Summary

I, Δ-503, the Constructor of The Integral - I'm only one of the mathematicians of the One State. My pen, accustomed to figures, doesn't have the power to create the music of assonances and rhymes. I shall merely attempt to record what I see, what I think - more precisely, what we think (exactly that: we, and let that WE be the title of my records).

Inside its glass dome the One State is a place of mathematical precision, a community where everything is everyone's, and integrity, clarity, and unerring loyalty reign over all. Δ-503, Constructor of the Integral, is an honest number, ashamed of the hairy hands that link him to a barbaric ancestry. It is this forbidden legacy that torments him by making him lust, that allows him to imagine, that has given him a soul. Consumed by his sickness and obsessed with the seductive and mysterious I-330, Δ-503 is led by his new lover outside the Wall, where he colludes in a plot to overthrow the Benefactor. As the Benefactor retaliates by ordering a state-administered Operation to return order to the perfect world, Δ-503 find himself fighting for the primitive and natural state of chaos - and rebelling against what he once held true.

A key work in the history of dystopian literature, Zamyatin's We was hugely influential, shaping the writing of many other authors including Orwell and Huxley. Written in the 1920s, and banned in the Soviet Union for over sixty years, We is still topical today, a portent of future totalitarian regimes, and an admonition that the battle for freedom is never over.