Sonia Orwell of George Orwell during the last decade of the writer's life, and other friends of Orwell, have said that Sonia was the model for Julia, the heroine of "Nineteen Eighty-Four", the "girl from the fiction department" who brings love and warmth to the middle-aged hero, Winston Smith. As Orwell wrote in "Nineteen Eighty-Four", "the girl from the fiction department... was looking at him... She was very young, he thought, she still expected something from life... She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated... All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness.
We (novel) with some similarities to Zamyatin's; Nabokov read "We" while writing "Invitation to a Beheading". Orwell began "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (1949) some eight months after he read "We" in a French translation and wrote a review of it. Orwell is reported as "saying that he was taking it as the model for his next novel". Brown writes that for Orwell and certain others, "We" "appears to have been "the" crucial literary experience". Shane states that "Zamyatin's influence on Orwell is beyond dispute". Robert Russell, in an overview of the criticism of "We", concludes that ""1984" shares so many features with "We" that