We

Yes. While supervising the construction of icebreakers in Newcastle and Tyneside, England, as a naval engineer, Zamyatin drew on that technical world for the novel's precise, industrial imagery — scholars have traced the numeric names of several characters to the shipyard specifications of vessels such as the icebreaker Saint Alexander Nevsky, one of Zamyatin's own projects.

Yes. Orwell read We in French translation, reviewed it, and said he intended to use it as a model for his next novel; he began writing 1984 roughly eight months later. Literary scholars regard 1984's debt to We as well established.

Zamyatin finished We in 1921, but Soviet censors banned it for its anti-totalitarian themes. It first appeared in English translation in 1924; the original Russian text wasn't published anywhere until 1952, in New York; and it didn't reach print in the Soviet Union itself until 1988, during glasnost.