Yevgeny Zamyatin
1884–1937
Biography
Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884–1937) was a Russian writer of novels, stories and satire, and a trained marine engineer. He was born in Lebedyan, in Tambov province, the son of an Orthodox priest. He turned away from religion as a young man, joined the Bolsheviks, and before 1917 was arrested, imprisoned and exiled several times for his revolutionary work.
After the revolution Zamyatin became a sharp critic of the new state's conformity and of the policing of writers. His novel We (Мы), written in the early 1920s, pictures a future police state in which people are numbered, every hour is timetabled and private feeling is treated as a sickness. It was the first work banned by the Soviet censors, and Zamyatin arranged for it to be smuggled abroad for publication. The state turned on him, and after winning permission to leave the country he died in poverty in Paris in 1937.
We is on this site as Мы (We), and it is the book by which he is best known. The narrator, the engineer D-503, keeps a diary and begins to feel something the state calls a disease: a soul. The novel was an early model for the twentieth-century dystopia, and later writers, Orwell among them, were in its debt. Zamyatin's work circulated in samizdat after his death, and he is now regarded as one of the first Soviet dissidents.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Мы
by Евгений Иванович Замятин (1884—1937)
In the glass-walled One State, where every hour is timetabled and people have numbers, not names, the engineer D-503 keeps a diary and begins to feel something called a soul. Zamyatin's 1920 novel is the first great dystopia and the ancestor of Orwell's.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.