We

by Yevgeny Zamyatin

The book is rife with symbols and its language as tight and suggestive as a coiled spring. In his essay “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters,” he describes writing and his conception of the fast “language of thought”: The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity—but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage. We must compress into a single second what was held before in a sixty-second minute. And hence, syntax becomes elliptic, volatile; the complex pyramids of periods are dismantled stone by stone into independent sentences. When you are moving fast, the canonized, the customary eludes the eye: hence, the unusual, often startling, symbolism and vocabulary. The image is sharp, synthetic, with a single salient feature—the one feature you will glimpse from a speeding car.