How Yevgeny Zamyatin shaped dystopian fiction
While Wells, Huxley and Orwell invented flawed worlds, the Soviet writer was living in one.
Literary Gazette under the title “Certificate concerning social eugenics”, one of them read:
Type: Zamiatin. Genus: Evgeny. Class: bourgeois. In the village: a kulak. The product of degeneration. Footnote: an enemy.
With its threatening references to degeneration and eugenics, this ditty would not have been out of place in
Der Stürmer, the Nazi tabloid that was being published in Germany at the time. For Zamyatin, one of the best known authors living in the Soviet Union, the attack was the culmination of years of dangerous insecurity. In September 1929 he resigned from the Soviet Union of Writers, and in June 1931 wrote to Stalin asking permission to leave the country. Maxim Gorky interceded on Zamyatin’s behalf, and his request was granted. Accompanied by his wife, Lyudmila, he left Russia in November 1931 and settled in Paris, where he died of a heart attack in 1937.