Some Russian literary émigrés were able to thrive in Paris, but Zamyatin wasn’t one of them. Unable to finish a historical novel, he wasted away in silence and poverty, and he died on March 10, 1937. There’s little doubt that he had foreseen and expected this fate. Like his hero, he even seemed to somehow relish his own immolation: “The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. . . . But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.”
