MY

Life in the "United State" created in the third millennium after the "Two Hundred Years' War". People no longer suffer from poverty, but they have lost their names and become mere "numbers". Women are named with vowels, e.g. I - 330, and men consonants. The protagonist, D-503, keeps diary entries that give us insight into the whole monstrous system. The lives of the people are organized and strictly guarded by the Guardian Office. They all live in glass houses, so they can't hide anything. They wake up at the same time every day, they go to work at the same time, and they go to rest at the same time. They are prescribed fifty bites for each bite at a meal. They have to have a warrant for the child or they are executed. The will of the collective here, under the totalitarian dictates of the Benefactor, completely displaces the freedom of human thought.

This terrifying vision of the future became famous as a forecast of the development of Soviet Russia, as a warning against totalitarian societies.

Zamyatin wrote the novel antiutopia MY in 1920. In 1924/25 it appeared in translations into Czech, English and French. In Russia, it was published only in the years of reconstruction, in 1987.

George Orwell's novel WE served as a prefigurement for his seminal work, the anti-utopia, 1984.