Yevgeny Zamyatin

Yevgeny Zamyatin (born February 1 [January 20, Old Style], 1884, Lebedyan, Tambov province, Russia—died March 10, 1937, Paris, France) was a Russian novelist, playwright, and satirist, one of the most brilliant and cultured minds of the postrevolutionary period and the creator of a uniquely modern genre—the anti-Utopian novel. His influence as an experimental stylist and as an exponent of the cosmopolitan-humanist traditions of the European intelligentsia was very great in the earliest and most creative period of Soviet literature.

Educated in St. Petersburg as a naval engineer (1908), Zamyatin combined his scientific career with writing. His early works were Uyezdnoye (1913; “A Provincial Tale”), a trenchant satire of provincial life, and Na kulichkakh (1914; “At the World’s End”), an attack on military life that was condemned by tsarist censors. Zamyatin was brought to trial, and, although acquitted, he stopped writing for some time. During World War I he was in England supervising the building of Russian icebreakers. There he wrote Ostrovityane (1918; “The Islanders”), satirizing what he saw as the meanness and emotional repression of English life. He returned to Russia in 1917.

A chronic dissenter, Zamyatin was a Bolshevik before the Russian Revolution of 1917 but disassociated himself from the party afterward. His ironic criticism of literary politics kept him out of official favour, but he was influential as the mentor of the Serapion Brothers, a brilliant younger generation of writers whose artistic creed was to have no creeds. In such stories as Mamay (1921)—the name of the Mongol general who invaded Russia in the 14th century—and Peshchera (1922; “The Cave”), Zamyatin painted a picture of the increasing savagery of humankind in postrevolutionary Petrograd. Tserkov Bozhiya (1922; “The Church of God”) is an allegorical tale affirming that power based on bloodshed cannot lay claim to virtue. His essay “Ya boyus” (1921; “I Am Afraid”), a succinct survey of the state of postrevolutionary literature, closes with the prophetic judgment: “I am afraid that the only future possible to Russian literature is its past.” During this period Zamyatin wrote some of his best short stories.

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His most ambitious work, the novel My (written 1920; We), circulated in manuscript but was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988 (an English translation appeared in the United States in 1924, and the original Russian text was published in New York in 1952). It portrays life in the “Single State,” where workers live in glass houses, have numbers rather than names, wear identical uniforms, eat chemical foods, and enjoy rationed sex. They are ruled by a “Benefactor” who is unanimously and perpetually reelected. Often classed as science fiction, We is the literary ancestor of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949).

The publication abroad of We was one of the reasons for the repressive campaign launched against many writers in 1929. Zamyatin announced his withdrawal from the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) and for all practical purposes ceased to be considered a Soviet author. He was no longer published, and his plays, which he had begun to write in 1923 and which had run successfully in theatres, were removed from the repertory. In 1931, after his appeal to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the intervention of writer Maxim Gorky on his behalf, Zamyatin was granted permission to leave the Soviet Union for an extended stay abroad. He lived in Paris for the rest of his life. His literary productivity during those years was scant.