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7 hrs. 48 min.

Language Russian

Author Yevgeny Zamyatin

Narrator Vyacheslav Gerasimov

Description

In Zamyatin’s novel set in the 26th century, the inhabitants of Utopia have lost their individuality so completely that they differ only by numbers. They live in glass houses (this was written even before television was invented), which allows the political police, called the “Guardians,” to monitor them without difficulty. Everyone wears the same uniform, and people usually address each other either as “such-and-such a number” or “unifa” (uniform). They eat artificial food and, during the hour of rest, march in fours in a row to the sound of the hymn of the One State coming from loudspeakers. During the allotted break, they are allowed—an hour (known as the “sex hour”)—to lower the curtains of their glass dwellings. Marriage, of course, has been abolished, but sexual life is by no means presented as disorderly. For love pleasures, each person has something like a checkbook with pink tickets, and the partner with whom one of the assigned sex-hours is spent signs the stub of the ticket.

At the head of the One State is someone called the Benefactor, who is re-elected every year by the entire population—usually unanimously. The guiding principle of the State is that happiness and freedom are incompatible. A person was happy in the Garden of Eden, but, in her folly, asked for freedom and was exiled to the desert. Now the One State has granted him happiness again by taking away freedom.