Starting as a writer of everyday life, with realistic stories and stories, he gained worldwide fame with the dystopian novel "We", whose frightening images are taken as if from our days.
The wall as a tool for segregation
From behind the Green Wall, from the wild invisible plains, the wind carries the yellow honey dust of some flowers. (…) I personally do not see anything beautiful in flowers - as in everything that belongs to the wild world, long exiled to the Green Wall (novel "We", 1920).
Long artificial barriers have been known for a long time, - remember the ancient Roman Andrian Wall, which passed approximately along the border between modern England and Scotland, or the Great Chinese one. However, such walls did not at all hinder the trade, economic and cultural ties of the inhabitants of different sides of the barricades.
On the contrary, the border fortifications, the main goal of which is to completely and permanently isolate themselves from the "alien" culture, ideology, religion, arose precisely in the 20th century. "Lines of Peace" between Catholic and Protestant quarters of Irish Belfast; A 250-kilometer “demilitarized zone” separating North and South Korea; the Israel-Gaza barrier; and, of course, Berlin.
Zamyatin himself fully knew what it was like to be separated from the Motherland by a wall: a wall of incomprehension, a wall of several state borders. In 1929, using as a pretext the fact that the novel "We" was published in one of the foreign publishing houses without the author's knowledge several years earlier, Soviet publicists close to the "gangster" literary group RAPP (also known for their malicious attacks on Mayakovsky, Yesenin, Bulgakov and others great), launched a real persecution of Evgeny Ivanovich. He was forbidden to publish. Unable to withstand the moral pressure, in 1931 Zamyatin went abroad - forever. Moreover, he did not consider himself an emigrant: he lived in Paris under a Soviet passport, in 1934 he joined the USSR Writers' Union in absentia, regularly transferred money to pay for his apartment in Leningrad.
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Glass is the main material of architecture
To the right and to the left, through the glass walls, I see myself, my room, my dress, my movements - repeated a thousand times. It invigorates: you see yourself as a part of a huge, powerful, united (novel "We").
Zamyatin, like no one else, had the right to talk about new engineering forms: in 1908 he graduated from the shipbuilding faculty of the St. Petersburg Polytechnic; in 1916 he was sent to England to control the construction of Russian ships ordered by the shipyards of Newcastle, Sunderland, Glasgow; designs one of the first Soviet icebreakers, which far outlived its creator and provided the escort of Arctic convoys to the Great Patriotic War.
Although, of course, transparent walls can serve not only the primary task of tracking the personal lives of citizens of the One State (a term from the dystopia "We"), but also quite honest goals, for example, prevention of abuse in law enforcement agencies - remember the glass police stations in some countries.
The essence of totalitarian politics is diktat in the sphere of culture
… A majestic whole is our Institute of State Poets and Writers. (…) Now poetry is no longer a shameless nightingale whistle: poetry is a public service, poetry is usefulness (the novel "We").
Zamyatin has always remained a stranger to conformism - or, as they would say in his time, "compromise."
As a student, he joined the Bolshevik Party. He was expelled from Tsarist Petersburg twice. As soon as the House of Romanovs was replaced by the Council of People's Commissars, the writer, who had once served in solitary confinement for revolutionary agitation in 1905, took, if not an opposition, then certainly a wait and see attitude towards the socialist experiment.
Of course, one cannot reduce his "We" solely to anti-Soviet satire. Because, at least, the USSR itself was formed only in 1922, while the first idea of the novel dates back to 1917, when it was difficult to imagine what forms the emerging state would acquire in the future.
However, Zamyatin, who taught the technique of fiction to young writers in a literary studio at the House of Arts in Petrograd in 1919 (for example, Zoshchenko considered him his teacher), was well aware that the values and tools of culture cannot be used to justify terror, violence, and oppression. To be convinced of this, it is enough to look at the films of Leni Riefenstahl, impeccable in form, made known when, it is known for whom.
The soulless consumer as the ideal citizen
The latest discovery of State Science: the center of fantasy is a pitiful brain knot … Three times cauterization of this knot with X-rays - and you are cured of fantasy - forever.
You are perfect, you are machine-equal, the path to absolute happiness is free (the novel "We").
A person without fantasy is devoid of both creative impulses and critical understanding of reality.
A person without imagination chokes every year in line for a new smartphone. Popcorn crunches weekly in the cinema at the next blockbuster. It keeps the flywheel of mass consumption from stopping, the main mechanism of the modern economy.
The best lines of Zamyatin were written in the terrible year of 1918, when it was impossible to find even ink and paper in the cold starving Petrograd - not to mention the no less relevant bread, boots or a safety razor. But it was precisely by gaining inner peace at the moment of maximum physical deprivation that the writer understood that, living in only one thing (from the word “thing”) world, it was impossible to reach the heights of creativity and freedom of spirit.
One State Politics - Violent Cultural Expansion
The great, historical hour is near when the first INTEGRAL will soar into world space.
You have a beneficent yoke of reason to subdue unknown creatures living on other planets - perhaps still in a wild state of freedom. If they don’t understand that we are bringing them mathematically infallible happiness, it is our duty to make them happy (novel "We").
The reality turned out to be almost the same - only worse. Today, supersonic birds take off from the airfields of developed countries, but they are not sent into space, as our naive science fiction writers had hoped, but into the skies over Libya, Afghanistan or Iraq in order to "make happy" their inhabitants with the chemical formula of trinitrotoluene.
And foreign cultural and dissenting elements are either destroyed or excluded from everyday life.
In a similar way, in 1922 Zamyatin was included in the official "List of anti-Soviet intelligentsia in Petrograd." The possibility of his expulsion from the country along with a group of cultural workers "hostile" to the new authorities was considered on the notorious "Philosophical Steamer". Fortunately, thanks to the efforts of friends, including Maxim Gorky, Evgeny Ivanovich was able to stay at home. However, his final emigration was only a matter of time.
The policy of the One State is the regulation of the intimate life of a person
Schedules (…) were hung on the walls of Mr. Dewley's library. Schedule meal times; (…) Charity schedule; and, finally, among others - one schedule, out of modesty not titled and specifically related to Mrs. Dewley … (the story "The Islanders").
A tremendous impression, without which there probably would not have been a great book, on Evgeny Ivanovich made a visit to England in 1916. He was shaken by the colossal shipyards of Newcastle (somewhat similar to the boathouse where the Integral, the spaceship from the dystopian We) was created. I was struck by the dense network of railways, along which, with the speed of a courier train, in perfect accordance with the schedule, you can reach any corner of the kingdom in a few hours. Is this not the origin of the admiration with which the hero of the dystopia, the engineer D-503, recalls "the greatest of the surviving monuments of ancient literature - the" Railway Schedule "?
But the main thing is the total regulation of all aspects of life, from work hours to moments of intimacy, which is reflected in the story "The Islanders" (1917), written on the basis of Zamyatin's "English" observations.
So the object of the satire of the dystopia "We" is not so much the Soviet reality of the era of devastation and civil war (remember the years of the creation of the novel), but rather a technically developed, but spiritless society of Western countries, which the science fiction writer could appreciate from the inside.
The decline of culture - a harbinger of a global crisis
Anxiety was everywhere in Europe, it was in the air itself, it was breathed.
Everyone was waiting for war, uprisings, catastrophes. Nobody wanted to invest in new ventures. Factories were closing. Crowds of the unemployed walked the streets and demanded bread. Bread became more and more expensive, and money fell in price every day.
This is how Zamyatin's unfinished novel "The Scourge of God" (1935) begins, dedicated to the final death of the dying ancient civilization after the invasion of barbarian tribes in the 5th century from the birth of Christ.
But these lines sound very relevant even now, when no one can imagine what the economic and social crisis that is growing in the countries of the "first" world will result in.
Likewise, the parents of the boy, who was born on January 20 (February 1), 1884 in the city of Lebedyan, Tambov province, did not know that their son would shake literature no less than the "Scourge of God", Attila, the Western Roman Empire.