Yevgeny Zamyatin

Russian · 1884 to 1937

Born Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin on February 1, 1884, in Lebedyan in the Tambov Governorate, three hundred kilometres south of Moscow, the son of an Orthodox priest and schoolmaster and a pianist mother who played Chopin while the small Zamyatin lay underneath the keyboard, he abandoned Christianity at engineering school in Saint Petersburg and joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He hid pyroxylin in his flat in December 1905, was beaten and held in solitary confinement for months, was exiled to Lebedyan in 1906, escaped, was rearrested in 1911, and returned to Petersburg under amnesty in 1913. In 1916 he was sent to Newcastle upon Tyne to supervise the construction of Russian icebreakers in British shipyards, and the regimented English company towns provided much of the visual furniture of his great novel. We, completed in 1921, set in a glass-walled mathematical future under the Benefactor, was the first work formally banned by the Soviet censorship board and circulated only in samizdat at home; smuggled abroad, it appeared in English in 1924 and Russian in Prague in 1927. The Party defamation campaign that followed was so total that in 1931 Zamyatin wrote directly to Stalin asking for permission to emigrate. Maxim Gorky interceded, and the request was granted. He spent his last years in Paris in declining health and worsening poverty, working on a screenplay of Gorky's The Lower Depths for Jean Renoir and an unfinished historical novel on Attila. He died of a heart attack on March 10, 1937, in Paris, at the age of fifty-three, attended at his deathbed only by his wife.