The Englishman from Lebedian : A Life of Evgeny Zamiatin

This volume explores the life and work of Evgeny Zamiatin, whose renown abroad has largely been shaped by his anti-utopian novel We, completed in 1919-20. After his death in 1937, he seemed fated to disappear into obscurity in the West, at the same time as he was being airbrushed out of Soviet literary history at home. George Orwell, who readily acknowledged that reading We had contributed to his own ideas for 1984, together with Professor Gleb Struve, set out to secure Zamiatin’s reputation after the Second World War. It would be sixty-five years after its initial publication that the novel finally became available to Russian readers at home, at the very end of the Soviet era. Only now has We been recognised in Zamiatin’s own country as a defining text, warning of the political and technological dangers of the coming century.

After Evgeny Zamiatin emigrated from the USSR in 1931, he was systematically airbrushed out of Soviet literary history, despite the central role he had played in the cultural life of Russia’s northern capital for nearly twenty years. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, his writings have gradually been rediscovered in Russia, but with his archives scattered between Russia, France, and the USA, the project of reconstructing the story of his life has been a complex task. This book, the first full biography of Zamiatin in any language, draws upon his extensive correspondence and other documents in order to provide an account of his life which explores his intimate preoccupations, as well as uncovering the political and cultural background to many of his works. It reveals a man of strong will and high principles, who negotiated the political dilemmas of his day—including his relationship with Stalin—with great shrewdness.