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Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (1884-1937) - name also written Evgenii Ivanovich Zamiatin |
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Russian novelist, playwright, short story writer, and essayist, whose famous anti-utopia My (1924, We) prefigured Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), and inspired George Orwell's 1984 (1949). The book was considered a "malicious slander on socialism" in the Soviet Union, and it was not until 1988 when Yevgeny Zamyatin was rehabilitated. In the English-speaking world My has appeared in several translations. "And again, as this morning at the dock, I saw everything as though for the first time in my life: the straight, immutable streets, the glittering glass of the pavements, the divine parallelepipeds of the transparent houses, the square harmony of the gray-blue ranks. And I felt: it was not the generations before me, but I—yes, I—who had conquered the old God and the old life. It was 1 who had created all this." (in We, translated by Mirra Ginsburg, Avon Books, 1987, p. 5) Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin was born in the provincial town of Lebedian, some two hundred miles south of Moscow. His father was an Orthodox priest and schoolmaster, and his mother musician. Zamyatin attended Progymnasium in Lebedian and gymnasium in Voronezh. From 1902 to 1908 he studied naval engineering at St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute. While still a student, he joined the Bolshevik fraction of the Social-Democratic Party. In 1905 he made a study trip in the Near East. Due to his revolutionary activities, Zamyatin was arrested in 1905 and exiled. 'Odin' (1908), his first short story, drew on his experiences in prison. Zamyatin lived illegally in St. Petersburg, spent some time in
Finland in 1906, and continued his studies. After graduating as a naval
engineer in 1908 he lectured at the Polytechnic Institute and began
publishing fiction and technical articles. Zamyatin was again
imprisoned and exiled in 1911, but two years later he was given
amnesty. In 1916 he was sent to England to supervise the construction of icebreakers at the Armstrong-Whitworth shipyards in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. On the eve of the October Revolution, Zamyatin returned to Russia. His stay in England inspired such satirical works as Ostrovitiane (1918, 'The Islanders'), in which he satirized English obsession with timetables, and Lovets cheloveka (1921, 'The Fisher of Men'), which takes place in a London suburb. In the Soviet Union Zamyatin was known as "the Englishman" because of his moustache, neat tweed suits, and formal behavior. Uezdnoe (1913,
'A Provincial Tale'), a satire of Russian small-town life, brought
Zamyatin
widespread recognition among critics of the regime. Na kulichkakh (1914,
A Godforsaken Hole) was published in the Socialist-Revulutionary
Party's almanac, Zavety, which had also printed Uezdnoe.
The story depicted drinking, racism, and barbarism in an army garrison
in Vladivostok, and led to the confiscation of the journal. Zamyatin
himself was tried for maligning the military. During this period
Zamyatin was close to the so-called "Scythian" movement, of which he
wrote in one of his essays: "This is the
tragedy and the biter, racking happiness of the true Scythian: he can
never rest on laurels, he will never be with the practical victors,
with those who rejoice and sing "Glory Be." The lot of the true
Scythian is the thorns of the vanguished. His faith is heresy. His
destiny is the destiny of Ahasuerus. His work is not for the near but
for the distant future." (A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny
Zamyatin, edited and translated by Mirra Ginsburg, 1970, pp. 22-23) In 1917-18 Zamyatin contributed articles under the
pseudonym of M. Platonov for Socialist newspapers, and in the early
1920s he edited of the journals Dom Iskusstva, Sovremennyi
zapad, and Ruskii sovremennik.
He lectured on writing techniques in the "House of Arts," which had
been established in Petrograd by Gorky, served on the board of numerous
literary organisations, and worked for the World Literature Publishing
house, where he edited Russian translations of Jack London, H.G. Wells,
Romain Rolland, O. Henry, and Anatole France. The short story 'Mamai'
drew from the cultural heritage of St. Petersburg, and the idea of the
city as an artifical creation, built on swamp ground. At night, the
buildings turn into ships. The short story 'Peshchere' (1921, The Cave) was set in the ruined, frozen old Petersburg, where people try to survive in the city as through it were the Ice Age: ". . . wrapped in hides, coats, blankets, rags, the cav dwellers retreated from cave to cave." ('The Cave,' translated by Gleb Struve, in Worlds Apart: An Anthology of Russian Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited and with commentary by Alexander Levitsky, 2007, p. 409) One of central characters, Martin Martinych, still remembers his "nice blue room, and the piano with its cover, and on the piano—a little wooden horse—an ashtay, and I was playing, and you came up behind—" (Ibid., p. 412) Zamyatin's grim vision inspired Friedrich Ermler's film House in the Snow Drifts (1927). Ermler's most famous and notorious film is perhaps The Great Citizen (1939), about the life and murder of the Communist Party leader Sergei Kirov. The film received the Stalin Prize first class. Although Zamyatin welcomed the revolution, he criticized its
repression of freedom, and barbarity of the new regime. In Petrograd
Zamyatin enjoyed the fame of a grand master of literature. His
disciples established in 1921 a group, called the Serapion
Brothers after E.T.A. Hoffmann's collection
of stories Die Serapions-Brüder
(1819-21). The Serapions insisted on their apolitical stance, but they
all had problems with the censors. Among the members were Konstantin
Fedin, Veniamin Kaverin, Lev Lunts, Viktor Shklovsky, Vsevolod Ivanov,
Nikolay Nikitin, Mikhail Slonimsky, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Nikolay
Tikhonov, and Elizaveta Poloskaya. In 1921 Zamyatin published in the magazine Dom
Iskusstv
an article entitled 'I am Afraid,' in which he accused the government
of suppressing free thought. "I am afraid the future of Russian
literature might be only its pass," he wrote."Real literature can exist
only where it is done not by obedient and dependable clerks, but by
madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics." (St Petersburg: A
Cultural History by Solomon Volkov, 2010, p. 374)
When
Zamyatin surveyed in
1923 the
new Russian prose, he criticized both the Proletkult writers and the
Serapion Brothers. He remarked the language of the epoch was
rapid and pungent, like a code. In 'The New Russian Prose (1923)
he said: "Life today has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not
along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of
Einstein, of Revolution. In this new projection, the best-known
formulas and objects become displaced, fantatic, familiar-unfamiliar." (from 'Introduction' by Mirra Ginsburg, We, p. x) Zamyatin was arrested in 1919 and again 1922, this time along with one hundred sixty members of the intelligentsia. He was imprisoned at Shpalernaya Prison in Petrograd, where he was held in solitary confinement and then released following an intervention of his friends. Unfortunately, they did not know that at that time Zamyatin toyed with the idea of leaving the country, but requested that the decision to deport him would be reversed and he would be allowed to go to Moscow instead. Finding it difficult to get his new works published, Zamyatin accepted an offer by the Leningrad Malay Academic Theater to adapt the story 'The Islanders' for the stage. It was produced in 1925 under the title The Society of Honorary Bell Ringers. Attila, Zamyatin's four-act tragedy, was banned and not published until 1950. His last play was the comedy Afrikanskii gost' (1929-1930, The African Guest). Blokha (1925, Flea), based on Leskov's folk-story 'Levsha' and produced at the Moscow Art Theater Two with sets by Boris Kustodiyev, was a great success. A second version premiered at the Bolshoi Dramatic Theater in 1926. Due to attacks on Zamyating, the production was closed by cultural officials. Aleksei Diky, who collaborated with Zamyatin on the initial adaptation, played later Stalin in such films as Igor Savchenko's The Third Strike (1948) and Vladimir Petrov's The Battle of Stalingrad (1949). Considered a heretic and "an open enemy of the working class,"
Zamyatin was constantly attacked in the late 1920s by Communist
Party-line critics, and he had to give up the leadership of the
All-Russian Writers' Union. Zamyatin argued that the post-revolutionary
age is best represented by work which form a synthesis of the fantastic
and common life. By this he meant his own fable We and perhaps Bulgakov's The
Master and Margarita.
The story 'Ivany' featured a village where all peasants are called
Ivan. The Ivans dig a hole so deep that they end up on the other side
of the world and find out that the soil is not better there. With reference to Zamyatin, Leon Trotsky
coined the term "inner
émigré" in Literature and Revolution
(1924), Zamyatin being
the master of this group of writers: ". . . he has sketches about
Russian "islanders," about the intelligentsia who live on an island in
the strange and hostile ocean of Soviet reality." (Literature and Revolution by Leon
Trotsky, edited by William Keach, translated by Rose Strunsky, 2005, p.
43) Zamyatin's books were banned, removed from libraries, and
he was unable to
publish. Zamyatin's contribution as one of the libretists to Dmitry
Shostakovich's satirical opera The Nose
(1927-28), based on Gogol's story, is unclear; other writers were
Georgy
Yonin, Alexander Preiss, and the composer himself. The pressures
of communist rule became too much for Zamyatin. After writing a letter
to Stalin, Zamyatin was allowed to go with
his wife into exile in 1931. He settled in Paris in 1932, where he
lived in poverty. Mostly he avoided emigré organizations, but he kept
contact to Bulgakov and Bulgakov's brother Nikolaj. The film director
Jean Renoir hired him
to co-write the script for Les Bas-fonds, based on
Gorky's play. The setting was changed from Russia to a French slum. For
the last years of his life Zamyatin worked on Bich Bozhii, a
novel on Attila and Rome, which paralleled the 20th century conflict
between Russia and West. He never finished the book. Zamyatin died in
Paris on March 10, 1937, dreaming of return to the Soviet Union. During the following decades Zamyatin's works were studied and published in the West, and he was characterized as one of the most brilliant Russian writers of the 20th century. With the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika policies banned Soviet masterpieces were again published, among them Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Grossman's Life and Fate, and Zamyatin's My. My, completed in 1921, was the only full-length novel
Zamyatin wrote. Extracts from the original text were published in an
émigre journal in Prague in 1927. In Russia My circulated in
manuscripts. At an imaginative level, claimed the author Martin
Seymour-Smith in The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written
(1998), My is far above even Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Besides Orwell, My inspired Huxley's Brave New World,
although the latter author did not acknowledge this fact. The first English translation was published in 1924, in the 1970s appeared two translations, and in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed. Orwell got in his hands a French edition, entitled Nous Autres, not the American edition from 1924. In his review in Tribune, Jamuary 4, 1946, Orwell wrote: "So far as I can judge it is not a book of the first order, but it is certainly an unusual one, and it is astonishing that no English publisher has been enterprising enought to reissue it." (We: With Introduction, Summary & Analysis by Yevgeny Zamyatin, translated by S. Viatchanin, introduction by George Orwell, 2015, p. ii) Orwell urged Fredric Warburg to publish the work. The story is set in the twenty-sixth century A.D. in a
totalitarian,
standardized One State of the future. Its dictator is the all-powerful
Benefactor, who offers the citizens, called Numbers, security and
material affluence but not freedom. All the citizens wear identical
grey-blue unifiorms with bandages bearing their numbers. There is no
freedom, because freedom and crime are closely connected: "when man's
freedom equals zero, he commits no crimes." (Ibid., p.
35) Special guardians spy upon the
behaviour and morals of the numbers. A certificate permits the use of
curtains, but the right is granted only on sexual days. "At all other
times we live behind our transparent walls that seem woven of gleaming
air—we are always visible, always washed in light. We have nothing to
conceal from one another." (Ibid., p. 18) The
narrator, D-503, is a mathematician and chief engineer of
the spaceship Integral. He
fully accepts the
total control of the centralized state. However, D-503's observations in his notebook reveal his
distorted view
of human existence: "And then, to myself: Why is this beautiful? Why is
dance beautiful? Answer: because it is unfree motion, because the whole
profound meaning of dance lies predsely in absolute, esthetic
subordination, in ideal unfreedom. And if it is true that our forebears
abandoned themselves to dance at the most exalted moments of their
lives (religious mysteries, military parades), it means only one thing:
the instinct of unfreedom is organically inherent in man from time
immemorial* and we, in our present life, are only consciously. . . ." (Ibid., p. 4) D-503 falls in love with I-330, a member of a revolutionary group, but their love is doomed. The caretaker of D's house makes a report to the guardians. Like in 1984, love is destroyed by the totalitarian system. When his imagination is removed in the Great Operation, D-503 is again a faithful servant of the One State. I-330 and other revolutionaries are subjected to torture under the Bell and sent to the Benefactor's Machine. The novel ends with the lines: "And I hope that we shall conquer. More than that—I am certain we shall conquer. Because Reason must prevail. ." (Ibid.p. 232) Zamyatin predicted a Stalinist type of industrial system. As
Alexander Levitsky wrote in Worlds
Apart: An Anthology of Russian Fantasy and Science Fiction, "Needless to say, We did not sit well within the
framework of the
future promised to the masses by the Bolshevik government which took
control of the Russian society in 1917." (Ibid., p. 32) Although Zamyatin's target in We was
not the The New Economic Policy (NEP), Lenin's idea of state
capitalism, but the perfectly rationalized, modern One State society.
Furthermore, Zamyatin drew from his experiences and observations
of the British society, where Taylorism, mechanization, and time
efficiency, despite negative reactions of engineers and workers, had
become key codes throughout the industry. They were the goals even in
the first communist-ruled state. Zamyatin's early stories satirized the backwardness of the provincial Russia, later on his target was the Communist system. All kinds of modes of thought, includung religious beliefs, gave material for several of his stories: "When the flaming, seething sphere (in science, religion, social life, art) cools, the fiery magma becomes coated with dogma—a rigid, ossified, motionless crust. Dogmatization in science, religion, social life, or art is the entropy of thought." (A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, edited and translated by Mirra Ginsburg, 1970, p. 108) In the tale 'God,' a cockroach named Senka, doesn't believe in God, until he sees Mizumin the postman, who says. "A-ah, cockroach that I love, my friend from behind the stove – where you been keeping yourself? Greetings!" Mizumin's plans to marry fail, he comes home drunk, and drops Senka into one of his canal-boats, size 14. Senka begs his God: "Have mercy upon me!" Mizumin finds Senka and places him on the wall, saying: "Creep on!" And Senka confesses: "How unbearably great was God, how merciful, how mighty!" For further reading: 25 Years of Soviet Russian Literature: 1918-1943 by Gleb Struve (1944); A Soviet Heretic by David J. Richards (1962); The Life and Works of Evgenii Zamjatin by Alex M. Shane (1968); Russian Literature Under Lenin and Stalin 1917-1953 by G. Struve (1971); Evgenii Zamjatin: An Interpretative Study by Christopher Collins (1973); "Brave New World," "1984," and "We": An Essay on Anti-Utopia by E.J. Brown (1976); Three Russian Writers and the Irrational: Zamyatin, Pil'nyak, and Bulgakov by T.R.N. Edwards (1982); Zamyatin's 'We': A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Gary Kern (1988); Russkaia antiutopia XX veka by B.A. Lanin and M.M. Borishanskaia (1994); Zamiatin's "We" by Robert Russell (1998); Human Nature in Utopia: Zamyatin’s We by Brett Cooke (2002); Cities at the End of the World: Using Utopian and Dystopian Stories to Reflect Critically on Our Political Beliefs, Communities, and Ways of Life by David J. Lorenzo (2014); 'Yevgeny Zamyatin: We, 1924,' in Literary Wonderlands: A Journey through the Greatest Fictional Worlds Ever Created, general editor, Laura Miller (2016); 'Yevgeny Zamyatin and the Wellsian Utopia' by Maxim Shadurski, in H.G. Wells and All Things Russian, edited by Galya Diment (2019); 'Creative Personality as an Indicator and Formula for the Discontinuity/Continuity of Culture: Yevgeny Zamyatin' by Larisa V. Polyakova, in A Culture of Discontinuity?: Russian Cultural Debates in Historical Perspective, edited by Olga Tabachnikova (2023); The Utopian Dilemma in the Western Political Imagination by John Farrell (2023) Selected works:
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