Our Notes & References

First edition, posthumous, of this collection of articles and memoirs, which includes the author’s famous feature “Ia boius'” [I Am Scared], the publication of which was the beginning of the end of Zamiatin’s literary career in Soviet Russia.

This New York edition served the first attempt to group and analyse Zamiatin’s publications of the 1920s and 1930s, which, as an anonymous author of the introduction suggests, make it clear why Zamiatin is more known in émigré circles than among the Soviet readers.

Zamiatin (1884 – 1937) rebelled all his life against the establishment not only in his literary works but also in his actions. Due to his association with opposition groups, he was arrested and sent to exile already before the Revolution, in 1906 and 1914. After a wave of destructive criticism and expulsion from ‘Soiuz Pisatelei’ [the Union of Writers] that followed Zamiatin’s attempts to publish his celebrated novel ‘We’, he asked Stalin in his letter in 1931 for permission to emigrate, which was subsequently granted. In 1934 already residing in Paris, he was accepted back to ‘Soiuz Pisatelei SSSR’, which was an unprecedented case. ‘We’ is famously known as a superb forerunner to Orwell’s ‘1984’.

Provenance

Avenir Nizoff (émigré, pianist, who lived in Edmonton, Canada, in the second half of the 20^th century, and gathered a large, wide-ranging library of Russian works, especially covering art, history and literature).