The son of aRussian Orthodox priest, Zamyatin lost his faith inChristianity at an early age and became aBolshevik. As a member of his Party's Pre-Revolutionary underground, Zamyatin was repeatedly arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and exiled. But Zamyatin was just as deeply disturbed by the policies pursued by theAll-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) following theOctober Revolution as he had been byTsarist policy.
In 1921,We became the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board. Ultimately, Zamyatin arranged forWe to be smuggled to the West for publication. The outrage this sparked within the Party and theUnion of Soviet Writers led directly to the State-organized defamation andblacklisting of Zamyatin and his successful request for permission fromJoseph Stalin to leave his homeland. In 1937 he died in poverty inParis.
After his death, Zamyatin's writings were circulated insamizdat and continued to inspire multiple generations ofSoviet dissidents.
Zamyatin was born inLebedyan,Tambov Governorate, 300 km (186 mi) south of Moscow. His father was aRussian Orthodox priest andschoolmaster, and his mother amusician. In a 1922 essay, Zamyatin recalled: "You will see a very lonely child, without companions of his own age, on his stomach, over a book, or under the piano, on which his mother is playingChopin."[2]: 3 Zamyatin may have hadsynesthesia since he gave letters and sounds qualities. He saw the letterЛ as having pale, cold and light blue qualities.[3]
Zamyatin later recalled theRussian Revolution of 1905 as follows: "In those years, being a Bolshevik meant following the line of greatest resistance, and I was a Bolshevik at that time. In the fall of 1905 there werestrikes, and the darkNevsky Prospekt was pierced by a searchlight from theAdmiralty Building. October 17. Meetings in the universities."[2]: 10
In December 1905, Zamyatin agreed to hide in his flat a paper bag filled with the explosivepyroxylin. The following day, he and thirty other Bolsheviks were arrested by theOkhrana inside their "revolutionary headquarters of theVyborg district, at the very moment when plans and pistols of various types were spread out on the table."[2]: 10–11
After being arrested and beaten up, Zamyatin managed to smuggle a note out of the prison, instructing his fellow Bolsheviks, "to remove everything compromising from my room and the rooms of my four comrades." Although this was immediately done, Zamyatin did not know of it until much later. During the months he spent insolitary confinement, Zamyatin recalled that he had almost daily nightmares about the paper bag in his flat containing pyroxylin.[2]: 11
In the spring of 1906, Zamyatin was released and sent intoexile in his native Tambov Governorate. However, Zamyatin later wrote that he could not stand life among the devoutly Russian Orthodox peasantry of Lebedyan. Therefore, he escaped and returned to Saint Petersburg where he lived illegally before moving toHelsinki, in theGrand Duchy of Finland.[2]: 11
After illegally returning to St. Petersburg, "disguised, clean-shaven, with apince-nez astride my nose,"[2]: 11 Zamyatin began to write fiction as a hobby. He was arrested and exiled a second time in 1911. He later recalled, "I lived first in an emptydacha atSestroretsk, then, in winter, inLakhta. There amidst snow, solitude, quiet, I wroteA Provincial Tale."[2]: 12–13
In 1913, Zamyatin was granted anamnesty as part of the celebrations for 300 years of rule by theHouse of Romanov and granted the right to return to St. Petersburg.[2]: 13 HisA Provincial Tale, which satirized life in a small Russian town, was immediately published and brought him a degree of fame. The next year he was tried and acquitted for defaming theImperial Russian Army in his storyNa Kulichkakh (At the World's End).[4] He continued to contribute articles to Marxist newspapers. After graduating as anengineer for theImperial Russian Navy, Zamyatin worked professionally at home and abroad.
In March 1916, he was sent to England to supervise the construction oficebreakers at the shipyards ofArmstrong Whitworth inWalker andSwan Hunter inWallsend while living inNewcastle upon Tyne. He supervised the building of theKrassin, which retained the distinction of being the most powerful icebreaker in the world into the 1950s. He also worked on theLenin.[5]
Zamyatin later wrote, "My only previous visit to the West had been to Germany.Berlin had impressed me as a condensed, 80-percent version of Petersburg. In England it was quite different: everything was as new and strange asAlexandria andJerusalem had been some years before."[2]: 13
Zamyatin later recalled, "In England, I built ships, looked at ruined castles, listened to the thud ofbombs dropped by GermanZeppelins, and wroteThe Islanders. I regret that I did not see theFebruary Revolution, and know only theOctober Revolution (I returned to Petersburg, past Germansubmarines, in a ship with lights out, wearing alife belt the whole time, just in time for October). This is the same as never having been in love and waking up one morning already married for ten years or so."[2]: 4
Zamyatin'sThe Islanders, satirizing English life, and the similarly themedA Fisher of Men, were both published after his return to Russia.
According to Mirra Ginsburg:
In 1917 he returned to Petersburg and plunged into the seething literary activity that was one of the most astonishing by-products of the revolution in ruined, ravaged, hungry, and epidemic-ridden Russia. He wrote stories, plays, and criticism; he lectured on literature and the writer's craft; he participated in various literary projects and committees – many of them initiated and presided over byMaxim Gorky – and served on various editorial boards, with Gorky,Blok,Korney Chukovsky,Gumilev,Shklovsky, and other leading writers, poets, critics, and linguists. And very soon he came under fire from the newly 'orthodox' – the Proletarian Writers who sought to impose on all art the sole criterion of 'usefulness to the revolution.'[1]: vi–v
As theRussian Civil War of 1917–1923 continued, Zamyatin's writings and statements became increasingly satirical and critical toward theBolshevik party. Even though he was anOld Bolshevik and even though "he accepted the revolution", Zamyatin believed that independent speech and thought are necessary to any healthy society and opposed the Party's increasing suppression offreedom of speech and thecensorship of literature, the media, and the arts.
In his 1918 essay "Scythians?" Zamyatin wrote:
Christ onGolgotha, between two thieves, bleeding to death drop by drop, is the victor – because he has been crucified, because, in practical terms, he has been vanquished. But Christ victorious in practical terms is theGrand Inquisitor. And worse, Christ victorious in practical terms is a paunchy priest in a silk-lined purple robe, who dispenses benedictions with his right hand and collects donations with his left. The Fair Lady, in legal marriage, is simply Mrs. So-and-So, with hair curlers at night and a migraine in the morning. AndMarx, having come down to earth, is simply aKrylenko. Such is the irony and such is the wisdom of fate. Wisdom because this ironic law holds the pledge of eternal movement forward. The realization, materialisation, practical victory of an idea immediately gives it aphilistine hue. And the trueScythian will smell from a mile away the odor of dwellings, the odor ofcabbage soup, the odor of the priest in his purplecassock, the odor of Krylenko — and will hasten away from the dwellings, into thesteppe, to freedom."[6]: 22
Later in the same essay, Zamyatin quoted a recent poem byAndrei Bely and used it to further criticizePeople's Commissar for Military AffairsNikolai Krylenko and those like him for having, "covered Russia with a pile of carcasses" and for "dreaming ofsocialist–Napoleonic Wars in Europe — throughout the world, throughout the universe! But let us not jest incautiously. Bely is honest, and did notintend to speak about the Krylenkos."[6]: 25
In 1919, Zamyatin wrote, "He who has found his ideal today is, likeLot's wife, already turned into a pillar of salt and does not move ahead. The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the hereticCopernicus, the hereticTolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy."[1]: v
Zamyatin's novelWe, which he wrote between 1920 and 1921, is set many centuries in the future. D-503, a mathematician, lives in the One State,[b] an urban society constructed almost entirely of glass apartment buildings, which assistmass surveillance by thesecret police, the Bureau of Guardians. The structure of the One State isPanopticon-like, and life is scientifically managed based on the theories ofF. W. Taylor. People march in step with each other and are uniformed. There is no way of referring to people except by numbers assigned by the One State. The society is run strictly by logic or reason as the primary justification for the laws or the construct of the society.[8][9] The individual's behaviour is based on logic by way of formulas and equations outlined by the One State.[10]
As the novel opens, the spaceshipIntegral is being built in order to visit extraterrestrial planets. In a deliberate swipe at the expansionist dreams ofNikolai Krylenko and others like him, the One State intends to "force" alien races "to be happy" by accepting theabsolutism of the One State and its leader, the Benefactor. Meanwhile, as the spaceship's chief engineer, D-503 begins ajournal that he intends to be carried upon the completed spaceship.
Like all other citizens of One State, D-503 lives in a glass apartment building and is carefully watched by the Bureau of Guardians. D-503's lover, O-90, has been assigned by the One State to visit him on certain nights. She is considered too short to bear children and is deeply grieved by her state in life. O-90's other lover and D-503's best friend is R-13, a State poet who reads his verse at public executions.
While on an assigned walk with O-90, D-503 meets a woman named I-330. I-330 smokes cigarettes, drinks vodka, and shamelessly flirts with D-503 instead of applying for a pink-ticket sex-visit; all of these acts are highly illegal according to the laws of One State.
Both repelled and fascinated, D-503 struggles to overcome his attraction to I-330. He begins dreaming, which people of the One State know to be a seriousmental illness.[11]Slowly, I-330 reveals to D-503 that she is in a member of MEPHI, an organization of rebels against the One State. I-330 also takes D-503 through secret tunnels to the untamed wilderness outside the Green Wall, which surrounds the city-state. There, D-503 meets human inhabitants whom the One State claims do not exist: hunter-gatherers whose bodies are covered with animal fur. MEPHI aims to topple the One State, destroy the Green Wall, and reunite the people of the city with the outside world.
Like many otherdystopian novels,We does not end happily for I-330 and D-503, it also ends with a general uprising by MEPHI and with the One State's survival in doubt. A recurring theme throughoutWe is that, just as there is no highest number, there can be nofinal revolution. Unsurprisingly, the Soviet Government refused to allow the publication ofWe.
In his 1921 essay "I Am Afraid", Zamyatin began by criticizing the poets who unconditionally sang the praises of the new Soviet government. Zamyatin compared them with theCourt Poets under theHouse of Romanov and under the FrenchHouse of Bourbon. Zamyatin further criticized "these nimble authors" for knowing "when to sing hail tothe Tsar, and when to theHammer and Sickle". Zamyatin then wrote: "True literature can exist only when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics." Zamyatin continued by pointing out that writers in the new Soviet Union were forbidden to criticize and satirise, in the vein ofJonathan Swift andAnatole France, the foibles and failings of the new society. Zamyatin added that, while many compared Russia after the October Revolution to theAthenian democracy at its inception, the Athenian government and people did not fear the satirical stage-plays ofAristophanes, in which everyone was mocked and criticized. Zamyatin concluded by pointing out that if the Party did not rid itself of "this new Catholicism, which is every bit as fearful of every heretical word asthe old one", then the only future possible forRussian literature was "in the past."[12]
In Zamyatin's 1923 essay "The New Russian Prose" he wrote: "In art, the surest way to destroy is to canonize one given form and one philosophy: that which iscanonized dies of obesity, ofentropy."[13] In his 1923 essay "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters" Zamyatin wrote:
The law of revolution is red, fiery, deadly; but this death means the birth of a new life, a new star. And the law of entropy is cold, ice blue, like the icy interplanetary infinities. The flame turns from red to an even, warm pink, no longer deadly, but comfortable. The sun ages into a planet, convenient for highways, stores, beds, prostitutes, prisons; this is the law. And if the planet is to be kindled into youth again, it must be set on fire, it must be thrown off the smooth highway ofevolution: this is the law. The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow (in theBook of Genesis days are equal to years, ages). But someone must see this already, and speakheretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought. When the flaming, seething sphere (in science, religion, social life, art) cools, the fierymagma becomes coated withdogma — a rigid, ossified, motionless crust. Dogmatization in science, religion, social life, or art is the entropy of thought. What has become dogma no longer burns; it only gives off warmth — it istepid, it is cool. Instead of theSermon on the Mount, under the scorching sun, to upraised-arms and sobbing people, there is drowsy prayer in a magnificent abbey. Instead ofGalileo's, 'Be still, it turns!' there are dispassionate computations in a well-heated room in an observatory. On the Galileos, theepigones build their own structures, slowly, bit by bit, likecorals. This is the path of evolution – until a new heresy explodes the crush of dogma and all the edifices of the most enduring which have been raised upon it. Explosions are not very comfortable. And therefore the exploders, the heretics, are justly exterminatedby fire,by axes, by words. To every today, to every civilization, to the laborious, slow, useful, most useful, creative, coral-building work, heretics are a threat. Stupidly, recklessly, they burst into today from tomorrow; they are romantics.Babeuf was justlybeheaded in 1797; he leaped into 1797 across 150 years. It is just to chop off the head of a heretical literature which challenges dogma; this literature is harmful. But harmful literature is more useful than useful literature, for it is anti-entropic, it is a means of challenging calcification,sclerosis, crust, moss, quiescence. It isUtopian, absurd – like Babeuf in 1797. It is right 150 years later.[14]
Zamyatin also wrote a number ofshort stories, infairy tale form, that constituted satirical criticism of Communist ideology. According to Mirra Ginsburg:
Instead of idealized eulogies to the Revolution, Zamyatin wrote stories likeThe Dragon,The Cave, andA Story about the Most Important Thing, reflecting the starkness and the territory of the time: the little man lost in his uniform, transformed into a dragon with a gun; the starving, frozen intellectual reduced to stealing a few logs of wood; the city turned into a barren, prehistoric landscape – a desert of caves and cliffs and roaringmammoths;fratricide and destruction and blood. InThe Church of God, he questions the Bolshevik tenet thatthe end justifies the means. InThe Flood, he gives the central place to individual passions against a background that reflects the vast changes of the time as marginally and obliquely as they are reflected in the consciousness of his characters – residents of an outlying suburb, whose knowledge of the history around them is limited to such facts as the deteriorating quality of coal, the silent machines, the lack of bread."[15]: vii–viii
In 1923, Zamyatin arranged for the manuscript of hisdystopianscience-fiction novelWe to be smuggled toE.P. Dutton and Company inNew York City. After being translated intoEnglish by Russian refugeeGregory Zilboorg, the novel was published in 1924. Then, in 1927, Zamyatin went much further. He smuggled the original Russian text toMarc Lvovich Slonim (1894–1976), the editor of an anti-communistRussian émigré magazine and publishing house based inPrague. To the fury of the Soviet State, copies of theCzechoslovak edition began being smuggled back to the Soviet Union and secretly passed from hand to hand. Zamyatin's secret dealings with Western publishers triggered a mass offensive by the Soviet State against him.
These attitudes, writings, and actions, which the Party consideredDeviationism made Zamyatin's position increasingly difficult as the 1920s wore on. Zamyatin became, according to Mirra Ginsburg, one of "the first to become the target of concerted hounding by the Party critics and writers."[1]: vii According to Ginsburg:
Zamyatin's vision was too far-reaching, too nonconformist, and too openly expressed to be tolerated by the purveyors of official and compulsory dogma. Very early he was branded byTrotsky as aninternal émigré. He was repeatedly attacked as abourgeois intellectual, out of tune with the revolution. When the Party-lineRussian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) gained full sway in the latter 1920s, with the end of theNew Economic Policy and the introduction of thefirst Five Year Plan, it set out systematically to end all originality and independence in the arts. Art had to serve the ends of the Party or it had no right to exist."[15]: ix
Max Eastman, an AmericanCommunist who had similarly broken with his former beliefs, described thePolitburo's war against Zamyatin in his 1934 bookArtists in Uniform.[16]
According to Mirra Ginsburg:
All the instruments of power were brought into use in the campaign for conformity. Faced with grim alternatives, most of Zamyatin's erstwhile pupils and colleagues yielded to pressure, recanted publicly, in many cases rewrote their works, and devoted themselves to turning out the gray eulogies to Communist construction demanded by the dictatorship. Other writers, likeBabel andOlesha, chose silence. Many committed suicide. Zamyatin's destruction took a different form. One of the most active and influential figures in theAll-Russian Writers' Union [ru], which included a variety ofliterary schools, he became the object of a frenzied campaign of vilification. He was dismissed from his editorial posts; magazines and publishing houses closed their doors to him; those which ventured to publish his work were persecuted; his plays were withdrawn from the stage. Under the pressure of the Party inquisitors, his friends began to be afraid to see him and many of his comrades in the Writer's Union denounced him. He was, in effect, presented with the choice of repudiating his work and his views, or total expulsion from literature.[1]: ix–x
Instead of surrendering, Zamyatin, whom Mirra Ginsburg has dubbed "a man of incorruptible and uncompromising courage,"[1]: x on 24 September 1929, wrote and mailed a letter resigning his membership in the Union of Soviet Writers.[17]: 301 Ginsburg states Zamyatin wrote in his resignation letter "that it was impossible for him to remain in a literary organization which, even indirectly, took part in the persecution of its members."[1]: x In 1931, he appealed directly to SovietGeneral SecretaryJoseph Stalin, requesting permission to leave the Soviet Union. In this letter Zamyatin wrote: "I do not wish to conceal that the basic reason for my request for permission to go abroad with my wife is my hopeless position here as a writer, the death sentence that has been pronounced upon me as a writer here at home."[18]
During the spring of 1931, Zamyatin askedMaxim Gorky, to intercede with Stalin on his behalf.[19][17]: 257
After Gorky's death in 1936, Zamyatin wrote:
One day, Gorky's secretary telephoned to say that Gorky wished me to have dinner with him at hiscountry home. I remember clearly that extraordinarily hot day and the rainstorm — a tropical downpour — inMoscow. Gorky's car sped through a wall of water, bringing me and several other invited guests to dinner at his home. It was a literary dinner, and close to twenty people sat around the table. At first Gorky was silent, visibly tired. Everybody drank wine, but his glass contained water – he was not allowed to drink wine. After a while, he rebelled, poured himself a glass of wine, then another and another, and became the old Gorky. The storm ended, and I walked out onto the large stone terrace. Gorky followed me immediately and said to me, 'The affair of your passport is settled. But if you wish, you can return the passport and stay.' I said I would go. Gorky frowned and went back to the other guests in the dining room. It was late. Some of the guests remained overnight; others, including myself, were returning to Moscow. In parting, Gorky said, 'When shall we meet again? If not in Moscow, then perhaps inItaly? If I go there, you must come to see me! In any case, until we meet again, eh?' This was the last time I saw Gorky.[17]: 257
After their emigration, Zamyatin and his wife settled inParis. According to Mirra Ginsburg: "Zamyatin's last years in Paris were years of great material hardship and loneliness. As Remizov wrote, 'He came with sealed lips and a sealed heart.' He found little in common with most ofthe emigrés who had left Russia a decade earlier."[1]: x
Zamyatin later wrote: "Gorky was informed of this, and wrote that he was pleased at my participation in the project, that he would like to see the adaptation of his play, and would wait to receive the manuscript. The manuscript was never sent: by the time it was ready for mailing, Gorky was dead."[2]: 258 After the film premiered, Zamyatin wrote articles for French magazines and worked on a novel,The Scourge of God, which hasAttila as the main character. The novel was never finished.[1]: x–xi
One of the mourners, however, was Zamyatin'sRussian language publisherMarc Lvovich Slonim, who had befriended the Zamyatins after their arrival in the West. His death was unreported in the Soviet press.[1]: xi
Tomb of Yevgeny Zamyatin at the "Cimetière de Thiais", Division 21, Line 5, Grave 36.
Writing in 1967, Mirra Ginsburg commented: "LikeBulgakov and likeBabel, Zamyatin gives us a glimpse of what post-revolutionaryRussian literature might have become had independence, daring, and individuality not been stamped out so ruthlessly by the dictatorship. The Russian reader – and by the same token, the Russian writer – was deprived of the work of these rich and germinal writers, and the effects, alas, are sadly evident."[1]: xi
TheCommunist Party of the Soviet Union's vengeance, however, against Zamyatin for sending his novelWe to the West for publication was remembered by Soviet poets and writers long after the writer's death. This is why it was 1957 before another Soviet writer took the risk of doing so again. In that year, when he handed the manuscript to his novelDoctor Zhivago over to an emissary frombillionaireItalian publisherGiangiacomo Feltrinelli,Boris Pasternak said: "You are hereby invited to watch me face thefiring squad."
Even though Pasternak was accordingly subjected to State-organizedcharacter assassination,ostracism, andblacklisting almost identical to what had been experienced by Zamyatin, Pasternak's decision to publishDoctor Zhivago in the West also helped him to win the 1958Nobel Prize for Literature.
Not surprisingly, many otherSoviet dissidents after Pasternak would also go on to both use and expand upon the ideas and tactics pioneered by the author ofWe. For example,Alexander Solzhenitsyn wasChristianizing Zamyatin's attacks against State-enforcedconformity when he wrote, in his 1973Letter to Soviet Leaders: "Our present system is unique in world history, because over and above its physical and economic constraints, it demands of us total surrender of our souls, continuous and willing participation in the general, consciouslie. To this putrefaction of the soul, this spiritual enslavement, human beings who wish to be human cannot submit. When Caesar, having exacted what is Caesar's, demands still more insistently that we render unto him what is God's – that is a sacrifice we dare not make."[20]
As part of last Soviet General SecretaryMikhail Gorbachev's reformist policies ofglasnost andperestroika, Zamyatin's writing began to again be published legally in his homeland in 1988.
Even since thecollapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Zamyatin's many denunciations of enforcedconformity andgroupthink, as well as his belief that writers and intellectuals have a duty to oppose the calcification andentropy of human thought has meant that his writings continue to have both readers and admirers.
We has often been discussed as apolitical satire aimed at thepolice state of theSoviet Union. There are many other dimensions, however. It may variously be examined as
a polemic against the optimistic scientific socialism ofH. G. Wells, whose works Zamyatin had previously published, and with the heroic verses of the (Russian)Proletarian Poets,
as an example of Expressionist theory, and
as an illustration of the archetype theories ofCarl Jung as applied to literature.
George Orwell believed thatAldous Huxley'sBrave New World (1932) must be partly derived fromWe.[21] However, in a 1962 letter toChristopher Collins, Huxley says that he wroteBrave New World as a reaction to H.G. Wells's utopias long before he had heard ofWe.[22][23]Kurt Vonnegut said that in writingPlayer Piano (1952) he "cheerfully ripped off the plot ofBrave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin'sWe."[24]
Na kulichkakh (На куличках), 1914 –A Godforsaken Hole (tr. Walker Foard, 1988)
Ostrovitiane (Островитяне), 1918 – "The Islanders" (tr. T.S. Berczynski, 1978) / 'Islanders' (tr. Sophie Fuller and Julian Sacchi, in 'Islanders and the Fisher of Men, 1984)
Mamai (Мамай), 1921 – "Mamai" (tr. Neil Cornwell, in Stand, 4. 1976)
Lovets chelovekov (Ловец человеков), 1921 – 'The Fisher of Men' (tr. Sophie Fuller and Julian Sacchi, inIslanders and the Fisher of Men, 1984)
Peshchera (Пещера), 1922 – 'The Cave' (tr. Mirra Ginsburg,Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1969) –The House in the Snow-Drifts (Dom v sugrobakh), film adaptation in 1927, prod.Sovkino, dir.Fridrikh Ermler, starringFyodor Nikitin, Tatyana Okova, Valeri Solovtsov, A. Bastunova
Ogni sviatogo Dominika (Огни святого Доминика), 1922 (play)
Bol'shim detiam skazki (Большим детям сказки), 1922
Robert Maier (Роберт Майер), 1922
Gerbert Uells (Герберт Уэллс), 1922 [H.G. Wells]
On Literature, Revolution, and Entropy, 1924
Rasskaz o samom glavnom (Рассказ о самом главном), 1924 – "A Story about the Most Important Thing" (tr. Mirra Ginsburg, inThe Dragon: Fifteen Stories, 1966)
My: Roman (Мы: Роман), 'We: A Novel' 1927 (translations: Gregory Zilboorg, 1924; Bernard Guilbert Guerney, 1970, Mirra Ginsburg, 1972; Alex Miller, 1991; Clarence Brown, 1993; Natasha Randall, 2006; first Russian-language book publication 1952, U.S.) –Wir, TV film in 1982, dir.Vojtěch Jasný, teleplay Claus Hubalek, starring Dieter Laser, Sabine von Maydell, Susanne nAltschul, Giovanni Früh, Gert Haucke
Nos: opera v 3-kh aktakh po N.V. Gogoliu, 1930 (libretto, with others) –The Nose: Based on a Tale byGogol (music byDmitri Shostakovich; tr. Merle and Deena Puffer, 1965)
^His last name is oftentransliterated asZamiatin orZamjatin.
^Translating the phraseYedinoye Gosudarstvo (Russian: Единое Государство), the Ginsburg and Randall translations use the phrasing "One State". Guerney uses "The One State"—each word iscapitalized. Brown uses the single word "OneState", which he calls "ugly".[7]
^Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (2021) [1924].We. Translated byGregory Zilboorg. Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing. Retrieved10 August 2022.How absurd! I am sick, it is clear; I never saw dreams before. They say that to see dreams was a common normal thing with the ancients. [...] but we, people of today, we know all too well that dreaming is a serious mental disease.
^Yevgeny Zamyatin (1970) [1921]. "I Am Afraid".A Soviet Heretic: The Essays of Yevgeny Zamyatin. Translated by Mirra Ginsberg. University of Chicago Press. p. 57.
^Yevgeny Zamyatin (1970) [1923]. "The New Russian Prose".A Soviet Heretic: The Essays of Yevgeny Zamyatin. Translated by Mirra Ginsburg. London: Quartet Books (published 1991). p. 22.
^Yevgeny Zamyatin (1970) [1923]. "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters".A Soviet Heretic: The Essays of Yevgeny Zamyatin. Translated by Mirra Ginsburg. London: Quartet Books (published 1991). pp. 108–109.
^abMirra Ginsburg (1970) [1918]. Introduction.A Soviet Heretic: The Essays of Yevgeny Zamyatin. By Yevgeny Zamyatin. Translated by Mirra Ginsburg. London: Quartet Books (published 1991).
^Max Eastman (1934).Artists in Uniform: A Study of Literature and Bureaucratism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 82–93.
^Yevgeny Zamyatin (1970) [1931]. "Letter to Stalin".A Soviet Heretic: The Essays of Yevgeny Zamyatin. Translated by Mirra Ginsberg. University of Chicago Press. p. xii.
Collins, Christopher.Evgenij Zamjatin: An Interpretive Study. The Hague and Paris, Mouton & Co. 1973. Examines his work as a whole and includes articles earlier published elsewhere by the author:We as Myth,Zamyatin, Wells and the Utopian Literary Tradition, andIslanders.
Cooke, Brett (2002).Human Nature in Utopia: Zamyatin's We. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
Fischer, Peter A. (Autumn 1971). "Review of The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin by Alex M. Shane".Slavic and East European Journal.15 (3):388–390.doi:10.2307/306850.JSTOR306850.
Evgeny Zamyatin (1920)."Mamai"(short story). Translated by Neil Cornwell.
Evgeny Zamyatin (1935)."The Lion". Translated by Eric Konkol. Archived from the original on 22 July 2011 – via SovLit.com.
Evgeny Zamyatin."Pictures". Translated by Andrew Glikin-Gusinsky. Archived from the original on 14 May 2011. Retrieved15 February 2015 – via SovLit.com.
Tatyana Kukushkina."«кривые» жизни Евгения Замятина" [The 'Twists and Turns' of Yevgeny Zamiatin's life](PDF). Archived from the original on 19 March 2009. Retrieved9 September 2006.
