This volume explores the life and work of Evgeny Zamiatin, whose renown abroad has largely been shaped by his anti-utopian novel We, completed in 1919-20. After his death in 1937, he seemed fated to disappear into obscurity in the West, at the same time as he was being airbrushed out of Soviet literary history at home. George Orwell, who readily acknowledged that reading We had contributed to his own ideas for 1984, together with Professor Gleb Struve, set out to secure Zamiatin’s reputation after the Second World War. It would be sixty-five years after its initial publication that the novel finally became available to Russian readers at home, at the very end of the Soviet era. Only now has We been recognised in Zamiatin’s own country as a defining text, warning of the political and technological dangers of the coming century.

"

“This new biography, the product of many years research in archives in the US, France, and Russia, is by far the most detailed account of this writer’s life to have been published so far and constitutes a landmark in the study of twentieth-century modernist fiction and Russian cultural life more broadly. The appeal of this monograph lies not only in its patient exploration of the significant personal events in Zamiatin’s life, but also in its impressive grasp of the social, political, and cultural events which shaped him. … Not only has Curtis woven this existing body of material into an elegantly written and compelling biographical narrative, she has also discovered archival materials of her own which shed important light on aspects of Zamiatin’s life and literary career which were hitherto shrouded in relative mystery. … It is a model of judicious and meticulous excavation, and a monumental achievement.” —Philip Cavendish, University College London, Canadian-American Slavic Studies Vol. 53