Yevgeny Zamyatin: Libertarian Novelist

Tags: Biographies, Media and Culture

02/16/2010 Jeff Riggenbach

Ultimately, he and the woman are caught, imprisoned, and tortured. In the end, he is sincerely repentant of his crimes and is completely devoted to the all-encompassing government that has done him all this harm.

We was the work of a not-very-well-known Russian writer, Yevgeny Zamyatin. Nineteen Eighty-Four, by contrast, is extremely well known in the West today, particularly in England and the United States, where words and phrases like "Newspeak," "doublethink," "thoughtcrime," and "Big Brother Is Watching You" are familiar to millions who have never read the novel from which they come. And there is no getting around the similarities between 1984 and Zamyatin's We.

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