Yevgeny Zamyatin

Yevgeny Zamyatin was born in 1884 in Lebedyan, a small town in the center of Russia — a place of churches, dust, and silence. He studied engineering in St. Petersburg, but the revolution was already inside him. He joined the Bolsheviks, was arrested, sent away, brought back. He built ships in England during the First World War and watched the grey Northern ice break against iron hulls. Then he returned to Russia to write. Always, he returned to write.

He believed a true writer must be dangerous. His novel We, written in 1920, was never published in the Soviet Union during his lifetime. It was too sharp, too clear. The state that once arrested him for rebellion now arrested his words for the same crime. We traveled abroad and became one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, a book that made other books possible.

By 1931, Zamyatin could no longer publish in his own country. He wrote a letter to Stalin — direct, proud, without apology — and asked to leave. He was allowed to go. He lived his last years in Paris, poor and mostly forgotten, and died there in 1937. He had always written about walls — the ones people build around others, and the ones they build around themselves. He knew that the most dangerous thing a writer can do is ask a simple question: what if the wall is wrong?