Banned Book #3: WE, by Yevgeny Zamyatin

What can we learn from a century-old Russian sci-fi novel?

I’m working on a series of pieces on significant banned/ challenged books. I also wrote about Jason Reynolds’ Stamped and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist. I plan to continue with books that are either being banned/ challenged today, or add more to the historical/ literary context of movements to ban books and ideas.

Continued attacks on Zamyatin throughout the twenties by Communist critics who had no taste for his “pernicious” ideology culminated in a defamatory campaign which ostracized him from Soviet literature in the autumn of 1929.

-Alex M. Shane, introduction to A Soviet Heretic (1970)

I am afraid we shall have no genuine literature until we cease to regard the Russian demos as a child whose innocence must be protected.

-Yevgeny Zamyatin, “I Am Afraid” (1921)

He loved jokes and caricatures, but never about himself.

-Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power (Volume 2)

To paraphrase a popular SNL character, this book has it all: dystopian science fiction satire, bizarre mathe…