Today In November 1944, George Orwell received a letter from Professor Gleb Struve, an expert on Russian literature, about a book he had just read. It was a novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin, entitled We. The book had originally been written in 1920-21 but had not been published in the Soviet Union because it was seen as being hostile to the Bolshevik government. It has been argued that it was the first anti-utopian novel ever written and is a satire on life in a collectivist state in the future. Orwell showed interest in reading the book and Struve sent him a copy that had been published in France.
