Yevgeny Zamyatin - Literary Career

Literary Career

Zamyatin wrote The Islanders, satirizing English life, and its pendant A Fisher of Men, both published after his return to Russia in late 1917. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 he edited several journals, lectured on writing, and edited Russian translations of works by Jack London, O. Henry, H. G. Wells, and others. Zamyatin originally supported the October Revolution, but opposed the increasing use of censorship which followed.

His works became increasingly satirical and critical toward the CPSU. This attitude made his position increasingly difficult as the 1920s wore on. In 1923, Zamyatin arranged for the manuscript of his novel We to be smuggled to E.P. Dutton and Company in New York City. After being translated into English by Gregory Zilboorg, the novel was published in 1924.

Then, in 1927, Zamyatin went much further. He smuggled the original Russian text to Marc Slonim, then editor of a Russian émigré journal and publishing house based in Prague. To the fury of the State, copies of the Slonim edition began being smuggled back to the USSR and secretly passed from hand to hand. Zamyatin's dealing with Western publishers triggered a mass offensive by the Soviet State against him. As a result, he was blacklisted from publishing anything in his homeland.

We has often been discussed as a political satire aimed at the police state which Zamyatin perceived in the Soviet Union. There are many other dimensions, however. It may variously be examined as (1) a polemic against the optimistic scientific socialism of H. G. Wells whose works Zamyatin had previously published and with the heroic verses of the (Russian) Proletarian Poets, (2) as an example of Expressionist theory and (3) as an illustration of the archetype theories of Carl Jung as applied to literature. George Orwell believed that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) must be partly derived from We. However, in a 1962 letter to Christopher Collins, Huxley says that he wrote Brave New World as a reaction to H.G. Wells' utopias long before he had heard of We. Kurt Vonnegut said that in writing Player Piano (1952) he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We." In 1994, We received a Prometheus Award in the "Hall of Fame" category.

In addition to We, Zamyatin also wrote a number of short stories, in fairy tale form, that constituted satirical criticism of Communist ideology. In one story, the mayor of a city decides that to make everyone happy he must make everyone equal. The mayors then forces everyone, himself included, to live in a big barrack, then to shave their heads to be equal to the bald, and then to become mentally disabled to equate intelligence downward. This plot is very similar to that of The New Utopia (1891) by Jerome K. Jerome whose collected works were published three times in Russia before 1917. In its turn, Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron" (1961) bears distinct resemblances to Zamyatin's tale.

Max Eastman, an American communist who had similarly broken with his former beliefs, described the Politburo's campaign against Zamyatin in his book Artists in Uniform.