Every dystopian novel your students have ever been assigned is standing on the shoulders of this strange, feverish little book. And most of them don't even know it.
I started We on a Saturday morning walk along the lakefront with Denise, thinking seven hours, a Russian dystopia, a pleasant autumn stroll — perfect pairing. By hour two, Denise had given up trying to talk to me because I kept stopping mid-stride to process what I'd just heard. By hour four, I was sitting on a bench near Montrose Harbor, alone, because she'd walked home without me. Fair enough.
The Blueprint Orwell Never Credited
Let's talk about what Zamyatin is really saying. Written in 1920 — 1920 — this book predicted surveillance states, algorithmic living, the erasure of individual identity in the name of collective happiness, all wrapped in the diary of a man called D-503 who builds rockets and genuinely cannot understand why anyone would want curtains. The citizens of OneState live in glass apartments. They have scheduled sex hours regulated by pink tickets. And D-503 records all of this with the earnest conviction of someone writing a five-star Yelp review for a prison.
That's what makes it brilliant and that's what makes it difficult. Zamyatin writes in this fragmented, mathematical, almost cubist prose style — sentences that feel like they've been broken apart and reassembled at odd angles. It's not Orwell's clean, journalistic horror. It's not Huxley's sardonic wit. It's something wilder, more poetic, more genuinely alien. The Clarence Brown translation captures this — the language stays deliberately uncomfortable, full of ellipses and half-formed images and D-503's obsession with irrational numbers as metaphor for everything he can't control about his own desire.
My students would hate this. I love it. Though I'll say — for a book that makes me feel genuinely challenged as a reader, it's a different kind of hard than something like Elsie Dinsmore, which tests your patience for entirely different, considerably more pious reasons.
But I'll be honest: around the halfway point, the book does get strange in ways that test your patience. D-503's spiral into obsession with the revolutionary I-330 becomes repetitive — the same cycle of desire, guilt, mathematical rationalization, desire again. The prose, already dense, turns almost hallucinatory. I can see why some listeners bail. If you're used to the clean dystopian machinery of 1984, this feels like its fever dream cousin who stayed up three days writing poetry about algebra.
Gardner Plays It Straight (And That's the Move)
Grover Gardner — and this is a narrator who's won more AudioFile awards than I have students who've actually finished The Great Gatsby — makes a very specific choice here. He plays D-503 completely straight. No winking at the audience. No ironic inflection when D-503 rhapsodizes about the beauty of unfreedom. And that restraint is what makes certain passages genuinely, unexpectedly funny. When D-503 describes the scheduled collective walks where thousands of citizens march in perfect rows and calls it "beautiful," Gardner delivers it with such steady sincerity that you laugh — and then feel uneasy about laughing.
The narrator understands that pause is punctuation. Gardner's pacing is deliberate, measured, almost metronomic, which mirrors OneState's obsession with mathematical order. It works. But — and here's the trade-off — he doesn't differentiate characters much. I-330, O-90, R-13 — they all come through Gardner's same steady register. For a book where the entire conflict hinges on the difference between people who are numbers and people trying to become people, that flatness occasionally undercuts the emotional stakes. You feel the ideas. You don't always feel the humans behind them.
The prose deserves to be savored, and at 1.0x speed, seven hours is just right. Don't speed this up. The density of Zamyatin's imagery needs breathing room.
Who This Is Really For
If you loved 1984, this is its spiritual predecessor — rawer, stranger, more experimental. If you're the kind of reader (listener) who wants to understand where the modern dystopia actually began, before Orwell polished it into something more accessible, this is essential. It's also required listening for anyone who thinks surveillance culture and algorithmic living are purely twenty-first century problems. Zamyatin saw it all a century ago, from inside a revolution that was already eating its own.
Skip it if you need strong character voices from your narrator, or if dated prose makes you restless. The second half demands patience. It rewards that patience — but it demands it first.
Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For
This is why we still read the classics. Not because they're old, but because they got there first — and sometimes they got there in ways we still haven't surpassed. We isn't a comfortable listen. It's not even always a good listen, structurally. But it's an important one, and Gardner's no-frills delivery lets Zamyatin's wild, broken, prophetic voice come through clean. I finished it on that bench by the lake, watched the joggers pass in their neat lines along the path, and thought about glass walls.
Denise texted me to pick up milk on the way home. I did. Even revolutionaries need milk.
