Yevgeny Zamyatin

Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin was a Russian writer of science fiction, political satire, and literary criticism.
He was born in February 1884 in the town of Lebedyan, about 300 kilometers south of Moscow, during the era of the Russian Empire. Although his father was a priest of the Orthodox Church, Zamyatin abandoned Christianity at a young age and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

As a young revolutionary and student activist among the Bolsheviks, he was arrested, imprisoned, and exiled several times by the Tsarist regime. In 1905, he spent months in solitary confinement before being sent into provincial exile. Disguised, he managed to escape and return secretly to St. Petersburg, where he completed his engineering degree — and it was during this period that he began to write.

In 1911, the police caught him again and exiled him to another part of Russia, where he spent his time composing satirical works. Later, he was sent to England to supervise the construction of Russian icebreaker ships. Amid the dramatic events of 1917, Zamyatin returned immediately to Russia, where Maxim Gorky — himself a famous former rebel — helped him find a literary position.

This period marked the height of Zamyatin’s creative life. It was then that he wrote his most famous novel, We, considered the first dystopian science fiction novel ever written — a bold critique of the totalitarian Soviet police state.

After completing We in late 1920, Zamyatin showed the manuscript to a few friends, but Soviet authorities refused to grant publication permission. In 1921, We became the first book officially banned by the Soviet censorship council. He was eventually forced to smuggle the manuscript abroad for publication.

When the novel was published in the West, it caused a major scandal, as expected. The result was Zamyatin’s expulsion from the Soviet Writers’ Union. In 1931, Joseph Stalin personally granted him permission to emigrate to Paris with his wife.

Zamyatin lived in exile hoping that one day he might be allowed to write again and return to his homeland. But he died in poverty and obscurity in March 1937 of a heart attack. The Soviet press did not even announce his death.