Yevgeny Zamyatin

• 1. Introduction

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  Yevgeny Zamyatin spent his final years in Paris dying in poverty, his name unmentioned in any Soviet newspaper, his most famous novel banned in his own country for decades. He had been an Old Bolshevik, a trained naval engineer, a man who had once hidden bags of explosive pyroxylin for the revolutionary underground. He ended up as one of the first Soviet dissidents, the author of a dystopian novel so dangerous the state machine mobilized against it. The questions worth sitting with are these: how does a man who devoted his youth to the revolution become its most incorruptible critic? And what did Zamyatin see coming that almost no one else dared name?

• 2. Boyhood and Belief

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  Zamyatin was born in Lebedyan, Tambov Governorate, roughly 300 kilometers south of Moscow, to a Russian Orthodox priest who also taught school and a mother who played Chopin. In a 1922 essay he recalled himself as "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." Scholars have noted he may have had synesthesia: he perceived the letter Л as pale, cold, and light blue.

  He arrived in Saint Petersburg in 1902 to study engineering for the Imperial Russian Navy, and during those years he shed both Christianity and political quietism at the same time. By the time the first Russian Revolution erupted in 1905, he had joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He later described what it felt like: "In those years, being a Bolshevik meant following the line of greatest resistance."

• 3. Underground and Exile

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  In December 1905, Zamyatin agreed to conceal a paper bag full of the explosive pyroxylin in his flat. The very next day, the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, arrested him along with thirty other Bolsheviks inside their headquarters in the Vyborg district, catching them, as Zamyatin recalled, "at the very moment when plans and pistols of various types were spread out on the table."

  From his cell, he managed to smuggle out a note instructing comrades to clear the evidence from his room and four others. He did not know whether the message had worked. During the months of solitary confinement that followed, he had near-daily nightmares about the bag of pyroxylin still sitting in his flat.

  Released in the spring of 1906, he was sent into internal exile in Tambov Governorate but found he could not endure life among the devoutly Orthodox peasantry of Lebedyan. He slipped back to Saint Petersburg illegally, "disguised, clean-shaven, with a pince-nez astride my nose," and began writing fiction as a hobby. A second arrest and exile followed in 1911, and it was in that forced solitude, first at Sestroretsk and then at Lakhta, that he wrote A Provincial Tale. A general amnesty in 1913 marking three hundred years of Romanov rule finally allowed him to return openly.

• 4. The English Interlude

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  In March 1916, the Imperial Russian Navy sent Zamyatin to England to oversee the construction of icebreakers at the Armstrong Whitworth shipyards in Walker and the Swan Hunter yards in Wallsend, while he lived in Newcastle upon Tyne. Among the vessels he helped bring into being was the Krassin, which held the distinction of being the most powerful icebreaker in the world into the 1950s. He also worked on the Lenin.

  Zamyatin later wrote that England was nothing like Germany, which had struck him as "a condensed, 80-percent version of Petersburg." In England, he said, "everything was as new and strange as Alexandria and Jerusalem had been some years before." He listened to German Zeppelins dropping bombs and, in the same breath, was writing The Islanders, his satire of English life. When the February Revolution broke out, he missed it. He sailed home past German submarines with all lights out, wearing a life belt the whole journey, arriving just in time for the October Revolution. He compared arriving home to "never having been in love and waking up one morning already married for ten years or so."

• 5. We and What It Cost

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  Zamyatin wrote his novel We between 1920 and 1921. It is set many centuries in the future, in the One State, a city of glass apartment buildings where mass surveillance is constant, the secret police are called the Bureau of Guardians, and every citizen is identified only by a number. The society runs on the theories of F. W. Taylor, life is managed by formula, and a spaceship called the Integral is being constructed to extend the One State's absolutism to other planets. The protagonist, D-503, is the spaceship's chief engineer. His lover, O-90, has been assigned to him by the state on specified nights; she is barred from having children because the state has decided she is too short. A woman named I-330, who smokes cigarettes and drinks vodka, pulls D-503 into MEPHI, a rebel organization aiming to destroy the Green Wall surrounding the city and reunite its people with the wild world beyond.

  In 1921, We became the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board. Zamyatin arranged for the manuscript to be smuggled to E.P. Dutton and Company in New York City, where Gregory Zilboorg translated it into English; it appeared in 1924. Then in 1927, Zamyatin went further, sending the original Russian text to Marc Lvovich Slonim, editor of an anti-communist Russian emigre magazine in Prague. Copies of the Czech edition were soon being smuggled back into the Soviet Union and passed hand to hand. The state response was swift and total: Zamyatin was dismissed from his editorial posts, publishing houses closed to him, his plays were withdrawn from stages, and friends grew afraid to be seen with him. On the 24th of September 1929, rather than recant, he resigned from the Union of Soviet Writers, writing that he could not remain in an organization that even indirectly took part in persecuting its members.

• 6. The Philosophy of Heresy

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  Zamyatin's essays are where his argument takes its clearest shape. In 1919 he wrote: "The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy." In his 1921 essay "I Am Afraid," he accused poets who praised the new Soviet government unconditionally of behaving exactly as the Court Poets had under the Romanovs and the French Bourbons. He called them "nimble authors" who knew "when to sing hail to the Tsar, and when to the Hammer and Sickle." True literature, he argued, could only be created by "madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics."

  In his 1923 essay "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters," he extended the argument into a theory of civilizational physics. Revolutions cool. Dogma is the crust that forms when ideas stop burning. "Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought." He cited Francois-Noel Babeuf, beheaded in 1797 for ideas that were right, he wrote, a hundred and fifty years later. Zamyatin predicted the same fate for any literature bold enough to challenge the official line: it would be chopped off, yet it would be more useful than the approved kind precisely because it was anti-entropic.

• 7. Exile and Death

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  In 1931, Zamyatin wrote directly to Joseph Stalin requesting permission to leave with his wife. "I do not wish to conceal," he told Stalin, "that the basic reason for my request is my hopeless position here as a writer, the death sentence that has been pronounced upon me as a writer here at home." He also asked Maxim Gorky to intercede on his behalf. Gorky did. Zamyatin left the Soviet Union in November 1931.

  In Paris he co-wrote the screenplay for Jean Renoir's 1936 film The Lower Depths, adapted from Gorky's stage play. He was also working on a novel about Attila that he never completed. The last time he saw Gorky was at a dinner at Gorky's country house on an extraordinarily hot day, during a tropical downpour. Gorky told him on the stone terrace afterward that the passport matter was settled, but added that Zamyatin could still return it and stay. Zamyatin said he would go. Gorky frowned and went back inside. Months later Gorky was dead, and the manuscript of the screenplay for The Lower Depths had never been sent to him as promised.

  Zamyatin died of a heart attack on the 10th of March 1937. Only a small group of friends attended his burial at the Cimetière de Thiais in the Parisian suburb of the same name. Among the mourners was Marc Lvovich Slonim, the Prague publisher who had first received the smuggled Russian text of We, and who had befriended the Zamyatins after their arrival in the West. Soviet newspapers reported nothing.

• 8. The Shadow We Cast

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  Aldous Huxley wrote in a 1962 letter to Christopher Collins that he produced Brave New World as a reaction to H.G. Wells's utopias, before he had even heard of We. Yet George Orwell believed Brave New World must be partly derived from Zamyatin's novel. Kurt Vonnegut was less circumspect: he said he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World" when writing Player Piano in 1952, and acknowledged that Brave New World's plot had itself been cheerfully ripped from We. Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed appeared in 1974; Ayn Rand's Anthem in 1938; Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949. In 1994, We received a Prometheus Award in the Libertarian Futurist Society's Hall of Fame category.

  The fear Zamyatin's example planted in Soviet literary culture lasted a full generation. It was not until 1957, twenty years after his death, that another Soviet writer took the same risk of sending a manuscript to a Western publisher. Boris Pasternak handed Doctor Zhivago to an emissary of the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli and said: "You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad." Alexander Solzhenitsyn, writing in his 1973 Letter to Soviet Leaders, was Christianizing Zamyatin's argument about state-enforced conformity when he called on citizens to refuse "total surrender of our souls, continuous and willing participation in the general, conscious lie." Zamyatin's writing began to be published legally again in his homeland in 1988, under Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms. His unfinished novel about Attila, Bich Bozhii, was among the manuscripts he left behind.