We by Yevgeny ZamyatinMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
With almost 13,000 reviews for this book, there doesn't seem much point in rehashing what the book is about, but I did want to point out a few things. The author enters the psyche of the main character in a way that reminds me of Dostoevsky's treatment of the underground man and the criminal in "Crime & Punishment" with bits of the Inquisitor thrown in. In this story this approach works, and it becomes an analysis of a society built around a collectivist "scientific" rationalism. The main character is infected with the growth of a soul or individual self-awareness, and as the story progresses he struggles against his programmed desire to be unconscious in the collective and the new feelings of self.
All this, I find interesting, and it makes a wry comment on all utopianist experiments. In a way it is a bridge between the ideas in Dostoevsky and Rand and Orwell and Huxley. Very well done in sparse modernist prose. I wish I could read Russian to see how it worked in it's original language.
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