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by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Zamyatin was first arrested in 1905, at the age of twenty-one, as a Bolshevik student activist. He was beaten up by Tsarist cops, kept in solitary for months, and exiled to the provinces. This exemplary punishment merely fertilized his eccentricities. Zamyatin was able to sneak back from Finland into St. Petersburg in disguise, where he obtained an engineering degree while squatting in the city illegally. In 1911, the cops rediscovered Zamyatin. This time he was sent into Russian internal exile, where he whiled away the time composing satires. In 1914 one of these satires, “In the Backwoods,” was published. This time, not just Zamyatin but also his publisher faced arrest. The entire print run of the magazine was also rounded up, and Zamyatin’s book was put before a judge, but he somehow avoided jail. Zamyatin then was sent to England to supervise the construction of Russian icebreakers, where, as a brief change of pace, he satirized the British. However, life without Mother Russia never seemed to agree with him. He quickly returned to Russia between the revolutions of 1917, where, as a noted former troublemaker, he was given a literary job by Maxim Gorky.