Inspirational Quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Russian Novelist)

Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884–1937,) fully Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin, was a Russian novelist, playwright, and satirist. One of the most talented and cultured minds of the post-revolutionary period, he created a distinctively modern genre, the anti-Utopian novel.

Born in Lebedyan, Tambov Province, Zamyatin was educated in St. Petersburg as a naval engineer and combined his scientific career with writing. His first published work was Uyezdnoye (1913, ‘A Provincial Tale.’) In 1914, he wrote the novella, Na kulichkakh (‘At the World’s End,’) satirizing the life of army officers in an isolated garrison town. As a result, Zamyatin was tried but ultimately acquitted of ‘maligning the officer corps.’

During World War I, Zamyatin spent 18 months in Glasgow and northern England, designing icebreakers for Russia. He returned to St. Petersburg in 1917 and participated in a variety of cooperative literary projects. Leon Trotsky branded him ‘an internal émigré,’ and he was frequently criticized as ‘a bourgeois intellectual.’

Zamyatin refused to adapt his art to political dogma. He wrote My (1920; We, 1924,) a dystopian fantasy prophesying Stalinism and the Revolution’s failure to be ground-breaking. We became the first work forbidden by the Soviet censorship board, but Zamyatin arranged for We to be smuggled to the West for publication. It significantly influenced Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949.)

Zamyatin’s best stories are contained in The Dragon (1966.) With Maxim Gorky’s help, he was allowed to leave Russia in 1931, and he settled for exile in Paris, where he died.

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