Three by Zamyatin

Three by Zamyatin

In 1924, in an autobiographical sketch, Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884- 1937) wrote of his student days, `I was a Bolshevik then (today I am not).”

In 1914 Tsarist authorities suppressed Zamyatin’s novella At the World’s End, which satirized the life of a provincial army post, and brought him to trial on charges of maligning the Russian officer corps.

Throughout the 1920s Communist writers and critics hounded Zamyatin for his refusal to conform to their notion of the duties of an artist in revolutionary society. In the face of growing repression he insisted on intellectual and artistic freedom. In an increasingly monolithic state based on rigid and inviolate dogma, he dared to prea...