The architect of a forbidden future
In June 1931, Zamyatin wrote directly to Stalin: "For me, as a writer, to be deprived of the opportunity to write is a death sentence." With that one line, he secured permission to leave the Soviet Union.
A Bolshevik naval engineer turned writer, he imagined a future of control and conformity in *We*. The novel became the first work banned by Soviet censorship; when life as a writer became impossible, he wrote directly to Stalin and secured permission to leave. Even in Paris exile he kept his Soviet passport and sat with the Soviet delegation at the 1935 anti-fascist writers' congress, but died outside his homeland.
Career Timeline
- 1905–1917Bolshevik underground work and engineering career
- 1921Completed *We*; Soviet ban followed
- 1920년대Published satire and literary criticism
- 1931Received permission to leave the USSR
- 1932–1937Lived in exile in Paris
Related historical events
- 1905–1907The Revolution of 1905Bolshevik underground activistHe worked as a Bolshevik underground activist during the 1905 Revolution and remained consistently involved in the party's illegal work through 1917.
- 1921–1928The New Economic Policy (NEP)Author of a forbidden futureA writer who produced the dystopia We amid the literary debates of the NEP years.
A Bolshevik of 1905, Engineer of Icebreakers
Yevgeny Zamyatin was a Bolshevik of 1905. As a student at the St Petersburg Polytechnic Institute he joined the party's Bolshevik faction and worked as an agitator; in December 1905 he was arrested, spent months in solitary confinement and was banished from the capital. He later recalled: "In those years being a Bolshevik meant following the line of greatest resistance, and I was a Bolshevik then."
He was also a first-rate naval engineer. In 1916 the Russian government sent him to Newcastle in England to supervise the construction of icebreakers, among them the St Alexander Nevsky, later renamed the Lenin. Precision engineer and born heretic in one, this "Russian Englishman" returned in September 1917 into the whirlwind of the revolution, became a master craftsman of the Petrograd literary world and trained the Serapion Brothers.
*We*: The First Censored Dystopia
Completed in 1920, Zamyatin's We (Мы) is regarded as the foundational text of 20th-century dystopian fiction. Set in the 32nd century, the glass-walled city of the 'One State' is narrated by D-503, a mathematician and builder of the spaceship Integral. A loyal cog in the machine, he develops a 'soul' after meeting the female number I-330 and is drawn into an underground revolution. The State has replaced names with numbers, regulates intimacy through 'Sexual Hours' and 'pink tickets', and unanimously re-elects the 'Benefactor' (Благодетель). Zamyatin fused the extreme Taylorism he witnessed in British shipyards with the reality of War Communism to produce a blueprint of totalitarianism in which technological progress extinguishes the human.
The manuscript was sent to the Grzhebin publishing house in Berlin in 1921. But Soviet censors banned it for 'mocking the communist system': the first official prohibition of a literary work in Soviet history. English (1924), Czech, and French translations soon followed, directly influencing Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley's Brave New World. It was not published inside the USSR until 1988. The novel that defined Zamyatin brought him international renown but made life as a writer in his own country impossible.
June 1931, A Letter to Stalin
His novel We, written in 1920–1921, was refused publication at home and appeared first in English translation in New York in 1924. When an abridged Russian text appeared in a Prague emigre journal in 1927, a campaign of denunciation erupted against Zamyatin in 1929. His plays were pulled from the stage and his books from the shelves, and he resigned from the writers' organization himself.
In June 1931 Zamyatin wrote directly to Stalin. For a writer, he argued, silence was a death sentence: if he could not write, let him leave. Gorky added his weight, and Stalin, exceptionally, granted permission. Zamyatin left in November 1931 carrying a Soviet passport, and in 1935 he sat with the Soviet delegation at the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture in Paris. To the end he insisted he was not an emigre but a temporary resident abroad; he died in Paris in March 1937. We was finally published in the Soviet Union in 1988.