Cooke, B., Human Nature in Utopia: Zamyatin's We: [Review]

One person's utopia might be another's gulag. Perhaps the only true utopias are the
unreal ones, the planned cities and ideologies that stop being utopias when they
become the reality of nightmare. Yevgeny Zamyatin's My (We), written in commu
nist Russia in 1921 and published abroad in 1924, has long been a classic of dysto
pian fiction which warns us what might happen if utopia was actually built. It is a
work influenced by Zamyatin's admiration for H.G Wells and by his own impressions of England as a naval engineer in Newcastle, from which he drew material for his 1916 satire of middle-class English society, Ostroviatane.