Yevgeny
Zamyatin
Yevgeny Zamyatin by Boris Kustodiev
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (Russian:
Евге́ний Ива́нович Замя́тин) (February
20, 1884 – March 10, 1937) was a Russian
author, most famous for his 1921 novel
We, a story of dystopian future which
influenced George Orwell's Nineteen
Eighty-Four, Ayn Rand's Anthem, Ursula
K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed and,
indirectly, Kurt Vonnegut's Player
Piano.
Early life
Zamyatin was born in Lebedyan, 300
km south of Moscow. His father was a
Russian Orthodox priest and
schoolmaster, and his mother a musician.
He may have had synesthesia as he gave
letters and sounds qualities. For
example, he saw the letter "L" as having
pale, cold and light blue qualities. He
studied naval engineering in Saint
Petersburg from 1902 until 1908, during
which time he joined the Bolsheviks. He
was arrested during the Russian
Revolution of 1905 and exiled, but
returned to Saint Petersburg where he
lived illegally before moving to 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 (A
Provincial Tale) in 1913, which
satirized life in a small Russian town,
brought him a degree of fame. The next
year he was tried for maligning the
military in his story Na Kulichkakh (At
the world's end). He continued to
contribute articles to various socialist
newspapers. After graduating as a naval
engineer, he worked professionally at
home and abroad. In 1916 he was sent to
England to supervise the construction of
icebreakers at the shipyards in Walker
and Wallsend while living in Newcastle
upon Tyne.
Literary career
Zamyatin wrote The Islanders,
satirizing English life, and its pendant
A Fisher of Men, both published after
his return to Russia in late 1917.
Zamyatin supported the October
Revolution, but opposed the system of
censorship under the Bolsheviks. 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 critical
of the regime. He stated boldly: "True
literature can only exist when it is
created, not by diligent and reliable
officials, but by madmen, hermits,
heretics, dreamers, rebels and
skeptics". This attitude caused his
position to become increasingly
difficult as the 1920s wore on.
Ultimately, his works were banned, and
he wasn't permitted to publish,
particularly after the publication of We
in a Russian émigré journal in 1927.
His novel We, while often discussed as
primarily a political satire on the
totalitarianism he perceived in the
Soviet Union, is significant in other
aspects as well. It may variously be
examined as (1) a polemic against the
optimistic scientific socialism of H. G.
Wells whose works Zamyatin had
previously published and with the heroic
verses of the (Russian) Proletarian
Poets, (2) 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 (1932) 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.
According to We translator Natasha
Randall, Orwell believed that Huxley was
lying. Kurt Vonnegut said that in
writing Player Piano (1952) he
"cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave
New World, whose plot had been
cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny
Zamyatin's We."
In addition to We, Zamyatin also wrote a
number of short stories, in fairy tale
form, that constituted satirical
criticism of Bolshevik rule, such as in
a mocking story about a city where the
mayor decides that to make everyone
happy he should make everyone equal. He
starts by forcing everyone, himself
included, to live in a big barrack, then
to shave 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 (1891) 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" (1961) bears
distinct resemblances to Zamyatin's
tale.
Exile and death
Zamyatin was eventually given
permission to leave the Soviet Union by
Joseph Stalin in 1931, after the
intercession of Maxim Gorky. He settled,
impoverished, in Paris with his wife,
where he died of a heart attack in 1937.
During his time in France, he notably
worked with Jean Renoir, co-writing the
script of his film Les Bas-fonds. He is
buried in Thiais, France, at a cemetery
on Rue de Stalingrad.
