SECOND READING: 21

We, By Yevgeny Zamyatin (1921)A MATHEMATICIAN, D-503 is engaged in an important project, the construction of the Integral, writes Eileen Battersby.

He has regulated sexual encounters with O-90. Bedtime is 22.30. His life is organised, as are his thoughts and the diligent entries he writes in his journal. He wonders about the past: "I have had occasion to read and hear many incredible things concerning those times when people were still living in a free - ie an unorganised, savage - state. But the one thing that has always struck me as the most improbable was precisely this: How could the governing power (let us say even a rudimentary one) allow the people to live without anything resembling our tables of Hourly Commandments, without obligatory walks, without exact regulation of mealtimes - how could it allow them to get up and go to bed whenever they got the notion to do so? Certain historians even assert that, apparently, in those times the streets were lit all through the night - that, all through the night, people walked and drove through the streets?"

Zamyatin's terrifyingly perceptive portrait of an anti-utopian future is pitch-perfect satire, written with cryptic elegance. D-503 may be a number in a uniform but he is not a machine and his observations indicate flickering traces of imagination.

It is spring. He notices the beautiful blue sky, "unmarred by a single cloud", and then adds "how extremely primitive in matters of taste were the ancients, since their poets could find inspiration in those absurd, sloppily shaped, foolishly jostling masses of vapour". D-503 may be a programmed number but he is capable of using a word such as "love". "I love - I am sure I do not err if I say that we all love - only such a sky as the present one, sterile, irreproachable. On days such as this the whole universe is moulded out of the same immovable, eternal glass as our Green wall, as are all our structures." Into D-503's ordered existence comes E-330, a disturbing female subversive with white teeth and dangerous individuality. She wants to have sex with D-503 and applies to the authorities. She sets about opening his mind. Her influence is disturbing, her tactics lethally effective. D-503 is faced by a new sensation: passion.

Zamyatin's vision is as angry as Swift's and as subtle as a fencing match, his thesis is the dehumanisation of ideological totalitarianism. In his youth, Zamyatin, who was born in central Russia in 1884, had been a Bolshevik but, concerned about the party's direction, left it before 1917. A naval architect by profession, he spent 1916 and 17 working in a Tyneside shipyard supervising the building of 10 ice-breakers ordered by the Tsarist government. Influenced by all things English and an admirer of HG Wells, whom he translated, Zamyatin was drawn to fiction. His literary mentor, Gorky, not only encouraged him when manuscript copies of We began circulating, he helped Zamyatin's bid for exile in Paris (where he died in 1937).

Both inspired science fiction and barbed allegory, We remains a dazzling, sophisticated work. Although widely read in the West, it was not published in Russia until 1988. George Orwell, who first read it in French, acknowledged Zamyatin's influence on 1984, while Aldous Huxley, whose burlesque, inferior Brave New World (1932), falters into parody, denied ever having read We - his loss.

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This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits titles from the literary canon