In December 1905, Zamyatin agreed to hide in his flat a paper bag filled with the explosive pyroxylin. In the fall of 1905 there were strikes, and the dark Nevsky Prospekt was pierced by a searchlight from the Admiralty Building. Zamyatin later recalled the Russian Revolution of 1905 as follows: 'In those years, being a Bolshevik meant following the line of greatest resistance, and I was a Bolshevik at that time. In 1937 he died in poverty in Paris.Īfter his death, Zamyatin's writings were circulated in samizdat and continued to inspire multiple generations of Soviet dissidents. The outrage this sparked within the Party and the Union of Soviet Writers led directly to the State-organized defamation and blacklisting of Zamyatin and his successful request for permission from Joseph Stalin to leave his homeland.

Ultimately, Zamyatin arranged for We to be smuggled to the West for publication. In 1921, We became the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board. He is most famous for his highly influential and widely imitated 1921 dystopian science fiction novel We, which is set in a futuristic police state. However, Zamyatin was just as deeply disturbed by the policies pursued by the All-Union Communist Party (b) (VKP (b) following the October Revolution as he had been by Tsarist policy.ĭue to his subsequent use of literature to both satirize and criticize the Soviet Union's enforced conformity and increasing totalitarianism, Zamyatin, whom Mirra Ginsburg has dubbed 'a man of incorruptible and uncompromising courage,' is now considered one of the first Soviet dissidents. As a member of his Party's Pre-Revolutionary underground, Zamyatin was repeatedly arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and exiled. The son of a Russian Orthodox priest, Zamyatin lost his faith in Christianity at an early age and became a Bolshevik.

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