A particularly vicious campaign was launched against Zamyatin and Pilnyak. The latter was pilloried for the publication abroad of his novel Mahogany. We, which had been written almost ten years earlier and never published in the Soviet Union, was used as the immediate pretext for Zamyatin’s destruction. While its first translation into English (in 1924) and Czech (in 1927) had not provoked any noticeable response by Soviet authorities, its publication in 1927 in Volya Rossii, a Russian emigre journal published in Czechoslovakia, without the author’s knowledge or consent, was used, two years later, as a convenient excuse for bringing the full weight of official pressure upon its author. The matter was discussed at a meeting of the Writers’ Union in the summer of 1929, when Zamyatin was away on a summer journey. One after another, his frightened and subservient colleagues rose to denounce him. Zamyatin replied with an indignant and courageous letter, resigning from the Union. “I find it impossible,” he wrote, “to belong to a literary organization which… takes part in the persecution of a fellow member.”
Pilnyak was unable to withstand the pressure and recanted. Zamyatin’s former pupils and admirers – Ivanov, Katayev, Kaverin – sacrificed their talents to become hacks, manufacturing whatever was required in the shape and style demanded. Those with stronger backbones, like Isaac Babel, turned silent. And only isolated giants like Zamyatin and Bulgakov refused to submit Denied access to publication, their plays withdrawn from the stage despite enormous popular success, and their books withdrawn from stores and libraries, they wrote to Stalin requesting permission to leave Russia. Both spoke of the ban on their work as a literary death sentence.
Thanks to Gorky’s intercession with Stalin, Zamyatin’s request was, surprisingly, granted. He left Russia in 1931 and settled in Paris. His last years were a time of great loneliness and privation. He died of heart disease in 1937, his funeral attended by a mere handful of friends, for he had not accepted the emigre community as his own. To the end he regarded himself as a Soviet writer, waiting merely, as he had written in his letter to Stalin, until “it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas without cringing before little men,” until “there is at least a partial change in the prevailing view concerning the role of the literary artist.” He was never to see that day. His death went unmentioned in the Soviet press. Like the rebellious poet of We, and like so many of the greatest Russian poets and writers of the twentieth century, he was literally “liquidated” – reduced to nonbeing. His name was deleted from literary histories, and for decades he has been unknown in his homeland.
And yet, he lives. As his fellow victim Bulgakov said, “manuscripts don’t burn.” He has been revived in the Western world. We has been translated into more than ten languages. Many of his stories, essays, and plays have been published abroad in Russian, and also in English translation. Even in Soviet Russia his name is beginning in recent years to crop up (timidly) in occasional memoirs, in occasional obscure essays on science fiction and Utopian literature. It has even been restored to literary encyclopedias – of course, with the inevitable negative comment. And although his writings are still unavailable in Soviet Russia, they have undoubtedly reached some readers, writers, and scholars in underground ways, for his influence is clear in the thinking of dissidents of the sixties and seventies. (Their fate, alas, is still much like Zamyatin’s. Some are silent, others forced into exile.)
Like all major works of art, We lends itself to a multiplicity of interpretations. Numerous essays and analyses have been written on Zamyatin, and on We, approaching it from various points of view and within various frameworks: as a study of modern man alienated from his natural self; as a Freudian charade; as myth presenting man’s dilemma in terms of archetypes and dream figures; as a religious parable with strong Dostoyevskian influences; as one of the most significant modern anti-Utopias, and so on. We is all these, and more. It is one of the great tragic novels of our time.
A fine biographical and critical study by Alex M. Shane appeared in the United States in 1968 – The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin (Berkeley, 1968) containing among other things, an excellent bibliography.
But let the book speak for itself. The discerning reader will find in it far more than can be suggested in an introduction.
Mirra Ginsburg
Acknowledgments
We was first published in Russian in book form in 1952 by the Chekhov Publishing House in New York. I wish to express my gratitude to the National Board of Young Men’s Christian Associations, present owner of legal rights to books published by the Chekhov Publishing House, for permission to translate We into English.
Thanks are also due to the University of Chicago Press for permission to quote from A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, published in 1970.
Author Yevgeny Zamyatin was born in Russia in 1884. Arrested during the abortive 1905 revolution, he was exiled twice from St. Petersburg, then given amnesty in 1913, by which time he was turning to a literary career. We, composed in 1920 and 1921, was denied publication in Russia and, when read at a meeting of the Writers’ Union in 1923, elicited attacks from party-line critics and writers. Nevertheless, throughout the 1920s, Zamyatin, outspoken and courageous as always, published his essays, plays and tales. In 1929, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers launched an all-out attack against him. Denied the right to publish his work, he requested permission to leave Russia, which, surprisingly, Stalin granted in 1931. Zamyatin went to Paris, where he died in 1937.
Mirra Ginsburg is a distinguished translator of Russian and Yiddish works by such well-known authors as Mikhail Bulgakov, Isaac Babel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Editor and translator of three anthologies of Soviet science fiction, she has also edited and translated A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, and History of Soviet Literature by Vera Alexandrova.