Background

Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin was born on January 20, 1884, in Lebedyan, Russian Empire (now the administrative center of Lebedyansky District in Lipetsk Oblast, Russian Federation) to the family of a Russian Orthodox priest and a school principal Ivan Dmitrievich Zamyatin and a pianist Maria Aleksandrovna Platonova. Born in a small city in central Russia in 1884, Zamyatin spent a solitary childhood in which books were his major companions, his favorites being the works of Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Turgenev.

Education

Yevgeny Zamyatin attended Lebedyan Progymnasium in 1892-1896. In 1902 he graduated from Voronezh Governorate Male Gymnasium. He studied naval engineering at Saint Petersburg Imperial Polytechnic Institute from 1902 until 1908, during which time he joined the Bolsheviks. He was arrested during the Russian Revolution of 1905 and sent into internal exile in Siberia. However, he escaped and returned to Saint Petersburg where he lived illegally before moving to the Grand Duchy of Finland in 1906 to finish his studies.

Career

Yevgeny Zamyatin began publishing stories in his student years and continued during the post-1911 period when he lectured in naval architecture at the Polytechnic Institute.

In 1916 Zamyatin traveled to England on a long-term engineering assignment: he was to oversee the construction of Russian icebreakers that had been commissioned from a Newcastle shipyard. Zamyatin, who spoke only broken English, did not feel at ease in Britain and filled his notebooks with jaundiced observations. His satirical eye was busily at work, however, and while he was there he wrote two short comic novellas about life in England, Ostrovitiane (The Islanders) and Lovets chelovekov (The Fisher of Men). These books (later published together in English under the title The Islanders) delved only superficially into English life but showed Zamyatin's fantastic humor developing to a new level. In The Islanders he imagines a bill introduced in the English Parliament that would make all noses the same length. Zamyatin took to wearing tweed suits, and England made enough of an impact on him that his Russian friends dubbed him "the Englishman" after he returned home.

When Zamyatin heard that a revolt against czarist rule had broken out in Russia in 1917, he hastened back home, traveling in a small British ship that was vulnerable to attack by German submarines. He was overjoyed by the Communist takeover and thought that it heralded a bright new future. Zamyatin wrote numerous newspaper articles, sometimes using the pseudonym Mich. Platonov, and edited several literary magazines. He also supervised Russian translations of foreign novels by, among others, Jack London, O. Henry, and H.G. Wells, the latter a science fiction writer and fellow engineer whom he greatly admired. Zamyatin's reputation was riding high in the early days of the Soviet regime, and he inspired a group of younger followers in St. Petersburg to form a writers' association called the Serapion Brothers.

Beginning in 1919 Zamyatin worked on drafts of We, whose Russian title was My. It was his only full-length novel. As state repression descended over Russia, Zamyatin vigorously protested the deteriorating civil rights situation. When he finished We in 1920 it was branded a slander against socialism and was left unpublished. The book appeared for the first time in English translation, in 1924. Russian writers passed copies of it from hand to hand, and a group of Russian expatriates in what is now the Czech Republic published a version in Czech in 1927, further angering Soviet authorities. The book was also issued in French and, thanks to high-profile reviews by George Orwell and other writers, became well known in the West.

Even in the face of his lack of success in getting We published, and even though he was detained by police on several occasions, Zamyatin continued to write. His essay "I Am Afraid" questioned government censorship, and an experimental long story, Peshchere (The Cave), was published in 1922. The story was set amid the privations of wartime in St. Petersburg, with an extended metaphor likening the cold and darkness of the city to life in a cave. The story inspired a 1927 film, House in the Snow Drifts, by Soviet director Friedrich Ermler. Despite (or perhaps because of) his problems with the authorities, Zamyatin was admired by other Russian writers and was chosen as president of the All-Russian Writers' Union.

Zamyatin wrote several plays in the middle and late 1920s; Atilla (1925) was based on the figure of Attila the Hun, and Blokha (The Flea) was based on a folk-style story. Blokha was staged with sets by a top designer, Boris Kustodiyev, and was enthusiastically received by the public in its opening performances, but by this time the comparative liberalism of the early 1920s had disappeared and Zamyatin was under constant attack in the government-controlled press. He was singled out for criticism by Leon Trotsky himself, then in the midst of a power struggle with future dictator Josef Stalin, but he did not back down from his view that a writer ought to be, as he often put it, a heretic. Blokha was closed down by government censors, and Zamyatin was forced into near-total obscurity. He may have contributed to the text of the Dmitri Shostakovich comic opera The Nose, which was based on a novel by Nikolai Gogol, a comic novelist whose outlook bore some similarities to Zamyatin's own.

Finally, Zamyatin's situation in the Soviet Union became untenable, and he wrote a letter to Stalin personally, asking that he be allowed to leave the country. Possibly due to support from writer Maxim Gorky, permission was granted, and he left for Paris. In his last years, he dreamed of returning to the Soviet Union and refrained from contributing writings to the anti-Communist press in the West. This earned him the enmity of Russian emigrés. In his last years, he worked on a novel about Attila the Hun, but it was never finished. Zamyatin died in Paris on March 10, 1937. We continued to be widely read in the West, and collections of Zamyatin's stories and essays appeared in English translation from the 1960s through the 1980s.

As a Russian stylist, Zamyatin innovated a neo-realis­tic style in which satire, primitivism, grotesque imag­ery, and linguistic play brought elements of the Sym­bolist movement to a realistic subject matter. He was closely associated with the Serapion Brothers literary group of the 1920s, a group of experimentalists who believed that art should be separate from politics. A number of critics have divided Zamyatin’s career into four distinct periods. The first included tales with a provincial setting, such as Uyezdnoye (A Provincial Tale) and Na kulichkakh (A Godforsaken Hole, also known as At the World’s End). Here, the tragedy of everyday life is conveyed through an ironic tone, in a narrative using provincial dialect and colloquialisms.

Formal innovation came to the fore in the works of Zamyatin’s second period, which began with the story Ostrovityane (The Islanders) and continued through My. During this period Zamyatin used imagery as a unifying technical device, according to a reviewer in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. The thematic focus shifted, at the same time, from rural life to mechanized urban civilization.

Zamyatin’s third stage, lasting from 1922 to 1927, has been called “transitional” by a writer in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. He molded stories such as “Rasskaz o samom glavnom (A Story about the Most Important Thing) to fit his aesthetic theories. That tale depicts four planes of existence at once, ranging from the life of a butterfly to the extinction of a planet. This third period also marked the high point of Zamyatin’s activity as a playwright.

In his fourth period Zamyatin turned to narrative and stylistic simplicity, objectivity, and an absence of sat­ire; as he himself put it (as quoted by Cornwell), “All the complexities through which I passed turned out to be necessary in order to achieve simplicity.” For Cornwell, this final period represents a “mature primitivism,” and is seen at its best in the 1930 no­vella Navodneniye (The Flood), which is notable for its unity of structure. Another work of this period singled out by critics is the story “Ela.”

As an essayist, Zamyatin wrote in favor of rebellion against tradition and authority, with a forcefulness that has led him to be admired as, in the phrase of a critic for Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, “an uncompromising artist.” His distinctive style has prompted varying responses from critics and readers: some have embraced its masterly modernism, vivid imagery, and strong satire, while others have consid­ered his verbal effects overdone. He has been criti­cized for paying more attention to his metaphors than to his characters, but praised for being philosophically consistent in his advocacy of humanity in conflict with established power. He was a major influence on Russian writers of the post-1920s decades despite the relative unavailability of his works in the Soviet Union.

Achievements

• Yevgeny Zamyatin was 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. His novel's We greatest influence was visible abroad; it was admired by English novelist George Orwell and was a key predecessor to 1984. His portrayal of totalitarian psychology inspired the brothers Strugatsky to write philosophically charged science-fiction novels in a similar anti-utopian vein. Zamyatin was officially rehabilitated in the Soviet Union in 1988, and today We is frequently assigned in literature classes in Russian schools. In 1994, We received a Prometheus Award in the Libertarian Futurist Society's "Hall of Fame" category.

Works

More photos

• book

  • We

    (We, one of the most powerful dystopias of all time, was w...)

    1920
  • Selected Short Stories: Mamai, The Cave, Tales for Big Kids, A Story about the Most Important Thing

    (This volume contains three of his earliest works of short...)

    2017
  • Ogni Sv. Dominika

    (Although he is best known for his science fiction, Soviet...)

    1922
  • The dragon, and other stories 1918
  • A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin 1970
  • The Sign: And Other Stories 2015
  • Islanders and the Fisher of Men 1921
  • Short Stories: Alatyr', Sever, Bich bozhiy, Lovec chelovekov 2017
  • Litsa 1955

Religion

Despite being born to the family of a Russian Orthodox priest Zamyatin would become an atheist by 1905, which was a great disappointment for his father.

Politics

In his student years, Zamyatin became interested in socialist doctrine and joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He was a member of the Vyborg District fighting squad and took an active part in the life of the revolutionary student youth. He took advantage of a summer job on a ship to make his way to Odessa, where he joined city residents in backing the mutiny of the crew of the battleship Potemkin in rebellion against being given maggot-infested food to eat. Zamyatin participated in the abortive leftist rebellion of 1905 and was arrested, beaten and held for several months in solitary confinement. That experience was reflected in Zamyatin's first published story, Odin (Alone), which appeared in 1908.

Although Zamyatin was officially told to stay clear of St. Petersburg, the secret police made a clerical error that allowed him to slip back into engineering classes, stay under the radar, graduate from the Polytechnic Institute and even teach there for several years. He continued writing fiction and published several technical articles. In 1911 the police realized their error, arrested him again and sentenced him to internal exile in the provincial city of Lakhta. Zamyatin made good use of the time by writing a set of short stories, Uezdnoye (District Tales), that satirized small-town Russian life. Two years later, having served his time, he was officially rehabilitated. He promptly antagonized authorities once again with Na kulichkakh (A Godforsaken Hole), a story that depicted a group of drunk, intolerant Russian soldiers in Vladivostok. The journal that published the story was seized by police.

Despite having been a prominent Old Bolshevik, Zamyatin was deeply disturbed by the policies pursued by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) following the October Revolution. is satirical stories of the 1920s include criticisms of Lenin in "Tales of Theta" and "Dragon," a surreal tale about the army's brutality during the Red Terror. In 1921, his novel We became the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board. Ultimately, Zamyatin arranged for We to be smuggled to the West for publication. The subsequent outrage this sparked within the Party and the Union of Soviet Writers led directly to Zamyatin's successful request for exile from his homeland. Due to his use of literature to criticize Soviet society, Zamyatin has been referred to as one of the first Soviet dissidents.

Views

The fundamental contradiction between mechanism and individualism that Zamyatin explored has resonated ever since in discussions of science, technology, and ethics. As societies, by adopting modern science and technologies, have come to possess increasingly potent tools for individual action, those tools often have resulted in the conscious imposition or spontaneous emergence of machinelike social orders. For good and bad, after all, railroads make people run on time. This dilemma echoes through powerful and popular works ranging from Edgar Rice's play The Adding Machine (1923) to monitory novels such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), Ayn Rand's Anthem (1938), George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), and William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) as well as potent sociological analyses such as Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society (1964) and touchstone movies such as Blade Runner (1982).

Quotations: "In England, I built ships, looked at ruined castles, listened to the thud of bombs dropped by German zeppelins, and wrote The Islanders. I regret that I did not see the February Revolution, and know only the October Revolution (I returned to Petersburg, past German submarines, in a ship with lights out, wearing a life belt the whole time, just in time for October). This is the same as never having been in love and waking up one morning already married for ten years or so."

"True literature can exist only when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics."

Membership

• Union of Soviet Writers , Soviet Union

Personality

Some researchers say that Yevgeny Zamyatin may have had synesthesia since he gave letters and sounds qualities. For instance, he saw the letter Л as having pale, cold and light blue qualities.

Quotes from others about the person

• "I cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We." - writer Kurt Vonnegut about creating his novel Player Piano (1952).
  
  "There were a lot of utopias in the nineteenth century, wonderful societies that we might possibly construct. Those went pretty much out of fashion after World War I. And almost immediately one of the utopias that people were trying to construct, namely the Soviet Union, threw out a writer called Zamyatin who wrote a seminal book called We, which contains the seeds of Orwell and Huxley. Writers started doing dystopias after we saw the effects of trying to build utopias that required, unfortunately, the elimination of a lot of people before you could get to the perfect point, which never arrived." - Margaret Atwood, a Canadian novelist, poet, and literary critic.
  
  "Zamyatin adds to our understanding of the form for forcing contradiction into outright paradox. We is clearly anti-utopian, but it is also very different from Wells's work in the way it generates and negotiates conflict. However intricate the Wellsian logical system may become, it is not confusing; Zamyatin's, even at its most simple, baffles complacent understanding. We is a novel whose ironic ambiguity is relentless. The reader is made aware of powerful and significant symbols, but every major symbol, besides its primary signification, retains the potential for representing its exact opposite." - John Huntington, in The Logic of Fantasy: H.G. Wells and Science Fiction.

Interests

• Writers

  Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Herbert George Wells

Connections

Yevgeny Zamyatin married Liudmila Nikolevna Usova.

Father:

Ivan Dmitrievich Zamyatin

Mother:

Maria Aleksandrovna Platonova

Wife:

Liudmila Nikolevna Usova

Friend:

Maxim Gorky

Acquaintance:

Joseph Stalin

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 166 This volume of Contemporary Authors contains biographical information on approximately 300 modern writers.
  1998
• Evgenij Zamjatin: an Interpretive Study
  1973
• Human Nature in Utopia: Zamyatin's We
  2002
• Zamyatin: A Soviet Heretic
  2011