YEVGHENIY ZAMYATIN was born in a small Russian town, to a poor aristocratic family, in 1884. He grew up, as he put it in his autobiography, “under the grand piano: Mother [was] a good musician.... Childhood almost friendless; friends were books.”

Trained in St. Petersburg as an engineer and shipbuilder, the well-traveled young Zamyatin joined the early Bolshevik movement and was repeatedly arrested and banned from residing in the capital.

He started writing in 1908 to substantial critical acclaim, until, during the First World War, the czar’s government charged him with treason for his anti-war novella In the Boondocks (1913) and confiscated the print run of the literary magazine that published it.

With such credentials, after the Revolution of 1917, Zamyatin became a respectable figure in the Soviet Russian literary life. He wrote prolifically, published extensively, taught literature, and edited several literary magazines. However, his attitude toward “all kinds of global deeds of derring-do” against a background of the complete decline of civilization remained skeptical. 

In 1920, Zamyatin wrote We as a parody of a utopia written by two Communist ideologues whose main conceit was global reorganization of the world based on “eradication of soul and the feeling of love in man.” He sent the manuscript abroad, where, in 1924, it was translated into English and published in New York. But even though it had not seen the light of day in the USSR, Soviet literary critics who had read it as a manuscript demolished it, chiding the author for turning into a middle-class reactionary who grumbled about the Great Revolution. Zamyatin’s plays were subsequently dropped from theaters’ repertoires and his new books rejected by state publishers.

In 1931, realizing that his life as a writer in the Soviet Russia was over, Zamyatin appealed directly to Iosif Stalin, asking permission to leave the country. Thanks to some influential friends, he secured Stalin’s personal permission and emigrated to France, where he died in March 1937.