ZAMYATIN, YEVGENY IVANOVICH

born Feb. 1 [Jan. 20, old style], 1884, Lebedyan, Tambov province, Russia died March 10, 1937, Paris Zamyatin also spelled Zamiatin Russian novelist, playwright, and satirist, one of the most brilliant and cultured minds of the post-revolutionary period, and creator of a peculiarly modern genrethe anti-Utopian novel. His influence as an experimental stylist and as an exponent of the cosmopolitanhumanist traditions of the European intelligentsia was very great in the earliest and most creative period of Soviet literature. Educated in St. Petersburg as a naval engineer (1908), he combined his scientific career with writing. His early works were Uyezdnoye (1913; A Provincial Tale), a trenchant satire of provincial life, and Na kulichkakh (1914; At the World's End), an attack on military life. The last named was condemned by tsarist censors, Zamyatin was brought to trial and, although acquitted, he stopped writing for some time. During World War I he was in England supervising the building of Russian icebreakers. There he wrote Ostrovityane (1918; The Islanders), satirizing the meanness and emotional repression of English life. He returned to Russia in 1917. A chronic dissenter, Zamyatin was a Bolshevik before the Revolution but disassociated himself from the party afterward. His ironic criticism of literary politics kept him out of official favour, but he was influential as the mentor of the Serapion Brothers, a brilliant younger generation of writers whose artistic creed was to have no creeds. His essay Ya boyus (1921; I Am Afraid), a succinct survey of the state of post-Revolutionary literature, closed with the prophetic judgment: I am afraid that the only future possible to Russian literature is its past. During this period Zamyatin wrote some of his best short stories. His most ambitious work, the novel My (1924; We), circulated in manuscript but was never published in the Soviet Union (an English translation appeared in the United States in 1924, and the original Russian text was published in Prague in 1927). It portrays life in the Single State, where workers live in glass houses, have numbers rather than names, wear identical uniforms, eat chemical foods, and enjoy rationed sex. They are ruled by a Benefactor who is unanimously and perpetually reelected. We is the literary ancestor of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). In 1923 Zamyatin turned to the theatre, and some of his plays were successfully produced; but the publication of We abroad and his continuous ridicule of artistic orthodoxy made him the victim of a press persecution that resulted in the banning of his works. In 1931, through Gorky's intervention, Stalin granted him permission to leave Russia. The few years that remained of his life were spent in Paris.