Yevgeny Zamyatin

Yevgeny Zamyatin was born in 1884 in Lebedyan, a town south of Moscow, the son of a Russian Orthodox priest and schoolmaster and a musician mother. He remembered himself as a lonely child, reading under the piano while his mother played Chopin. He studied naval engineering in Saint Petersburg and as a young man joined the Bolsheviks; for his underground activity he was arrested, imprisoned and exiled more than once. In 1916 he was sent to England to supervise the building of icebreakers at shipyards near Newcastle upon Tyne. There he wrote The Islanders, a satire of English life. He returned to Russia in 1917, but he grew disturbed by the new Soviet government's demands for conformity. His novel We, set in a future state where people have numbers instead of names, became the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board. The manuscript was smuggled to New York, and an English translation was published in 1924. Attacked and blacklisted at home, he wrote to Joseph Stalin asking permission to leave, and in 1931 he went abroad. He died in poverty in Paris in 1937.

Yevgeny Zamyatin is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Son of a Russian Orthodox priest; he lost his faith and became an atheist. Source: Wikipedia