Evgenii Zamiatin's work is a lens through which the issues pertaining to utopian literature can be examined. Zamiatin established the cultural coordinates of dystopia in imaginative literature. Among the virtues of Zamiatin's novel are the tropes later to be found in the dystopian works following in the wake of Zamiatin. The dialectical perspective on We reflects the author's intent and also the reason that We is the essential 20th century dystopia - in that the same dialectical process motivated the creation of the Soviet Union.

    It includes the prose of officially recognized writers and dissidents, both well-known and neglected or forgotten, plus new authors from the end of the 20th century.ContentsOnce upon a time / Leonid Andreyev -- The invoker of the beast / Fyodor Sologub -- Gambrinus / Aleksandr Kuprin -- The little devil / Aleksei Remizov -- Thus life passes / Elena Guro -- Four people ; Scenes from the life of the worker Pantelei Grymzin / Arkady Averchenko -- Black iris / Nadezhda Teffi -- The red crown / Mikhail Bulgakov -- Black magic ; The female fish / Mikhail Zoschenko -- Gedali ; The rabbi ; The rabbi's son / Isaac Babel -- Family man / Mikhail Sholokhov -- Outgoing paper no. 27 / Lev Lunts -- The gardener of the Emir of Bukhara / Vsevolod Ivanov -- The viper / Aleksei Tolstoy -- The flood / Evgeny Zamyatin -- Doubting Makar / Andrei Platonov -- Blue notebook number 10 ; Old women tumbling out ; Kushakov the carpenter ; A dream ; The start of a very nice summer day ; The lynching / Daniil Kharms -- Lake, cloud, tower / Vladimir Nabokov -- The smoky glass goblet / Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky -- Tanya / Ivan Bunin -- The tenants / Andrei Sinyavsky -- Eulogy / Varlam Shalamov -- The house with a turret / Fridrikh Gorenshtein -- "Victory" / Vasily Aksyonov -- Hands / Yuli Daniel -- A German in felt boots / Konstantin Vorobyov -- My uncle of the highest principles / Fazil Iskander -- Chudik ; I believe! / Vasily Shkshin -- Bread for a dog / Vladimir Tendryakov -- You cried bitterly in your sleep / Yury Kazakov -- Little arm, leg, cucumber... / Yury Dombrovsky -- My older cousin / Sergei Dovlatov -- Girl of my dreams / Bulat Okudzhava -- The fakir / Tatiana Tolstaya -- Galoshes / Viktor Erofeyev -- Surrealism in a proletarian district / Vladimir Makanin -- Passing through / Vladimir Sorokin -- The young / Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -- Butterfly. 1987 / Leonid Yuzefovich -- The last war story / Oleg Ermakov -- A short history of paint-ball in Moscow / Viktor Pelevin -- The queen of spades / Lyudmila Ulitskaya -- More and more angels ; The Samurai's dream / Yury Buida -- Currency / Yury Mamleyev / Snow falls ever so quietly / Irina Polyanskaya -- Teachers without pupils, or from under the rubble into the mausoleum of thine / Lev Rubinshtein -- The lord of the Steppes / Vladimir Tuchkov -- Never / Lyudmila Petrushevskaya -- Experience in demonstrating mourning / Marina Vishnevetskaya -- The dump / Andrei Levkin.