Евгений Замятин: Жизнь и творчество русского диссидента.

Russian author

Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (; 1 February 1884 [O. S. 20 January 1884] – 10 March 1937), sometimes anglicized as Eugene Zamyatin, was a Russian author of science fiction, philosophy, literary criticism, and political satire. The son of a Russian Orthodox priest, Zamyatin lost his faith in Christianity at an early age and became a Bolshevik. As a member of his Party's Pre Revolutionary underground, Zamyatin was repeatedly arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and exiled. However, Zamyatin was just as deeply disturbed by the policies pursued by the All Union Communist Party (b) [VKP (b)] following the October Revolution as he had been by Tsarist policy. Due to his subsequent use of literature to both satirize and criticize the Soviet Union's enforced conformity and increasing totalitarianism, Zamyatin, whom Mirra Ginsburg has dubbed "a man of incorruptible and uncompromising courage," is now considered one of the first Soviet dissidents. He is most famous for his highly influential and widely imitated 1921 dystopian science fiction novel We, which is set in a futuristic police state. 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 outrage this sparked within the Party and the Union of Soviet Writers led directly to the State organized defamation and blacklisting of Zamyatin and his successful request for permission from Joseph Stalin to leave his homeland. In 1937 he died in poverty in Paris. After his death, Zamyatin's writings were circulated in samizdat and continued to inspire multiple generations of Soviet dissidents.

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." Zamyatin may have had synesthesia since he gave letters and sounds qualities. 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 lost his faith in Christianity, became an atheist and a Marxist, and joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

Zamyatin later recalled the Russian Revolution of 1905 as follows: "In those years, being a Bolshevik meant following the line of greatest resistance, and I was a Bolshevik at that time. In the fall of 1905 there were strikes, and the dark Nevsky Prospekt was pierced by a searchlight from the Admiralty Building. October 17. Meetings in the universities." In December 1905, Zamyatin agreed to hide in his flat a paper bag filled with the explosive pyroxylin. The following day, he and thirty other Bolsheviks were arrested by the Okhrana inside their "revolutionary headquarters of the Vyborg district, at the very moment when plans and pistols of various types were spread out on the table." After being arrested and beaten up, Zamyatin managed to smuggle a note out of the prison, instructing his fellow Bolsheviks, "to remove everything compromising from my room and the rooms of my four comrades." Although this was immediately done, Zamyatin did not know of it until much later. During the months he spent in solitary confinement, Zamyatin recalled that he had almost daily nightmares about the paper bag in his flat containing pyroxylin. In the spring of 1906, Zamyatin was released and sent into exile in his native Tambov Governorate. However, Zamyatin later wrote that he could not stand life among the devoutly Russian Orthodox peasantry of Lebedyan. Therefore, he escaped and returned to Saint Petersburg where he lived illegally before moving to Helsinki, in the Grand Duchy of Finland.

In 1913, Zamyatin was granted an amnesty as part of the celebrations for 300 years of rule by the House of Romanov and granted the right to return to St. Petersburg. His A Provincial Tale, which satirized life in a small Russian town, was immediately published and brought him a degree of fame. The next year he was tried and acquitted for defaming the Imperial Russian Army in his story Na Kulichkakh (At the World's End). Zamyatin later wrote, "My only previous visit to the West had been to Germany. Berlin had impressed me as a condensed, 80 percent version of Petersburg. In England it was quite different: everything was as new and strange as Alexandria and Jerusalem had been some years before."

Yevgeny Zamyatin died in poverty of a heart attack on 10 March 1937. Only a small group of friends were present for his burial at the Cimetière de Thiais, in the Parisian suburb of the same name. One of the mourners, however, was Zamyatin's Russian language publisher Marc Lvovich Slonim, who had befriended the Zamyatins after their arrival in the West. His death was unreported in the Soviet press.

Writing in 1967, Mirra Ginsburg commented: "Like Bulgakov and like Babel, Zamyatin gives us a glimpse of what post revolutionary Russian literature might have become had independence, daring, and individuality not been stamped out so ruthlessly by the dictatorship. The Russian reader – and by the same token, the Russian writer – was deprived of the work of these rich and germinal writers, and the effects, alas, are sadly evident." In the same year, Solzhenitsyn responded to the KGB's seizure of a hidden manuscript of The Gulag Archipelago, his nonfiction exposé of the Soviet secret police, the Soviet concentration camps, and the role of Vladimir Lenin in setting up both, by ordering his publisher in France to publish the whole book immediately. This resulted, as with Zamyatin, in Solzhenitsyn's departure from his homeland. Unlike Zamyatin, however, Solzhenitsyn was not given a choice in the matter. As part of last Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's reformist policies of glasnost and perestroika, Zamyatin's writing began to again be published legally in his homeland in 1988. Even since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Zamyatin's many denunciations of enforced conformity and groupthink, as well as his belief that writers and intellectuals have a duty to oppose the calcification and entropy of human thought has meant that his writings continue to have both readers and admirers.