New World is entirely uncoincidental. I-393 is, of course, a member in an underground rebel movement scheming to bring down the Green Wall; and goaded by that most horrifyingly unreasonable motivation—love—D-503 becomes a prime accessory in the putsch.
There is even more in We to make it an essential source text. The Bible is still known (though derided) by One State as an artifact of the Ancients, setting a precedent not only for Frank Herbert's Dune series but for Walter M. Miller Jr.'s A Canticle for Liebowitz, my choice for the best dystopian novel of them all. And Zamyatin's math-based descriptions—characters have noses like hypotenuses and mouths like parabolas, and D-503 is bedeviled to madness by the square root of negative one, an "irrational number"—presage writers from Edwin A. Abbott to David Foster Wallace.
But the question remains, is We more than a museum piece? Does it survive as a book or just as a text? On the whole, I think that We can be read and enjoyed on its own virtues, though, to be sure, it is beset by severe liabilities. For one thing, the theories that Zamyatin was satirizing—and We is really more satire than cautionary tale—are nowadays defunct. Long gone is the early assembly-line era of machine worship that inspired Lenin's ludicrous ideas on utopian mechanization and culture fads like futurism. And a satire is all but defanged when its object of criticism becomes passé. But the greater trouble is that, like so many concept novels, We is very shoddy as a work of art. Despite the brave translation efforts of Natasha Randall, it's pretty clear that Zamyatin wrote badly, generating stilted, overheated prose shot through with endless ellipses like so many wormholes defacing an old parchment. The reader's consistent confusion is only magnified at the conclusion of the book, which involves a spaceship and something called the Great Operation, and is quite simply incomprehensible. I could not give away what happens at the end if you asked me.
Yet for all that, We is remarkably entertaining. As an allegory it performs the feat of being completely without pretension or sanctimony, and as a satire it is often very funny. Zamyatin was not a prophet—he was an eccentric, and the book's sheer iconoclastic weirdness carries it through its many artistic solecisms. I find something infinitely amusing about a society that exalts "the wisdom and the eternal happiness of the multiplication table." And descriptions like the following are strangely memorable: "His face was as it always is: round and white, like a porcelain platter, and he talks as though he is carrying something unbearably delicious on his platter." Zamyatin understood, as do moderns like Adam Johnson and George Saunders, that when societies direct themselves toward organized perfection they become ridiculous, jokes that are funny and then, depending on their consequences, potentially terrible.
Later, more expert, writers would exploit the full potential of Zamyatin's joke. As a dystopian novel We is therefore a historical document; but as a literary oddment it remains fascinating and surprisingly unique.