We
The Soviet dystopia that Orwell read before writing 1984: a glass-walled One State where every hour is scheduled, citizens are addressed by number rather than name, and D-503, a spacecraft engineer, begins to develop an interior life after meeting a woman from the underground.
Summary
D-503 is the lead engineer building the Integral, a spacecraft designed to export the One State's perfection to other planets. He writes a diary, which is the novel, initially as a propaganda exercise, to explain the rational perfection of the One State to whatever alien intelligences the Integral will encounter.
The One State is glass: all apartments, all buildings have transparent walls. Privacy is impossible. Citizens are designated by letters and numbers rather than names. Every hour of every day is scheduled by the Table. Sexual partners are assigned on designated days. The Benefactor rules as a permanent elected dictator.
D-503 meets I-330, who is connected to an underground movement called the Mephi. He begins to feel things the One State has no vocabulary for, develops an "imagination" (described as an illness by the state doctors), and is drawn into the resistance.
Zamyatin wrote We in 1920-21 and it was banned in Soviet Russia immediately. Orwell read it in French before writing 1984 and acknowledged the debt. Huxley denied having read it before writing Brave New World, which is disputed. We is the source text for the 20th-century literary dystopia.
What distinguishes it from its descendants is the diary form and D-503's psychological specificity. He is not an obvious rebel. He believes in the One State at the start, finds I-330's irrationality threatening, and turns in people he loves to the authorities more than once. His corruption into individuality is slow, incomplete, and eventually reversed by a state lobotomy that removes the imagination. The ending is not a triumph.
Quotes
"Perfect unfreedom is perfect happiness."
"There is no final revolution. Revolutions are infinite."