Zamyatin's
The Islanders, satirizing English life, and the similarly themed
A Fisher of Men, were both published after his return to Russia. According to Mirra Ginsburg: In 1917 he returned to Petersburg and plunged into the seething literary activity that was one of the most astonishing by-products of the revolution in ruined, ravaged, hungry, and epidemic-ridden Russia. He wrote stories, plays, and criticism; he lectured on literature and the writer's craft; he participated in various literary projects and committees – many of them initiated and presided over by
Maxim Gorky – and served on various editorial boards, with Gorky,
Blok,
Korney Chukovsky,
Gumilev,
Shklovsky, and other leading writers, poets, critics, and linguists. And very soon he came under fire from the newly 'orthodox' – the Proletarian Writers who sought to impose on all art the sole criterion of 'usefulness to the revolution.' As the
Russian Civil War of 1917–1923 continued, Zamyatin's writings and statements became increasingly satirical and critical toward the
Bolshevik party. Even though he was an
Old Bolshevik and even though "he accepted the revolution", Zamyatin believed that independent speech and thought are necessary to any healthy society and opposed the Party's increasing suppression of
freedom of speech and the
censorship of literature, the media, and the arts. In his 1918 essay "Scythians?" Zamyatin wrote:
Christ on
Golgotha, between two thieves, bleeding to death drop by drop, is the victor – because he has been crucified, because, in practical terms, he has been vanquished. But Christ victorious in practical terms is the
Grand Inquisitor. And worse, Christ victorious in practical terms is a paunchy priest in a silk-lined purple robe, who dispenses benedictions with his right hand and collects donations with his left. The Fair Lady, in legal marriage, is simply Mrs. So-and-So, with hair curlers at night and a migraine in the morning. And
Marx, having come down to earth, is simply a
Krylenko. Such is the irony and such is the wisdom of fate. Wisdom because this ironic law holds the pledge of eternal movement forward. The realization, materialisation, practical victory of an idea immediately gives it a
philistine hue. And the true
Scythian will smell from a mile away the odor of dwellings, the odor of
cabbage soup, the odor of the priest in his purple
cassock, the odor of Krylenko — and will hasten away from the dwellings, into the
steppe, to freedom." Later in the same essay, Zamyatin quoted a recent poem by
Andrei Bely and used it to further criticize
People's Commissar for Military Affairs Nikolai Krylenko and those like him for having, "covered Russia with a pile of carcasses" and for "dreaming of
socialist–
Napoleonic Wars in Europe — throughout the world, throughout the universe! But let us not jest incautiously. Bely is honest, and did not
intend to speak about the Krylenkos." The individual's behaviour is based on logic by way of formulas and equations outlined by the One State. As the novel opens, the spaceship
Integral is being built in order to visit extraterrestrial planets. In a deliberate swipe at the expansionist dreams of
Nikolai Krylenko and others like him, the One State intends to "force" alien races "to be happy" by accepting the
absolutism of the One State and its leader, the Benefactor. Meanwhile, as the spaceship's chief engineer, D-503 begins a
journal that he intends to be carried upon the completed spaceship. Like all other citizens of One State, D-503 lives in a glass apartment building and is carefully watched by the Bureau of Guardians. D-503's lover, O-90, has been assigned by the One State to visit him on certain nights. She is considered too short to bear children and is deeply grieved by her state in life. O-90's other lover and D-503's best friend is R-13, a State poet who reads his verse at public executions. While on an assigned walk with O-90, D-503 meets a woman named I-330. I-330 smokes cigarettes, drinks vodka, and shamelessly flirts with D-503 instead of applying for a pink-ticket sex-visit; all of these acts are highly illegal according to the laws of One State. Both repelled and fascinated, D-503 struggles to overcome his attraction to I-330. He begins dreaming, which people of the One State know to be a serious
mental illness. Slowly, I-330 reveals to D-503 that she is in a member of MEPHI, an organization of rebels against the One State. I-330 also takes D-503 through secret tunnels to the untamed wilderness outside the Green Wall, which surrounds the city-state. There, D-503 meets human inhabitants whom the One State claims do not exist: hunter-gatherers whose bodies are covered with animal fur. MEPHI aims to topple the One State, destroy the Green Wall, and reunite the people of the city with the outside world. Like many other
dystopian novels,
We does not end happily for I-330 and D-503, it also ends with a general uprising by MEPHI and with the One State's survival in doubt. A recurring theme throughout
We is that, just as there is no highest number, there can be no
final revolution. Unsurprisingly, the Soviet Government refused to allow the publication of
We. In his 1921 essay "I Am Afraid", Zamyatin began by criticizing the poets who unconditionally sang the praises of the new Soviet government. Zamyatin compared them with the
Court Poets under the
House of Romanov and under the French
House of Bourbon. Zamyatin further criticized "these nimble authors" for knowing "when to sing hail to
the Tsar, and when to the
Hammer and Sickle". Zamyatin then 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." Zamyatin continued by pointing out that writers in the new Soviet Union were forbidden to criticize and satirise, in the vein of
Jonathan Swift and
Anatole France, the foibles and failings of the new society. Zamyatin added that, while many compared Russia after the October Revolution to the
Athenian democracy at its inception, the Athenian government and people did not fear the satirical stage-plays of
Aristophanes, in which everyone was mocked and criticized. Zamyatin concluded by pointing out that if the Party did not rid itself of "
this new Catholicism, which is every bit as fearful of every heretical word as
the old one", then the only future possible for
Russian literature was "in the past." In Zamyatin's 1923 essay "The New Russian Prose" he wrote: "In art, the surest way to destroy is to canonize one given form and one philosophy: that which is
canonized dies of obesity, of
entropy." In his 1923 essay "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters" Zamyatin wrote: The law of revolution is red, fiery, deadly; but this death means the birth of a new life, a new star. And the law of entropy is cold, ice blue, like the icy interplanetary infinities. The flame turns from red to an even, warm pink, no longer deadly, but comfortable. The sun ages into a planet, convenient for highways, stores, beds, prostitutes, prisons; this is the law. And if the planet is to be kindled into youth again, it must be set on fire, it must be thrown off the smooth highway of
evolution: this is the law. The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow (in the
Book of Genesis days are equal to years, ages). But someone must see this already, and speak
heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought. When the flaming, seething sphere (in science, religion, social life, art) cools, the fiery
magma becomes coated with
dogma — a rigid, ossified, motionless crust. Dogmatization in science, religion, social life, or art is the entropy of thought. What has become dogma no longer burns; it only gives off warmth — it is
tepid, it is cool. Instead of the
Sermon on the Mount, under the scorching sun, to upraised-arms and sobbing people, there is drowsy prayer in a magnificent abbey. Instead of
Galileo's, 'Be still, it turns!' there are dispassionate computations in a well-heated room in an observatory. On the Galileos, the s build their own structures, slowly, bit by bit, like
corals. This is the path of evolution – until a new heresy explodes the crush of dogma and all the edifices of the most enduring which have been raised upon it. Explosions are not very comfortable. And therefore the exploders, the heretics, are justly exterminated
by fire,
by axes, by words. To every today, to every civilization, to the laborious, slow, useful, most useful, creative, coral-building work, heretics are a threat. Stupidly, recklessly, they burst into today from tomorrow; they are romantics.
Babeuf was justly
beheaded in 1797; he leaped into 1797 across 150 years. It is just to chop off the head of a heretical literature which challenges dogma; this literature is harmful. But harmful literature is more useful than useful literature, for it is anti-entropic, it is a means of challenging calcification,
sclerosis, crust, moss, quiescence. It is
Utopian, absurd – like Babeuf in 1797. It is right 150 years later. Zamyatin also wrote a number of
short stories, in
fairy tale form, that constituted satirical criticism of Communist ideology. According to Mirra Ginsburg: Instead of idealized eulogies to the Revolution, Zamyatin wrote stories like
The Dragon,
The Cave, and
A Story about the Most Important Thing, reflecting the starkness and the territory of the time: the little man lost in his uniform, transformed into a dragon with a gun; the starving, frozen intellectual reduced to stealing a few logs of wood; the city turned into a barren, prehistoric landscape – a desert of caves and cliffs and roaring
mammoths;
fratricide and destruction and blood. In
The Church of God, he questions the Bolshevik tenet that
the end justifies the means. In
The Flood, he gives the central place to individual passions against a background that reflects the vast changes of the time as marginally and obliquely as they are reflected in the consciousness of his characters – residents of an outlying suburb, whose knowledge of the history around them is limited to such facts as the deteriorating quality of coal, the silent machines, the lack of bread." In 1923, Zamyatin arranged for the manuscript of his
dystopian
science-fiction novel
We to be smuggled to
E.P. Dutton and Company in
New York City. After being translated into
English by Russian refugee
Gregory Zilboorg, the novel was published in 1924. Then, in 1927, Zamyatin went much further. He smuggled the original Russian text to
Marc Lvovich Slonim (1894–1976), the editor of an anti-communist
Russian émigré magazine and publishing house based in
Prague. To the fury of the Soviet State, copies of the
Czechoslovak edition began being smuggled back to the Soviet Union and secretly passed from hand to hand. Zamyatin's secret dealings with Western publishers triggered a mass offensive by the Soviet State against him. These attitudes, writings, and actions, which the Party considered
Deviationism made Zamyatin's position increasingly difficult as the 1920s wore on. Zamyatin became, according to Mirra Ginsburg, one of "the first to become the target of concerted hounding by the Party critics and writers." According to Mirra Ginsburg: All the instruments of power were brought into use in the campaign for conformity. Faced with grim alternatives, most of Zamyatin's erstwhile pupils and colleagues yielded to pressure, recanted publicly, in many cases rewrote their works, and devoted themselves to turning out the gray eulogies to Communist construction demanded by the dictatorship. Other writers, like
Babel and
Olesha, chose silence. Many committed suicide. Zamyatin's destruction took a different form. One of the most active and influential figures in the , which included a variety of
literary schools, he became the object of a frenzied campaign of vilification. He was dismissed from his editorial posts; magazines and publishing houses closed their doors to him; those which ventured to publish his work were persecuted; his plays were withdrawn from the stage. Under the pressure of the Party inquisitors, his friends began to be afraid to see him and many of his comrades in the Writer's Union denounced him. He was, in effect, presented with the choice of repudiating his work and his views, or total expulsion from literature. During the spring of 1931, Zamyatin asked
Maxim Gorky, to intercede with Stalin on his behalf. After Gorky's death in 1936, Zamyatin wrote: One day, Gorky's secretary telephoned to say that Gorky wished me to have dinner with him at his
country home. I remember clearly that extraordinarily hot day and the rainstorm — a tropical downpour — in
Moscow. Gorky's car sped through a wall of water, bringing me and several other invited guests to dinner at his home. It was a literary dinner, and close to twenty people sat around the table. At first Gorky was silent, visibly tired. Everybody drank wine, but his glass contained water – he was not allowed to drink wine. After a while, he rebelled, poured himself a glass of wine, then another and another, and became the old Gorky. The storm ended, and I walked out onto the large stone terrace. Gorky followed me immediately and said to me, 'The affair of your passport is settled. But if you wish, you can return the passport and stay.' I said I would go. Gorky frowned and went back to the other guests in the dining room. It was late. Some of the guests remained overnight; others, including myself, were returning to Moscow. In parting, Gorky said, 'When shall we meet again? If not in Moscow, then perhaps in
Italy? If I go there, you must come to see me! In any case, until we meet again, eh?' This was the last time I saw Gorky. Zamyatin left the Soviet Union in November 1931. ==Life in exile==