We

A novel about the impossibility of forced happiness, which already in the 1920s guessed the main features of totalitarian ideologies, a model of the genre for all Russian and Western dystopias. Zamyatin, a shipbuilding engineer by his first profession, was in England from 1916, where he supervised the construction of icebreakers for Russia. After the February Revolution of 1917, he hurried to return to Russia to observe historical events with his own eyes - the novel "We" was partly the fruit of his observations. "The Main Books of Russian Literature" is a joint series of the publishing house "Alpina.Proza" and the Internet project "Polka". The works that are published in it are chosen by modern writers, critics, literary scholars, teachers. This is both an attempt to determine what the Russian literary canon looks like today, and a new look at famous works: each book is accompanied by a detailed article by the authors of "Polka". For all lovers of classical Russian literature and for high school students.