We

by Yevgeny Zamyatin

For three years after that we were all locked up together in a steel projectile and, cooped up in darkness, whistled through space, no one knew where. In those last seconds-years before death, we had to do something, to settle down to some sort of a life in the hurtling missile. . . . And all the writers, all those who had survived, were constantly bumping into each other in the cramped space—Gorky and Merezhkovsky, Blok and Kuprin, Muyzhel and Gumilyov, Chukovsky and Volynsky. . . . In the frozen, hungry, typhus-ridden Petersburg, there raged an epidemic of cultural and educational activities. Since literature is not education, all poets and writers became lecturers. And in place of money there was a strange new unit of exchange—the ration, obtained by abandoning poems and novels for lectures.