Escape and Death
In 1931, Zamyatin appealed directly to Joseph Stalin, requesting permission to leave the Soviet Union. In his letter, Zamyatin wrote, "True literature can only exist when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics". With the encouragement of Maxim Gorky, Stalin decided to grant Zamyatin's request.
Zamyatin settled with his wife in Paris, where he collaborated with French film director Jean Renoir. Renoir's 1936 adaptation of Gorky's The Lower Depths was co-written by Zamyatin.
Yevgeny Zamyatin died in poverty of a heart attack in 1937. Only a small group of friends were present for his burial. However, one of the mourners was his Russian language publisher Marc Slonim, who had befriended the Zamyatins. Zamyatin's grave lies in Thiais, France, at a secular cemetery on Rue de Stalingrad.
Read more about this topic: Yevgeny Zamyatin
Famous quotes containing the words escape and, escape and/or death:
“We now talk of our killed and wounded. There is however a very happy feeling. Those who escape regret of course the loss of comrades and friends, but their own escape and safety to some extent modifies their feelings.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“To retire to the monastery, or the woods, or the sea, is to escape from the sharp suggestions that spur on ambition.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)