We

Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937) was a Russian author of science-­fiction and political satire. He is most famous for his 1921 novel We, a story set in a dystopian future police state. Due to his use of literature to criticize Soviet society, Zamyatin has been referred to as one of the first Soviet dissidents. Although Zamyatin supported the Communist Party of the Soviet Union before they came to power, he slowly came to disagree with their policies, particularly those regarding censorship of the arts. In his 1921 essay I Am Afraid, Zamyatin wrote: True literature can exist only when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics. This attitude made his position increasingly difficult as the 1920s wore on. In 1923, Zamyatin arranged for the manuscript of We to be smuggled to E.P. Dutton and Company in New York City. After being translated into English by Gregory Zilboorg, the novel was published in 1924. In 1927, Zamyatin smuggled the original Russian text to Marc Lvovich Slonim (1894-1976), then editor of a Russian émigré journal and publishing house based in Prague. To the fury of the State, copies of the Slonim edition began being smuggled back to the USSR and secretly passed from hand to hand - triggering a mass offensive by the Soviet State against him. As a result, he was blacklisted from publishing anything in his homeland. In 1931, Zamyatin appealed directly to Joseph Stalin, requesting permission to leave the Soviet Union. With the encouragement of Maxim Gorky, Stalin agreed to Zamyatin's request. Zamyatin settled with his wife in Paris, where he collaborated with French film director Jean Renoir. Zamyatin died in poverty of a heart attack in 1937. We directly inspired Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), Ayn Rand's Anthem (1938), George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952), and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974).