Orwell never acknowledged having borrowed from We for his masterpiece, but the timing of his reading it, along with some of the uncanny similarities between the two novels, make it hard to conclude otherwise. She inspires him to commit acts of rebellion against the state. Filled with suspicion, he first hates her, but soon falls in love with her. At a point early on, Winston notices a particular woman showing up wherever he goes. In this city, citizens are subjected to constant surveillance by a branch of government called the Thought Police, with an all-powerful leader called Big Brother. In his review, Orwell praised the book’s “intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism.” Three years after writing those words, Orwell published 1984, a dystopian novel about a man named Winston living in a dystopian city of the future. At a point early on, D-503 notices a particular woman showing up wherever he goes.
In this city, citizens are subjected to constant surveillance by a branch of government called the Bureau of Guardians, with an all-powerful leader called the Well-Doer ("the Benefactor" in some translations).
We tells the story of D-503, a man living in a dystopian city of the future in which people no longer have Christian names and are known instead by a letter followed by a series of numbers. As the recent author of Animal Farm and a writer for whom fiction and politics belonged together, Orwell seemed a natural choice to examine this dystopian work.
Originally released in New York in 1921 after being banned prior to publication in Russia, We had recently been translated into French, in which Orwell was fluent. In January 1946, George Orwell published a review of a fairly obscure Russian novel titled We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, in the Tribune.
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