The Englishman from Lebedian: A Life of Evgeny Zamiatin

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.