This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote We between 1920 and 1921, inside the same revolution the novel is quietly arguing against: a numbered citizen, D-503, living under total transparency and total surveillance in the glass-walled One State, begins to feel something the state has no name for and no tolerance for. Soviet censors refused to publish it. Zamyatin arranged for the manuscript to be smuggled abroad, and an English translation reached print in New York in 1924, years before the novel could legally appear in its own author's own country, where it remained banned for nearly seven decades; a Russian-language edition did not follow until 1927, in the Prague journal Volya Rossii, and that printing was unauthorized, a reverse translation made from a Czech version without Zamyatin's knowledge or consent. Its influence traveled the same route into exile: George Orwell could not obtain the English translation and read the novel in French, as Nous Autres, reviewing it in 1946 as a direct model for what would become Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, though Huxley denied the debt, shares enough of We's architecture, a rationalized society, a numbered population, a rebellion staged through desire rather than politics, that most scholars read the line running through all three as continuous.