Dear Reader,
I’m writing a Dystopian novel, so I knew that “We,” the novel that inspired 1984, was essential reading. What I didn’t realize was the extent to which it inspired Orwell, and how strongly some people feel about it…
Feel free to watch my video version of the following review / comparison on YouTube, and don’t forget to like and subscribe to help me re-launch that channel. Otherwise, read on:
Some reviews of “We” (1924) by Yevgeny Zamyatin spend more words attacking Orwell than they do praising Zamyatin. They accuse Orwell of having “stolen” the plot of 1984 from We… and, to a certain extent, they actually are not wrong! Consider the following summary:
The book follows a bookish, unheroic man working for a future authoritarian regime who has an illegal affair with a mysterious woman; they rendezvous in an old apartment full of antiques and in the countryside, and eventually aligns himself with a shadowy resistance movement before the law catches up, and through physically abusive, invasive means, the Regime converts him back into a loyal bootlicker.
That accurately describes the broad strokes of both We and 1984!
“Orwell, how could you!?”
Zamyatin, author of “We” (1924)
The fact that Orwell took heavy inspiration from “We” apparently really bothers some people, but not I. In my view, it does not detract from the brilliance of Orwell and 1984 at all, and here’s why:
If I learned anything from 8 years producing music it’s that all artists steal, including the greats. Everyone’s favorite bands and artists drew heavily from their influences and in many cases directly sampled or covered them. Do listeners get upset about this? No. As a society, we’ve accepted that great music begets great music and also pays homage to music of the past. This is how we get Johnny Cash’s cover of “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails, the creation of entire genres like Hip Hop, and some of the best dance music, like “Tru Dancing” by O’Flynn, a personal favorite that leans heavily on a sample.
One might argue what’s acceptable in Music isn’t in Literature, but let’s not pretend novelists don’t “sample” sometimes too.
The high-level concept of Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” is notably similar to Japanese film “Battle Royale,” as Hollywood’s (overrated) crank Quentin Tarantino recently called out. And riding her success came a whole wave of dystopian YA books, including, quite blatantly, Red Rising by Pierce Brown, which has seen a huge resurgence in popularity thanks to BookTok. And while Red Rising is the lowest-rated in the series, with good reason, does anyone really care that he kinda ripped off Hunger Games? No, becasue it’s different enough and he took the series in a very different direction (space opera) after book 1.
So then what is the “acceptable” amount of “inspiration” one can take when writing a novel? (No, I’m not literally asking for copyright law nor the definition of plagiarism). My point is that some people feel Orwell crossed a line, and I’m arguing that this feeling is wrong.
First and foremost, beyond the high-level plot points laid out above, there is a lot of daylight between 1984 and We, both in style and substance.
The world in We is futuristic and strange, while 1984’s bombed-out Airstrip One (England) feels much more grounded and recognizable near-future.
Orwell’s prose is famously straightforward and easy to grasp. Zamyatin’s is quite stylized and sometimes disorienting.
Orwell’s Winston has doubts about Big Brother and acts on his rebellious thoughts from the get-go, while Zamyatin’s D-503 (the characters have numbers instead of names) is a diehard believer in the cold, all-encompassing “Logic” of OneState. This, in turn, makes D-503’s female foil the true rebel with much more agency than he, while the dynamic is reversed in 1984 between Winston and Julia.
The plot of 1984 is much more coherent—Characters take action for clear reasons, and are faced with direct consequences. In We, there are loose through-lines (the romance, the rocket ship), but motivations and significance of events is not always clear scene to scene, and sometimes actions and events seem to have little or no bearing on what happens next.
Put simply, I really enjoyed reading We, but 1984 is the superior novel in every way that really counts.
The tragic issue was that Zamyatin used science fiction to indirectly critique Bolshevism in an attempt to avoid censorship. Unfortunately, the abstract, allegorical strangeness also dilutes the emotional impact of the story itself. Even more tragic is that this subversive approach failed to trick the censors. He had to smuggle the manuscript out of Russia to get it published, then smuggled back into the Soviet Union, where it was banned.
I suppose it’s unsurprising, then, that the most direct, compelling, and enduring refute of Authoritarianism had to have been written by Orwell, a man who enjoyed freedom from censorship in the West.
Orwell’s depiction of Airstrip One is so visceral you can almost smell the suffering. It is the brutal, tactile realism and compelling characters that make the ending of 1984 feel like a gut punch, while the ending of We is more of a shrug.
Would Zamyatin have written it differently if he weren’t trying to avoid censorship? Probably. Would it have been a better novel for it? I think so. We’ll never know for sure. But the world is blessed that Zamyatin, against all odds, wrote and published We; it is an important and worthwhile book in its own right, but especially because of its influence on Orwell and 1984.
Watch the video version of this review on YouTube.
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Thanks for reading!
-Brendan
