ZAMIATIN, Evgenii (Ivanovich)

Nationality: Russian. Born: Lebedian', 20 January 1884. Education: Progymnasium, Lebedian', 1892-96; gymnasium in Voronezh 1896-1902; studied naval engineering at St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute, 1902-08; arrested and exiled for student political activity, 1906 and 1911. Career: Naval engineer, 1908-11, and lecturer from 1911, St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute; supervised the construction of ice-breakers in England, 1916-17; associated with the Serapion Brothers literary group, from 1921; editor, Dom Iskusstva (House of the Arts), 1921, Sovremennyi zapad (Contemporary West), 1922-24, and Russkii Sovremennik (Russian Contemporary), 1924; editor, with Kornei Chukovskii, English section of World Literature series; victimized from the late 1920s, and removed from the leadership of Soviet Writers Union. Left Soviet Union, 1931; settled in Paris, 1932. Died: 10 March 1937.

Publications

Collections

Povesti i rasskazy [Tales and Stories]. 1963.

Sochineniia [Works]. 2 vols., 1970-72.

Short Stories

Uezdnoe [A Provincial Tale]. 1916.

Ostrovitiane. 1922; title story translated as The Islanders, 1978; asThe Islanders, and The Fisher of Men, 1984.

Bolshim detiam skazki [Fairy Tales for Grown-Up Children]. 1922.

Nechstivye rasskazy [Impious Tales]. 1927.

The Dragon: Fifteen Stories. 1967; as The Dragon and Other Stories, 1975.

Novels

Na kulichkakh [At the World's End]. 1923.

My. 1927; translated as We, 1924.

Zhitie Blokhi ot dnia chudesnogo ee rozhdeniia… [The Life of aFlea from the Day of Its Miraculous Birth…]. 1929.

Navodnenie [The Flood]. 1930.

Bich Bozhi [The Scourge of God] (unfinished). 1939; as A Godforsaken Hole, 1988.

Plays

Ogni sviatogo Doninika [The Fires of St. Dominic]. 1922.

Blokha [The Flea] (produced 1925). 1926.

Obshchestvo pochotnykh zvonarei [The Society of HonorableBellringers] (produced 1925). 1926.

Sensatsiia, from the play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (produced 1930).

Atilla, and Afrikanskii gost' [The African Guest], in Novy zhurnal 24 and 73, 1950, 1963.

Screenplays:

Severnaia liubov' [Northern Love], 1928; Les Bas-Fonds (The Lower Depths), 1936.

Other

Robert Mayer. 1922.

Gerbert Uells [H. G. Wells]. 1922.

Sobranie sochinenii [Collected Works]. 4 vols., 1929.

Litsa [Faces]. 1955; as A Soviet Heretic: Essays, edited by MirraGinsburg, 1969.

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Critical Studies:

Zamyatin: A Russian Heretic by David J. Richards, 1962; The Life and Works of Evgeny Zamyatin by Alex M. Shane, 1968 (includes bibliography); Zamyatin: An Interpretative Study by Christopher Collins, 1973; "Literature and Revolution in We " by Robert Russell, in Slavonic and East European Review, 1973; Brave New World, 1984, and We: An Essay on Anti-Utopia by Edward J. Brown, 1976; "The Imagination and the 'I' in Zamjatin's We " by Gary Rosenshield, in Slavic and East European Journal, 1979; Three Russian Writers and the Irrational: Zamyatin, Pil'nyak, and Bulgakov by T. R. N. Edwards, 1982; "Adam and the Ark of Ice: Man and Revolution in Zamyatin's The Cave" by Andrew Barratt, in Irish Slavonic Studies 4, 1983; Zamyatin's "We": A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Gary Kern, 1988; New Views on Zoshchenko, Zamiatin, Bulgakov, and Pasternak, 1996.

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Although Evgenii Zamiatin is far better known in the West for his novel We, his short fiction is arguably the greater achievement. Of the approximately 50 stories and sketches, fewer than half have appeared in English, along with just a couple of the 20 "fairy tales" that are clearly aimed at an adult audience. Still the translated works include most of his finest prose, and they give a clear idea of the qualities that have established him as a major figure in twentieth-century Russian literature.

To some degree the stylistic distinctiveness of his writing comes through even in translation. The characters in "A Provincial Tale," his first work to attract wide attention, speak in a peasant dialect that conveys the rhythms and syntactic peculiarities of the living language; these people are a world removed from the gentry society described in much nineteenth-century Russian literature. The narrative voice is equally distinctive: at times it too employs the turns of speech and incomplete sentences that typify the characters, but it is equally notable for presenting the story in a fragmentary, elliptical fashion. The action jumps from one figure to another, the significance of individual scenes is often left unexplained, and as a result a coherent picture emerges only gradually. Zamiatin was a master of the intricate style that came to be called "ornamental prose," which in his case is especially notable for its dense imagery and grotesque descriptions.

Zamiatin deals with primitive forces that overwhelm any decency or civilizing tendencies. Many of his provincial characters seem motivated only by their animal-like instincts and by a selfish need to satisfy their own desires, at whatever cost to those around them. Thus, in "A Provincial Tale" Chebotarikha's obesity is matched only by her insatiable sexual drive. Baryba, a loutish young man whom she has used for that purpose, eventually accepts a bribe to give false testimony against a friend, who is then hanged. "A Godforsaken Hole" deals with soldiers at a remote garrison, where the military figures have yielded to the apathy and depravity of their surroundings. The small handful of worthy people within this milieu is eventually caught up in the wanton actions of the other military people, and their lives are destroyed as a result. Daria ("In Old Russia") chooses which of her suitors to marry by drawing a slip of paper; when she is courted by another, a poisonous mushroom ends up in her husband's supper, and she is free to remarry.

Although Zamiatin's stories are filled with brutality and horror, most are not unrelievedly gloomy. Often the most vicious deeds are juxtaposed with scenes of incongruous humor, particularly in some of the works that deal with the manner in which the Bolshevik revolution takes hold in provincial Russia. "The Protectress of Sinners" has as foreboding a beginning as any of Zamiatin's works. Three peasants have been assigned to take funds from a convent to aid the others in their village; the "decree" that the villagers have passed contains a garbled example of revolutionary terminology. At night they violently overpower the guard, and the stage is set for further mayhem inside. But instead the good-natured Mother Superior, who has always treated the nuns as though they were her own children, cheerfully treats the men to cake and wine, solicitously asks about the injured hand of one man, and totally disarms the three, who run off and slink back without any money. In "X," a story that weaves together Zamiatin's favorite themes of revolution, religion, and love, the tone remains relatively light throughout. The main figure is a former deacon who has switched his loyalties from the church to the new civil order; he comes upon the beautiful Marfa when she has gone for a swim, and he switches. Now he is no longer a Marxist but a Marfist. A much grimmer vision appears in "Comrade Churygin Has the Floor," where the comic elements (Churygin mangles ideological phraseology; one character mistakes a statue of Mars for that of Marx) are mingled with horrific images: the narrator comes to the home of a neighbor, just back from the front, and finds him propped up against a trunk like a sack of oats, both his legs having been shot off in the war. The story ends with a bloody confrontation between the villagers and an estate owner, motivated largely by a grotesque misunderstanding of the events in the outside world. In Zamiatin's tales revolutionary ideals cannot change or even penetrate through the deeply ingrained barbarity that rules these people's lives.

Several of the postrevolutionary works that have an urban setting are constructed around a single dominant image. "Mamai" is based on a darkly ironic comparison between the hero and the historical figure who shares his name, the leader of the Tatar forces at the 1380 battle of Kulikovo field, where the Russians attained their first victory against the Golden Horde. This Mamai, a meek book collector who has managed to save up money in order to add to his library, finds that his cache has been eaten by a mouse; he rises up in fury and runs the mouse through with a sword, just as mercilessly as his namesake. "The Cave," the most widely anthologized of Zamiatin's stories in English, takes place in Petersburg after the revolution, where the cold and hunger are depicted in terms of a return to the ice age, with mammoths and glaciers seeming to reappear and the apartments compared to caves. The couple in the story are still surrounded by the accouterments of culture from prerevolutionary times; now, however, their lives are ruled by a new god, the cast-iron stove whose appetite they can no longer satisfy. The husband steals some firewood to enable his sick, frail wife to celebrate her name-day, and at the end he allows her to use the one vial of poison they have stored away to end her misery.

Zamiatin was opposed to all forces that crushed the individual, be it the revolution (which he initially supported), the savagery of provincial life, or religion. In the fairy tale "The Church of God" he tells of a man who resolves to build a church but who steals and kills in order to get the money. At the dedication ceremony the church turns out to be pervaded by a smell of death that drives everyone away. As a naval engineer, Zamiatin spent part of World War I in England, and he came away with a dislike of righteous church people who attempt to impose their morality on others; two stories with an English setting, "The Islanders" and "Lovets chelovekov" (The Fisher of Men), depict the passions that eventually disrupt surface appearances of respectability, much as in his novel My (We) where the demand for order confronts the powerful force of human emotions.

The fatal effects of repression come out most clearly in "The Flood," where the usual social and political themes give way to an exploration of the human psyche, which is ultimately Zamiatin's chief concern throughout his stories. Sofia's inability to have children is symbolic of an inner closed-ness, and she breaks out of this state through a kind of fertility rite: the murder of a young girl whom she and her husband had taken in and who had become the husband's lover. The rich layers of imagery, the startling cold-bloodedness of the murder, and the deep psychological insights combine to make this story one of Zamiatin's finest.

—Barry P. Scherr

See the essay on "A Story about the Most Important Thing."