Yevgeny Zamyatin

Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin was born in Lebedyan, a small provincial town south of Moscow, in 1884. He studied naval engineering at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute, became a Bolshevik, was arrested twice and exiled twice by the Tsarist government — once after the failed 1905 Revolution, once in 1911 — and continued his political activities through both exiles. He spent 1916–1917 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, supervising the construction of Russian icebreakers in British shipyards; the England of that period, with its industrial fog and class hierarchies, appears in his satirical stories set there. He returned to Russia shortly before the October Revolution.

The Revolution that he had helped work for disappointed him quickly. By the early 1920s he was writing essays critical of the Bolshevik government's censorship, its suppression of intellectual life, its drift toward a new kind of authoritarianism. His novel We (Мы) was written between 1920 and 1921. It could not be published in the Soviet Union — not because it had been banned, initially, but because it was clear that it would be if it were submitted. A Russian émigré journal in Prague published excerpts; an English translation appeared in New York in 1924; French and Czech translations followed. The first complete Russian edition did not appear until 1952, fifteen years after Zamyatin's death.

We is the first fully realized dystopian novel in the modern sense. Set in the distant future in the One State, a glass-walled city where all citizens are designated by number rather than name and where privacy has been abolished (the glass walls make all rooms permanently visible), it follows D-503, a rocket engineer, who encounters a woman (I-330) who introduces him to resistance and, more dangerous still, to the irrational. The novel's target is not any specific political system but the logic of perfect rationality applied to human life — the idea that human happiness can be engineered, that freedom is the source of unhappiness rather than its remedy, that the self should be eliminated for the good of the collective.

George Orwell read We in a French translation and wrote about it in 1946, two years before he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. The influence is direct and acknowledged: the telescreens, the Thought Police, the memory hole, the love affair as political rebellion — all have clear antecedents in Zamyatin. Aldous Huxley claimed he had not read We before writing Brave New World (1932); most scholars find this implausible, though it cannot be proven either way. Regardless of the genealogy, We is not merely a source text for later dystopias but a fully achieved novel in its own right — more formally experimental than either Orwell or Huxley, with a narrator whose prose style visibly breaks down as his rebellion undermines his capacity for the precise, mechanical language of the One State.

In 1929, Soviet writers' organizations demanded Zamyatin's expulsion, citing We and his essays. He survived, barely, in Soviet literary life. In 1931 he wrote directly to Stalin requesting permission to emigrate; Stalin granted it, which was almost without precedent. He spent his final years in Paris, writing a play and a novel about Attila the Hun (The Scourge of God, left unfinished) and dying of a heart attack in 1937, in poverty, largely forgotten in the West and unpublishable in the Soviet Union. The rehabilitation began after his death and continues.