Yevgeny Zamyatin


Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin / 1 February, sometimes anglicized as Eugene Zamyatin, was a Russian author of science fiction and political satire. He is most famous for his 1921 novel We, a story set in a dystopian future police state.
Despite having been a prominent Old Bolshevik, Zamyatin was deeply disturbed by the policies pursued by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union following the October Revolution. 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 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.

Early life

Zamyatin was born in Lebedyan, Tambov Governorate, 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."
He 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.
He studied engineering for the Imperial Russian Navy in Saint Petersburg, from 1902 until 1908. During this time, Zamyatin joined the Marxist-Leninist, or Bolshevik, faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He was arrested by the Okhrana 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.
After returning to Russia, he began to write fiction as a hobby. He was arrested and exiled a second time in 1911, but amnestied in 1913. His Uyezdnoye in 1913, which satirized life in a small Russian town, brought him a degree of fame. The next year he was tried for defaming the Imperial Russian Army in his story Na Kulichkakh. He continued to contribute articles to various Marxist newspapers.
After graduating as an engineer for the Imperial Russian Navy, Zamyatin worked professionally at home and abroad. In 1916 he was sent to the United Kingdom to supervise the construction of icebreakers at the shipyards in Walker and Wallsend while living in Newcastle upon Tyne.
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. This is the same as never having been in love and waking up one morning already married for ten years or so."

Soviet Dissident

Zamyatin's The Islanders, satirizing English life, and the similarly themed A Fisher of Men, were both published after his return to Russia in late 1917. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 he edited several journals, lectured on writing, and edited Russian translations of works by Jack London, O. Henry, H. G. Wells, and others.
His works became increasingly satirical and critical toward the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Even though he was an Old Bolshevik, Zamyatin came to disagree more and more with the Party's policies, particularly regarding the suppression of freedom of speech, and the censorship of literature,the media, and the arts.
In his 1921 essay I Am Afraid, Zamyatin wrote: "True literature can exist only when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics."
In his 1923 essay, On Literatute, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters, Zamyatin wrote, "The law of revolution is red, fiery, deadly; but this death means the birth of a new life, a new star. And the law of entropy is cold, ice blue, like the icy interplanetary infinities. The flame turns from red to an even, warm pink, no longer deadly, but comfortable. The sun ages into a planet, convenient for highways, stores, beds, prostitutes, prisons; this is the law. And if the planet is to be kindled into youth again, it must be set on fire, it must be thrown off the smooth highway of evolution: this is the law. The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. But someone must see this already, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only remedy against the entropy of human thought. When the flaming, seething sphere cools, the fiery magma becomes coated with dogma - a rigid, ossified, motionless crust. Dogmatization in science, religion, social life, or art is the entropy of thought. What has become dogma no longer burns; it only gives off warmth - it is tepid, it is cool. Instead of the Sermon on the Mount, under the scorching sun, to upraised-arms and sobbing people, there there is drowsy prayer in a magnificent abbey. Instead of Galileo's, 'Be still, it turns!' there are disspasionate computations in a well-heated room in an observatory. On the Galileos, the epigones build their own structures, slowly, bit by bit, like corals. This is the path of evolution - until a new heresy explodes the crush of dogma and all the edifices of the most enduring which have been raised upon it. Explosions are not very comfortable. And therefore the exploders, the heretics, are justly exterminated by fire, by axes, by words. To every today, to every civilization, to the laborious, slow, useful, most useful, creative, coral-building work, heretics are a threat. Stupidly, recklessly, they burst into today from tomorrow; they are romantics. Babeuf was justly beheaded in 1797; he leaped into 1797 across 150 years. It is just to chop off the head of a heretical literature which challenges dogma; this literature is harmful. But harmful literature is more useful than useful literature, for it is anti-entropic, it is a means of challenging calcification, sclerosis, crust, moss, quiescence. It is Utopian, absurd - like Babeuf in 1797. It is right 150 years later."
These attitudes, which the Party considered Deviationism made Zamyatin's position increasingly difficult as the 1920s wore on.
Zamyatin also wrote a number of short stories, in fairy tale form, that constituted satirical criticism of Communist ideology. In one story, the mayor of a city decides that to make everyone happy he must make everyone equal. The mayor then forces everyone, himself included, to live in a big barrack, then to shave their heads to be equal to the bald, and then to become mentally disabled to equate intelligence downward. This plot is very similar to that of The New Utopia by Jerome K. Jerome whose collected works were published three times in Russia before 1917. In its turn, Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron" bears distinct resemblances to Zamyatin's tale.
In 1923, Zamyatin arranged for the manuscript of his dystopian science fiction novel We to be smuggled to E.P. Dutton and Company in New York City. After being translated into English by Russian refugee Gregory Zilboorg, the novel was published in 1924.
Then, in 1927, Zamyatin went much further. He smuggled the original Russian text to Marc Lvovich Slonim, the editor of an anti-communist Russian émigré magazine and publishing house based in Prague. To the fury of the Soviet State, copies of the Czechoslovakian edition began being smuggled back to the USSR and secretly passed from hand to hand. Zamyatin's secret dealings with Western publishers triggered a mass offensive by the Soviet State against him. As a result, he was blacklisted from publishing anything in his homeland.
Max Eastman, an American Communist who had similarly broken with his former beliefs, described the Politburo's war against Zamyatin in his book Artists in Uniform.
In 1931, Zamyatin appealed directly to Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, requesting permission to leave the Soviet Union. In this letter Zamyatin wrote, "I do not wish to conceal that the basic reason for my request for permission to go abroad with my wife is my hopeless position here as a writer, the death sentence that has been pronounced upon me as a writer here at home.".
During the spring of 1931, Zamyatin asked Maxim Gorky, to intercede with Stalin on his behalf.
After Gorky's death, Zamyatin wrote, "One day, Gorky's secretary telephoned to say that Gorky wished me to have dinner with him at his country home. I remember clearly that extraordinarily hot day and the rainstorm - a tropical downpour- in Moscow. Gorky's car sped through a wall of water, bringing me and several other invited guests to dinner at his home. It was a literary dinner, and close to twenty people sat around the table. At first Gorky was silent, visibly tired. Everybody drank wine, but his glass contained water - he was not allowed to drink wine. After a while, he rebelled, poured himself a glass of wine,then another and another, and became the old Gorky. The storm ended, and I walked out onto the large stone terrace. Gorky followed me immediately and said to me, 'The affair of your passport is settled. But if you wish, you can return the passport and stay.' I said I would go. Gorky frowned and went back to the other guests in the dining room. It was late. Some of the guests remained overnight; others, including myself, were returning to Moscow. In parting, Gorky said, 'When shall we meet again? If not in Moscow, then perhaps in Italy? If I go there, you must come to see me! In any case, until we meet again, eh?' This was the last time I saw Gorky."

Emigration and death

After their emigration, Zamyatin and his wife settled in Paris. The screenplay to French film maker Jean Renoir's 1936 adaptation of Maxim Gorky's stage play The Lower Depths 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."
Yevgeny Zamyatin died in poverty of a heart attack in 1937. Only a small group of friends were present for his burial. However, one of the mourners was his Russian language publisher Marc Lvovich Slonim, who had befriended the Zamyatins after their arrival in the West. Yevgeny Zamyatin's grave can be found in Cimetière de Thiais, in the Paris suburb of the same name.
", Division 21, Line 5, Grave 36.

Legacy

We has often been discussed as a political satire aimed at the police state of the Soviet Union. There are many other dimensions, however. It may variously be examined as a polemic against the optimistic scientific socialism of H. G. Wells, whose works Zamyatin had previously published, and with the heroic verses of the Proletarian Poets, as an example of Expressionist theory, and as an illustration of the archetype theories of Carl Jung as applied to literature. George Orwell believed that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World must be partly derived from We. However, in a 1962 letter to Christopher Collins, Huxley says that he wrote Brave New World as a reaction to H.G. Wells' utopias long before he had heard of We. Kurt Vonnegut said that in writing Player Piano he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We." In 1994, We received a Prometheus Award in the Libertarian Futurist Society's "Hall of Fame" category.
We, the 1921 Russian novel, directly inspired: