Мы / We

YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
WE
Translated by M. Ginsburg

УДК 372.8
ББК 
81.2 Англ 
З26
Замятин, Евгений Иванович.
З26		
Мы : книга для чтения на английском языке  / 
Е. И. Замятин. — [пер. с рус. М. Гинзбург] — СанктПетербург : КАРО, 2024. — 288 с.  — (Русская классическая литература на иностранных языках).
ISBN 978-5-9925-1373-8.
Предлагаем вашему вниманию роман-антиутопию Евгения Замятина «Мы». Роман, написанный в 1920 году, известен читателям 
благодаря гротескному исполнению идеи социализма и элементам 
блестящей сатиры.
Действие романа разворачивается приблизительно в тридцать 
втором веке и описывает общество жeсткого тоталитарного контроля над личностью.
УДК 372.8 
ББК 81.2 Англ
© КАРО, 2024 
Все права защищены
ISBN 978-5-9925-1373-8

FIRST ENTRY
Topics:	 A Proclamation. The Wisest of Lines. 
	
A Poem
I shall simply copy, word for word, the proclamation that appeared today in the One State Gazette:
The building of the Integral will be completed 
in one hundred and twenty days. The great historic 
hour when the first Integral will soar into cosmic 
space is drawing near. One thousand years ago your 
heroic ancestors subdued the entire terrestrial 
globe to the power of the One State. Yours will be 
a still more glorious feat: you will integrate the infinite equation of the universe with the aid of the 
fire-breathing, electric, glass Integral. You will subjugate the unknown beings on other planets, who may 
still be living in the primitive condition of freedom, 
to the beneficent yoke of reason. If they fail to understand that we bring them mathematically infallible 
happiness, it will be our duty to compel them to be 
happy. But before resorting to arms, we shall try the 
power of words.
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In the name of the Benefactor, therefore, we proclaim to all the numbers of the One State:
Everyone who feels capable of doing so must 
compose tracts, odes, manifestoes, poems, or other 
works extolling the beauty and the grandeur of the 
One State.
This will be the first cargo to be carried by the 
Integral.
Long live the One State, long live the numbers, 
long live the Benefactor!
I write this, and I feel: my cheeks are burning. 
Yes, to integrate the grandiose cosmic equation. Yes, 
to unbend the wild, primitive curve and straighten 
it to a tangent — an asymptote — a straight line. 
For the line of the One State is the straight line. The 
great, divine, exact, wise straight line — the wisest 
of all lines.
I, D-503, Builder of the Integral, am only one of 
the mathematicians of the One State. My pen, accustomed to figures, does not know how to create the 
music of assonances and rhymes. I shall merely attempt to record what I see and think, or, to be more 
exact, what we think (precisely so — we, and let this 
We be the title of my record). But since this record 
will be a derivative of our life, of the mathematically 
perfect life of the One State, will it not be, of itself, 
and regardless of my will or skill, a poem? It will. 
I believe, I know it.
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I write this, and my cheeks are burning. This 
must be similar to what a woman feels when she 
first senses within herself the pulse of a new, still 
tiny, still blind little human being. It is I, and at the 
same time, not I. And for many long months it will 
be necessary to nourish it with my own life, my own 
blood, then tear it painfully from myself and lay it at 
the feet of the One State.
But I am ready, like every one, or almost every 
one, of us. I am ready.
SECOND ENTRY
Topics:	 Ballet. Square Harmony. X 
Spring. From beyond the Green Wall, from the 
wild, invisible plains, the wind brings yellow honey 
pollen of some unknown flowers. The sweet pollen dries your lips, and every minute you pass your 
tongue over them. The lips of all the women you 
see must be sweet (of the men, too, of course). This 
interferes to some extent with the flow of logical 
thought.
But the sky! Blue, unblemished by a single cloud. 
(How wild the tastes of the ancients, whose poets 
could be inspired by those absurd, disorderly, stupidly tumbling piles of vapor!) I love — I am certain 
I can safely say, we love — only such a sterile, immaculate sky. On days like this the whole world is cast 
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of the same impregnable, eternal glass as the Green 
Wall, as all our buildings. On days like this you see 
the bluest depth of things, their hitherto unknown, 
astonishing equations — you see them even in the 
most familiar everyday objects.
Take, for instance, this. In the morning I was at 
the dock where the Integral is being built, and suddenly I saw: the lathes; the regulator sphere rotating 
with closed eyes, utterly oblivious of all; the cranks 
flashing, swinging left and right; the balance beam 
proudly swaying its shoulders; the bit of the slotting 
machine dancing up and down in time to unheard music Suddenly I saw the whole beauty of this grandiose 
mechanical ballet, flooded with pale blue sunlight.
And then, to myself: Why is this beautiful? Why 
is dance beautiful? Answer: because it is unfree motion, because the whole profound meaning of dance 
lies precisely in absolute, esthetic subordination, in 
ideal unfreedom. And if it is true that our forebears 
abandoned themselves to dance at the most exalted 
moments of their lives (religious mysteries, military 
parades), it means only one thing: the instinct of unfreedom is organically inherent in man from time 
immemorial, and we, in our present life, are only 
consciously…
I will have to finish later: the annunciator clicked. 
I looked up: O-90, of course. In half a minute she’ll 
be here, for our daily walk.
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Dear O! It always seems to me that she looks exactly like her name: about ten centimeters shorter 
than the Maternal Norm, and therefore carved in the 
round, all of her, with that pink O, her mouth, open to 
meet every word I say. And also, that round, plump 
fold on her wrist, like a baby’s.
When she came in, the flywheel of logic was 
still humming at full swing within me, and I began, 
by sheer force of inertia, to speak to her about the 
formula I had just established, which encompassed 
everything — dance, machines, and all of us.
“Marvelous, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Yes, marvelous.” O-90 smiled rosily at me. “It’s 
spring.”
Well, wouldn’t you know: spring… She talks 
about spring. Women… I fell silent.
Downstairs, the avenue was full. In such weather, 
the afternoon personal hour is used for an additional 
walk. As always, the Music Plant played the “March 
of the One State” with all its trumpets. The numbers 
walked in even ranks, four abreast, ecstatically stepping in time to the music-hundreds, thousands of 
numbers, in pale blue unifs1, with golden badges on 
their breasts, bearing the State Number of each man 
and woman. And I — the four of us — but one of 
the innumerable waves in this mighty stream. On 
1	 Derived apparently from the ancient “uniform.”
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my left, O-90 (if this were being written by one of 
my hairy ancestors a thousand years ago, he probably would have described her by that funny word 
“mine”); on my right, two numbers I did not know, 
male and female.
Blessedly blue sky, tiny baby suns in every badge, 
faces unshadowed by the insanity of thoughts… Rays. 
Do you understand that? Everything made of some 
single, radiant, smiling substance. And the brass 
rhythms: “Ta-ta-ta-tam! Ta-ta-ta-tam!” Like brass 
stairs gleaming in the sun, and every step taking you 
higher and higher, into the dizzying blue…
And again, as this morning at the dock, I saw everything as though for the first time in my life: the 
straight, immutable streets, the glittering glass of the 
pavements, the divine parallelepipeds of the transparent houses, the square harmony of the gray-blue 
ranks. And I felt: it was not the generations before 
me, but I — yes, I — who had conquered the old God 
and the old life. It was I who had created all this. 
And I was like a tower, I dared not move an elbow 
lest walls, cupolas, machines tumble in fragments 
about me.
Then — a leap across the centuries, from + to 
–. I remembered (evidently an association by contrast) — I suddenly remembered a picture I had seen 
in a museum: one of their avenues, out of the twentieth century, dazzlingly motley, a teeming crush 
8

of people, wheels, animals, posters, trees, colors, 
birds… And they say this had really existed — could 
exist. It seemed so incredible, so preposterous that 
I could not contain myself and burst out laughing.
And immediately, there was an echo — laughter — on my right. I turned: a flash of white — extraordinarily white and sharp teeth, an unfamiliar 
female face.
“Forgive me,” she said, “but you looked at everything around you with such an inspired air, like some 
mythical god on the seventh day of creation. It seems 
to me you are sure that even I was created by you, 
and by no one else. I am very flattered…”
All this — without a smile; I would even say, with 
a certain deference (perhaps she knew that I am the 
Builder of the Integral). But in the eyes, or in the 
eyebrows — I could not tell — there was a certain 
strange, irritating X, which I could not capture, could 
not define in figures.
For some odd reason, I felt embarrassed and 
tried, in a rather stumbling manner, to explain my 
laughter to her logically. It was entirely clear, I said, 
that this contrast, this impassable abyss between the 
present and the past…
“But why impassable?” (What white teeth!) 
“A bridge can be thrown across an abyss. Just think: 
drums, battalions, ranks — all this has also existed 
in the past; and, consequently…”
9

“But of course!” I cried. (What an astonishing coincidence of ideas: she spoke almost my own words, 
the words I had written down before our walk.) “You 
understand, even ideas. And this is because nobody 
is ‘one,’ but ‘one of.’ We are so alike…”
She: “Are you sure?”
I saw her eyebrows raised to her temples at a 
sharp angle, like the pointed horns of an X, and again 
I was confused. I glanced right, left, and…
On my right — she, slender, sharp, stubbornly 
pliant, like a whip, I-330 (I could see her number 
now); on my left — O, altogether different, all curves, 
with that childish fold on her wrist; and at the other 
end of our row, a male number I did not know — 
strange, doubly bent somehow, like the letter S. All 
of us so different…
That one on the right, I-330, seemed to have intercepted my flustered glance, and with a sigh she 
said, “Yes… Alas!”
Actually, this “alas” was entirely appropriate. But 
again there was that something in her face, or in her 
voice… And with a sharpness unusual for me, I said, 
“No reason for ‘Alas.’ Science progresses, and it is obvious that, if not now, then in fifty or a hundred years…”
“Even everyone’s noses…”
“Yes,” I almost shouted, “noses. If there is any 
ground for envy, no matter what it is… If I have a 
button-nose and another…”
10