So far as I can judge it is not a book of the first order, but it is certainly an unusual one, and it is astonishing that no English publisher has been enterprising enought to reissue it. The English translation was published in the United States, and I have never been able to procure a copy: but copies of the French translation (the title is Nous Autres) do exist, and I have at last succeeded in borrowing one. A copy of the manuscript found its way out of the country, and the book has appeared in English, French and Czech translations, but never in Russian. We was written about 1923, and though it is not about Russia and has no direct connection with contemporary politics-it is a fantasy dealing with the twenty-sixth century AD-it was refused publication on the ground that it was ideololgically undesirable. Zamyatin, who died in Paris in 1937, was a Russian novelist and critic who published a number of books both before and after the Revolution.
Looking it up in Gleb Struve's Twenty-Five Years of Soviet Russian Literature, I find its history to have been this: Several years after hearing of its existence, I have at last got my hands on a copy of Zamyatin's We, which is one of the literary curiosities of this book-burning age.
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