Yevgeny Zamyatin

Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (Russian: Евге́ний Ива́нович Замя́тин, IPA: [jɪvˈɡʲenʲɪj ɪˈvanəvʲɪdʑ zɐˈmʲætʲɪn]; 1 February [O.S. 20 January] 1884 – 10 March 1937), sometimes anglicized as Eugene Zamiatin, was a Russian author of science fiction, philosophy, literary criticism, and political satire.

The son of a Russian Orthodox priest, Zamyatin abandoned Christianity at an early age and became a Bolshevik. As a member of his Party's Pre-Revolutionary underground, Zamyatin was repeatedly arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and exiled. But Zamyatin was just as deeply disturbed by the policies pursued by the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) following the October Revolution as he had been by Tsarist policy.

Due to his subsequent use of literature to both satirize and criticize the Soviet Union's enforced conformity and increasing totalitarianism, Zamyatin, whom Mirra Ginsburg has dubbed "a man of incorruptible and uncompromising courage," is now considered one of the first Soviet dissidents. He is most famous for his highly influential and widely imitated 1921 dystopian science fiction novel We, which is set in a futuristic police state.

In 1921, 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 outrage this sparked within the Party and the Union of Soviet Writers led directly to the State-organized defamation and blacklisting of Zamyatin and his successful request for permission from Joseph Stalin to leave his homeland. In 1937 he died in poverty in Paris.

After his death, Zamyatin's writings were circulated in samizdat and continued to inspire multiple generations of Soviet dissidents.

Zamyatin was born in Lebedyan, Tambov Governorate, 300 km (186 mi) south of Moscow. His father was a Russian Orthodox priest and schoolmaster, and his mother a musician. In a 1922 essay, Zamyatin recalled: "You will see a very lonely child, without companions of his own age, on his stomach, over a book, or under the piano, on which his mother is playing Chopin." Zamyatin may have had synesthesia since he gave letters and sounds qualities. He saw the letter Л as having pale, cold and light blue qualities.

He studied engineering for the Imperial Russian Navy in Saint Petersburg, from 1902 until 1908. During this time, Zamyatin lost his faith in Christianity, became an atheist and a Marxist, and joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

Zamyatin later recalled the Russian Revolution of 1905 as follows: "In those years, being a Bolshevik meant following the line of greatest resistance, and I was a Bolshevik at that time. In the fall of 1905 there were strikes, and the dark Nevsky Prospekt was pierced by a searchlight from the Admiralty Building. October 17. Meetings in the universities."

In December 1905, Zamyatin agreed to hide in his flat a paper bag filled with the explosive pyroxylin. The following day, he and thirty other Bolsheviks were arrested by the Okhrana inside their "revolutionary headquarters of the Vyborg district, at the very moment when plans and pistols of various types were spread out on the table."

After being arrested and beaten up, Zamyatin managed to smuggle a note out of the prison, instructing his fellow Bolsheviks, "to remove everything compromising from my room and the rooms of my four comrades." Although this was immediately done, Zamyatin did not know of it until much later. During the months he spent in solitary confinement, Zamyatin recalled that he had almost daily nightmares about the paper bag in his flat containing pyroxylin.

In the spring of 1906, Zamyatin was released and sent into exile in his native Tambov Governorate. However, Zamyatin later wrote that he could not stand life among the devoutly Russian Orthodox peasantry of Lebedyan. Therefore, he escaped and returned to Saint Petersburg where he lived illegally before moving to Helsinki, in the Grand Duchy of Finland.

After illegally returning to St. Petersburg, "disguised, clean-shaven, with a pince-nez astride my nose," Zamyatin began to write fiction as a hobby. He was arrested and exiled a second time in 1911. He later recalled, "I lived first in an empty dacha at Sestroretsk, then, in winter, in Lakhta. There amidst snow, solitude, quiet, I wrote A Provincial Tale."

In 1913, Zamyatin was granted an amnesty as part of the celebrations for 300 years of rule by the House of Romanov and granted the right to return to St. Petersburg. His A Provincial Tale, which satirized life in a small Russian town, was immediately published and brought him a degree of fame. The next year he was tried and acquitted for defaming the Imperial Russian Army in his story Na Kulichkakh (At the World's End). He continued to contribute articles to Marxist newspapers. After graduating as an engineer for the Imperial Russian Navy, Zamyatin worked professionally at home and abroad.

In March 1916, he was sent to England to supervise the construction of icebreakers at the shipyards of Armstrong Whitworth in Walker and Swan Hunter in Wallsend while living in Newcastle upon Tyne. He supervised the building of the Krassin, which retained the distinction of being the most powerful icebreaker in the world into the 1950s. He also worked on the Lenin.

Zamyatin later wrote, "My only previous visit to the West had been to Germany. Berlin had impressed me as a condensed, 80-percent version of Petersburg. In England it was quite different: everything was as new and strange as Alexandria and Jerusalem had been some years before."

Zamyatin later recalled, "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."

Zamyatin's The Islanders, satirizing English life, and the similarly themed A Fisher of Men, were both published after his return to Russia.

In 1917 he returned to Petersburg and plunged into the seething literary activity that was one of the most astonishing by-products of the revolution in ruined, ravaged, hungry, and epidemic-ridden Russia. He wrote stories, plays, and criticism; he lectured on literature and the writer's craft; he participated in various literary projects and committees – many of them initiated and presided over by Maxim Gorky – and served on various editorial boards, with Gorky, Blok, Korney Chukovsky, Gumilev, Shklovsky, and other leading writers, poets, critics, and linguists. And very soon he came under fire from the newly 'orthodox' – the Proletarian Writers who sought to impose on all art the sole criterion of 'usefulness to the revolution.'

As the Russian Civil War of 1917–1923 continued, Zamyatin's writings and statements became increasingly satirical and critical toward the Bolshevik party. Even though he was an Old Bolshevik and even though "he accepted the revolution", Zamyatin believed that independent speech and thought are necessary to any healthy society and opposed the Party's increasing suppression of freedom of speech and the censorship of literature, the media, and the arts.

In his 1918 essay "Scythians?" Zamyatin criticized the Skify (Scythians) circle of writers led by Ivanov-Razumnik, over their conformity with increasingly stifling Soviet artistic norms, writing:

Christ on Golgotha, between two thieves, bleeding to death drop by drop, is the victor – because he has been crucified, because, in practical terms, he has been vanquished. But Christ victorious in practical terms is the Grand Inquisitor. And worse, Christ victorious in practical terms is a paunchy priest in a silk-lined purple robe, who dispenses benedictions with his right hand and collects donations with his left. The Fair Lady, in legal marriage, is simply Mrs. So-and-So, with hair curlers at night and a migraine in the morning. And Marx, having come down to earth, is simply a Krylenko. Such is the irony and such is the wisdom of fate. Wisdom because this ironic law holds the pledge of eternal movement forward. The realization, materialisation, practical victory of an idea immediately gives it a philistine hue. And the true Scythian will smell from a mile away the odor of dwellings, the odor of cabbage soup, the odor of the priest in his purple cassock, the odor of Krylenko — and will hasten away from the dwellings, into the steppe, to freedom."

After their emigration, Zamyatin and his wife settled in Paris. According to Mirra Ginsburg: "Zamyatin's last years in Paris were years of great material hardship and loneliness. As Remizov wrote, 'He came with sealed lips and a sealed heart.' He found little in common with most of the emigrés who had left Russia a decade earlier."

The screenplay for Jean Renoir's The Lower Depths (1936), from Maxim Gorky's stage play of the same name, was co-written by Zamyatin.

Zamyatin later wrote: "Gorky was informed of this, and wrote that he was pleased at my participation in the project, that he would like to see the adaptation of his play, and would wait to receive the manuscript. The manuscript was never sent: by the time it was ready for mailing, Gorky was dead." After the film premiered, Zamyatin wrote articles for French magazines and worked on a novel, The Scourge of God, which has Attila as the main character. The novel was never finished.

Yevgeny Zamyatin died in poverty of a heart attack on 10 March 1937. Only a small group of friends were present for his burial at the Cimetière de Thiais, in the Parisian suburb of the same name.

One of the mourners, however, was Zamyatin's Russian language publisher Marc Lvovich Slonim, who had befriended the Zamyatins after their arrival in the West. His death was unreported in the Soviet press.

Writing in 1967, Mirra Ginsburg commented: "Like Bulgakov and like Babel, Zamyatin gives us a glimpse of what post-revolutionary Russian literature might have become had independence, daring, and individuality not been stamped out so ruthlessly by the dictatorship. The Russian reader – and by the same token, the Russian writer – was deprived of the work of these rich and germinal writers, and the effects, alas, are sadly evident."

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union's vengeance, however, against Zamyatin for sending his novel We to the West for publication was remembered by Soviet poets and writers long after the writer's death. This is why it was 1957 before another Soviet writer took the risk of doing so again. In that year, when he handed the manuscript to his novel Doctor Zhivago over to an emissary from billionaire Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Boris Pasternak said: "You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad."

Even though Pasternak was accordingly subjected to State-organized character assassination, ostracism, and blacklisting almost identical to what had been experienced by Zamyatin, Pasternak's decision to publish Doctor Zhivago in the West also helped him to win the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Not surprisingly, many other Soviet dissidents after Pasternak would also go on to both use and expand upon the ideas and tactics pioneered by the author of We. For example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was Christianizing Zamyatin's attacks against State-enforced conformity when he wrote, in his 1973 Letter to Soviet Leaders: "Our present system is unique in world history, because over and above its physical and economic constraints, it demands of us total surrender of our souls, continuous and willing participation in the general, conscious lie. To this putrefaction of the soul, this spiritual enslavement, human beings who wish to be human cannot submit. When Caesar, having exacted what is Caesar's, demands still more insistently that we render unto him what is God's – that is a sacrifice we dare not make."

In the same year, Solzhenitsyn responded to the KGB's seizure of a hidden manuscript of The Gulag Archipelago, his nonfiction exposé of the Soviet secret police, the Soviet concentration camps, and the role of Vladimir Lenin in setting up both, by ordering his publisher in France to publish the whole book immediately. This resulted, as with Zamyatin, in Solzhenitsyn's departure from his homeland.