Zamyatin's novel, written in 1924, predicted with accuracy the ways totalitarian states would later try to eliminate not just political opposition but the very capacity for independent thought.
2Reading· 오늘의 본문
We · Yevgeny Zamyatin · 1924
D-503's day began with the Table of Hours, a schedule as precise as the glass walls of the One State. He moved through the transparent city, a perfect cog in a silent machine. His mathematical mind found comfort in the predictable arcs of the city's bridges and the synchronized steps of the Numbers. Yet, a strange, irregular feeling sometimes flickered—a memory of green beyond the Green Wall, a curve that defied a straight line. This was his secret rebellion, a chaotic thought growing in the sterile order. The cost of the State's absolute freedom from want was the freedom of his own soul, and he was only beginning to feel the price.
B2 · 128 wordsavg 25.6 w/s
In Yevgeny Zamyatin's 'We', the protagonist D-503's meticulously regulated existence within the glass city of the One State serves as a profound exploration of freedom's antithesis. His daily routine, dictated by the Table of Hours, is not merely a schedule but the physical manifestation of a totalitarian ideology that has successfully externalized order into architecture and internalized it into consciousness. The city's transparency is the ultimate panopticon, ensuring conformity by eliminating the very possibility of private thought or action. D-503, an engineer of the Integral spaceship, initially revels in this mathematical purity. However, Zamyatin masterfully uses D-503's growing, irrational attraction to I-330 and the natural world beyond the Green Wall to symbolize the indomitable human yearning for authentic self-determination. His internal conflict—between the comforting, sterile order of guaranteed societal 'freedom' and the terrifying, chaotic potential of individual liberty—encapsulates the novel's central thesis: that true freedom necessitates the perilous embrace of the unknown and the unregulated, a cost the One State has brutally eliminated. What makes We endure as a work of literature is precisely this refusal to offer easy consolation — it demands that readers sit with the discomfort of a world that does not resolve neatly, and find their own position within it.
C1 · 170 wordsavg 34.0 w/s
3Vocabulary· 핵심 어휘 & 연습
totalitarian
전체주의의
The One State in 'We' is a classic totalitarian regime.
eliminate
제거하다
The State seeks to eliminate all individual desire.
capacity
능력, 역량
The Great Operation aimed to destroy the capacity for imagination.
independent
독립적인
Independent thought was considered a disease.
predicted
예측하다
Zamyatin predicted the horrors of 20th-century collectivism.
Activity 1 · 빈칸 채우기5 questions
1. Every hour of D-503's life was carefully ____ by the Table of Hours.
2. The ____ of privacy did not exist in the One State.
3. Individual names were ____ and replaced with numbers.
4. The glass walls guaranteed there was no ____ for citizens.
5. The State was ____ declared to represent perfect happiness.