Biography

Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin was born on February 1, 1884, in Lebedyan, a small town in the Russian heartland. The writer would later point out with pride that the town was famous for its cardsharps, Gypsies, and distinctive Russian speech, and he would utilize this spicy material in his mature fiction. His childhood, however, was a lonely one, and as the son of a village teacher, he spent more time with books than with other children.

After completing four years at the local school in 1896, Zamyatin went on to the Gymnasium in Voronezh, where he remained for six years. Immediately after he graduated, Zamyatin moved to St. Petersburg to study naval engineering at the Petersburg Polytechnic Institute. Over the next few years, Zamyatin became interested in politics and joined the Bolshevik Party. This political involvement led to his arrest late in 1905, when the student was picked up by the authorities who were trying to cope with the turbulent political agitation that swept the capital that year. Zamyatin spent several months in solitary confinement, and he used the time to write poetry and study English. Released in the spring of 1906, Zamyatin was exiled to Lebedyan. He soon returned to St. Petersburg, however, and lived there illegally until he was discovered and exiled again in 1911.

By this time he had graduated from the Institute and had been appointed a lecturer there. He also had made his debut as a writer: in 1908, he published the story “Odin” (“Alone”), which chronicles the fate of an imprisoned revolutionary student who kills himself over frustrated love, and in 1910, he published “Devushka,” another tale of tragic love. Although neither work is entirely successful, they both demonstrate Zamyatin's early interest in innovative narrative technique. A more polished work of his was Uezdnoe (1913; A Provincial Tale, 1966), which Zamyatin wrote during the months of renewed exile in 1911 and 1912. Zamyatin's penetrating treatment of ignorance and brutality in the Russian countryside was greeted with warm approval by the critics. On the other hand, his next major work, Na kulichkakh (1914; at the end of the world), provided such a sharp portrait of cruelty in the military that the publication in which the story appeared was confiscated by the authorities.

In 1916, Zamyatin departed Russia for Great Britain, where he was to work on seagoing icebreakers. His experience abroad provided the impetus for two satires on the British middle class–Ostrovityane (1918; The Islanders, 1972) and “Lovets chelovekov” (“The Fisher of Men”). Zamyatin returned to Russia after the abdication of Czar Nicholas in 1917 and embarked upon a busy course of literary endeavors. The period from 1917 to 1921 was a time of remarkable fecundity for the writer: He wrote fourteen stories, the novel We, a dozen fables, and a play. This body of work evinces an impressive diversity of artistic inspiration. Zamyatin's subjects range from the intense passions found in rural Russia (“Sever,” “The North”) to the dire conditions afflicting the urban centers during the postrevolutionary period (“Peshchera,” or “The Cave”; “Mamay”; and “Drakon,” or “Dragon”) to ribald parodies of saints' lives (“O tom, kak istselen byl inok Erazm,” or “How the Monk Erasmus Was Healed”).

In addition to his own literary creation, Zamyatin dedicated himself to encouraging the literary careers of others. He regularly lectured on the craft of writing to young writers in the House of Arts in Petrograd, and he took part in numerous editorial and publishing activities. Among those whose works he helped to edit were Anton Chekhov and H. G. Wells. For many of these editions, he also wrote critical or biographical introductions, and such writers as Wells, Jack London, O. Henry, and George Bernard Shaw received Zamyatin's critical attention. As a result of this editorial work and his involvement in such literary organizations as the All-Russian Union of Writers, which he helped to found, Zamyatin's own productivity began to decline after 1921, particularly his prose.

At the same time, Zamyatin found himself in the awkward position of having to defend himself against those who perceived something dangerous or threatening in the ideas his work espoused. In his prose fiction and in numerous essays, Zamyatin consistently articulated a belief in the value of continual change, innovation, and renewal. Seizing upon the thermodynamic theory of entropy—the concept that all energy in the universe tends toward stasis or passivity—Zamyatin warned against the dangers of stagnation in intellectual and artistic spheres. Exhorting writers to be rebels and heretics, he argued that one should never be content with the status quo, for satisfaction with any victory can easily degenerate into stifling philistinism. By the same token, Zamyatin denounced conformist tendencies in literary creation and decried efforts to subordinate individual inspiration to predetermined ideological programs.

Given the fact that one of the ideological underpinnings of the new Soviet state was a belief in the primacy of the collective over the interests of the individual, Zamyatin's fervent defense of individual freedom could not help but draw the attention of the emerging establishment. The writer was arrested in 1922 along with 160 other intellectuals and became subject to an order for deportation. Yet without his knowledge, and perhaps against his will, a group of friends interceded for him and managed to have the order withdrawn. After Zamyatin's release in 1923, he applied for permission to emigrate, but his request was rebuffed.

During the latter half of the 1920's, the political climate in the Soviet Union became more restrictive, and Zamyatin was among a number of talented writers who were singled out for public denunciation and criticism. He found that the doors to publishing houses were now closed to him and that permission to stage his plays was impossible to obtain. Zamyatin did not buckle before the increasingly vituperative attacks directed toward him. Indeed, he had once written that “a stubborn, unyielding enemy is far more deserving of respect than a sudden convert to communism.” Consequently, he did not succumb to pressure and make a public confession of his “errors,” as some of his fellow writers were forced to do. On the contrary, he stood up to this campaign of abuse until 1931, when he sent Joseph Stalin an audacious request for permission to leave the Soviet Union with the right to return “as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men.”

With Gorky's help, Zamyatin's petition was granted, and he left the Soviet Union with his wife in November, 1931. Settling in Paris, he continued to work on a variety of literary projects, including translations, screenplays, and a novel entitled Bich bozhy (1939; the scourge of God). Because of his interest in film, he envisioned a trip to Hollywood, but these plans never materialized. He died on March 10, 1937.

Analysis

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Yevgeny Zamyatin's short fiction is its charged, expressive narrative style. The writer characterized the style of his generation of writers in a lecture entitled “Contemporary Russian Literature,” delivered in 1918. Calling the artistic method of his generation Neorealism, he outlined the differences between Neorealist fiction and that of the preceding Realist movement. He states:

During the first part of his career, Zamyatin consciously developed and honed his own unique form of Neorealist writing. Although his initial experimentation in this direction is evident in his early prose works (and especially in the long story A Provincial Tale), this tendency did not reach its expressive potential until the late 1910's, when it blossomed both in his satires on British life and in the stories devoted to Russian themes. The stories The Islanders and “The Fisher of Men” provide a mordant examination of the stifling philistinism permeating the British middle class. The former work in particular displays the tenor and thrust of Zamyatin's satiric style. The first character introduced into the tale is a minister named Vicar Dooley, who has written a Testament of Contemporary Salvation, in which he declares that “life must become a harmonious machine and with mechanical inevitability lead us to the desired goal.” Such a vision raises the specter of death and stasis, not energy and life, and Zamyatin marshals his innovative narrative skills to expose the dangers that this vision poses for society.

The Islanders

One salient feature of Zamyatin's style is the identification of a character with a specific physical trait, animal, or object that seems to capture the essence of the character being depicted. Through this technique, the writer can both evoke the presence of the character by mentioning the associated image and underscore that character's fundamental personality type. What is more, once Zamyatin has established such an identification, he can suggest significant shifts in his characters' moods or situations by working changes on the associated images themselves. In The Islanders, this technique plays a vital role in the narrative exposition, and at times the associated images actually replace a given character in action. Thus, one character's lips are compared at the outset of the story to thin worms, and the women who attend Dooley's church are described as being pink and blue. Later, a tense interaction between the two is conveyed in striking terms: “Mrs. Campbell's worms twisted and sizzled on a slow fire. The blues and pinks feasted their eyes.” Similarly, the central protagonist is compared to a tractor, and when his stolid reserve is shattered by feelings of love, Zamyatin writes that the tractor's “steering wheel was broken.” Through this felicitous image Zamyatin not only evokes his hero's ponderous bulk but also suggests the unpredictable consequences which follow the release of suppressed emotion.

As striking as his satires on British conservatism are, however, it is in the stories that he wrote on Russian subjects that Zamyatin attained the apex of his vibrant expressionistic style. In his lecture on contemporary Russian literature, he spoke of his desire to find fresh subjects for literary treatment. Contrasting urban and rural settings, he declared: “The life of big cities is like the life of factories. It robs people of individuality, makes them the same, machinelike.” In the countryside, Zamyatin concludes, “the Neorealists find not only genre, not only a way of life, but also a way of life concentrated, condensed by centuries to a strong essence, ninety-proof.”

“The North”

As if to illustrate this premise, in 1918 he wrote the long tale entitled “The North.” This story celebrates the primal forces of nature: In a swift succession of scenes, Zamyatin depicts a passionate yet short-lived affair between a true child of the forest—a young woman named Pelka—and a simple fisherman named Marey. Pelka is perhaps the closest embodiment of the ideally “natural” character in all of Zamyatin's works. She talks with the forest creatures, keeps a deer for a pet, and loves with a profound passion that cannot understand or tolerate the constraints imposed by civilized man. Sadly, her brief interlude of love with Marey is threatened by his foolish obsession with constructing a huge lantern “like those in Petersburg.” Marey's desire to ape the fashions of the city destroys his romantic idyll with Pelka. After she vainly tries to stir Marey's emotions by having a short fling with a smug, callous shopkeeper named Kortoma, Pelka engineers a fatal encounter between herself, Marey, and a wild bear: The two lovers die at the hands of the natural world.

To illuminate this spectacle of extraordinary desire and suffering, Zamyatin utilizes all the tools of his Neorealist narrative manner. Striving to show rather than describe, Zamyatin avoids the use of such connectors as “it seemed” or “as if” in making comparisons; instead, the metaphorical image becomes the illustrated object or action itself. Especially noteworthy in “The North” is Zamyatin's use of charged color imagery. By associating particular characters with symbolic visual leitmotifs, the writer enhances his character portrayals. Thus, he underscores Pelka's naturalism by linking her to a combination of the colors red (as of flesh and blood) and green (as of the vegetation in the forest). Zamyatin compared his method to Impressionism: The juxtaposition of a few basic colors is intended to project the essence of a scene. At times, Zamyatin allows the symbolic associations of certain colors to replace narrative description entirely. Depicting the rising frenzy of a Midsummer Night's celebration, Zamyatin alludes to the surging flow of raw passion itself when he writes: “All that you could see was that … something red was happening.”

Zamyatin's attention to visual detail in “The North” is matched by his concern with auditory effects. He thought that literary prose and poetry were one and the same; accordingly, the reader finds many examples of alliteration, assonance, and instrumentation in his work. He also gave careful consideration to the rhythmic pattern of his prose, revealing a debt to the Russian Symbolist writers who emphasized the crucial role of sound in prose. Seeking to communicate his perceptions as expressively and concisely as possible, he tried to emulate the fluidity and dynamism of oral speech. One notes many elliptical and unfinished sentences in Zamyatin's prose at this time, and his narratives resemble a series of sharp but fragmentary images or vignettes, which his readers must connect and fill in themselves. Zamyatin explained: “Today's reader and viewer will know how to complete the picture, fill in the words—and what he fills in will be etched far more vividly within him, will much more firmly become an organic part of him.”

“In Old Russia”

Zamyatin's other works on the deep recesses of the Russian countryside reflect his calculated attempt to evoke deep emotions and passionate lives in elliptical, allusive ways. The story “Rus” (“In Old Russia”), for example, is narrated in a warm colloquial tone in which the neutral language of an impersonal narrator is replaced by language that relies heavily on the intonations and lexicon of spoken Russian. This technique, called skaz in Russian, was popularized by writers such as Nikolay Leskov and Alexey Remizov, and Zamyatin uses it to good effect in this tale. His narrator's account of the amorous activities of a young married woman named Darya is accented with notes of sly understanding and tolerance. As the narrator describes her, Darya cannot help but give in to the impulses of her flesh. At the very outset, she is compared to an apple tree filling up with sap; when spring arrives, she unconsciously feels the sap rising in her just as it is in the apple and lilac trees around her. Her “fall,” then, is completely natural, and so, too, is the ensuing death of her husband only a few days later. Again, Zamyatin's narrator conveys the news of the husband's death and the gossip that attended it in tones of warm indulgence. In the deep backwaters of Russia, he indicates, life flows on; such events have no more lasting impact than a stone which is dropped into a pond and causes a few passing ripples.

“Mamay” and “The Cave”

While Zamyatin was drawn to rural Russian subjects, he did not ignore urban themes: Two of his most striking works of 1920—“Mamay” and “The Cave”—exhibit his predilection for expressive imagery and his nuanced appreciation of human psychology. In “The Cave,” Zamyatin depicts the Petrograd landscape in the winters following the Russian Revolution as a primordial, prehistoric wasteland. This image dominates the story, illustrating the writer's own admission that if he firmly believes in an image, “it will spread its roots through paragraphs and pages.”

Yet while the overarching image of Petrograd's citizens as cave dwellers creates a palpable atmosphere of grimness and despair in “The Cave,” the images with which Zamyatin enlivens “Mamay” are more humorous. This story continues a long tradition in Russian literature of depicting the life of petty clerks in the city of St. Petersburg. The protagonist here is a meek individual who bears the incongruous name of Mamay, one of the Tatar conquerors of Russia. Mamay's wife is a stolid woman so domineering that every spoonful of soup eaten by Mamay is likened to an offering to an imperious Buddha. The sole pleasure in little Mamay's life is book collecting, and it is this mild passion that finally stirs the character into uncharacteristic action. He had been gathering and hiding a large sum of money with which to buy books, and at the end of the story he discovers with dismay that his stockpile has been destroyed by an enemy. Enraged, he is driven to murder. This contemporary Mamay, however, is only a pale shadow of his famous namesake: The intruder proves to be a mouse, and Mamay kills it with a letter opener.

“The Flood”

Despite some complex works written in the 1920s, later in the decade Zamyatin began to simplify his narrative techniques; the result can be seen in the moving story “Navodnenie” (“The Flood”), perhaps the finest short story of this late period. Written in 1928, “The Flood” reveals how Zamyatin managed to tone down some of his more exaggerated descriptive devices, while retaining the power and intensity of his central artistic vision. One finds few of his characteristic recurring metaphors in the story, but the few that are present carry considerable import. The work's central image is that of flooding, both as a literal phenomenon (the repeated flooding of the Neva River) and as a metaphorical element (the ebb and flow of emotions in the protagonist's soul). The plot of the story concerns a childless woman's resentment toward an orphaned girl named Ganka, who lives in her house and has an affair with her husband. Sofya's rising malice toward Ganka culminates on a day when the river floods. As the river rises and a cannon booms its flood warning, Sofya feels her anger surging too: It “whipped across her heart, flooded all of her.” Striking Ganka with an ax, she then feels a corresponding outflow, a release of tension. Similar images of flooding and flowing accompany Sofya's childbirth, the feeding of her child, and the rising sensation of guilt in her heart. In the final scene of the story, the river again begins to flood, and now Sofya feels an irrepressible urge to give birth to her confession. As she begins to reveal her murderous secret, “Huge waves swept out of her and washed over … everyone.” After she concludes her tale, “everything was good, blissful … all of her had poured out.”

The recurring water images link all the major events in “The Flood,” and Zamyatin achieves further cohesiveness through additional associations such as birth and death, conception and destruction. The tight austerity of his later fiction endows that body of work with understated force. The writer himself commented on the conscious effort he made to achieve this kind of effective simplicity: “All the complexities I had passed through had been only a road to simplicity. … Simplicity of form is legitimate for our epoch, but the right to simplicity must be earned.”

Summary

The oeuvre that Zamyatin left behind provides an eloquent testament both to the man's skill as a literary craftsman and to the integrity and power of his respect for human potential. His innovations in narrative exposition exerted a palpable influence on his contemporaries, and his defense of individual liberty in the face of relentless repression holds timeless appeal for his readers. Although Yevgeny Zamyatin is best known in the West for his novel We, it has been his short fiction that has been most influential in the Soviet Union, since We was not published there until 1987. In his short fiction, Zamyatin developed an original prose style that is distinguished by its bold imagery and charged narrative pacing. This style, along with Zamyatin's writings and teachings about literature in the immediate postrevolutionary period, had a decisive impact on the first generation of Soviet writers, which includes such figures as Lev Luntz, Nikolay Nikitin, Venyamin Kaverin, and Mikhail Zoshchenko. In addition, Zamyatin's unswerving defense of the principle of artistic and individual freedom remains a vivid element of his literary legacy.

Bibliography