20 January] 1884 – 10 March 1937), sometimes anglicized as Eugene Zamyatin, was a Russian author of science fiction, philosophy, literary criticism, and political satire.

He is most famous for his highly influential and widely imitated 1921 dystopian science fiction novel We, which is set in a futuristic police state.

The outrage this sparked within the Party and the Union of Soviet Writers led directly to the State-organized defamation and blacklisting of Zamyatin and his successful request for permission from Joseph Stalin to leave his homeland.

In a 1922 essay, Zamyatin recalled: "You will see a very lonely child, without companions of his own age, on his stomach, over a book, or under the piano, on which his mother is playing Chopin.

During this time, Zamyatin lost his faith in Christianity, became an atheist and a Marxist, and joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

The following day, he and thirty other Bolsheviks were arrested by the Okhrana inside their "revolutionary headquarters of the Vyborg district, at the very moment when plans and pistols of various types were spread out on the table.

During the months he spent in solitary confinement, Zamyatin recalled that he had almost daily nightmares about the paper bag in his flat containing pyroxylin.

In March 1916, he was sent to the United Kingdom to supervise the construction of icebreakers at the shipyards of Armstrong Whitworth in Walker and Swan Hunter in Wallsend while living in Newcastle upon Tyne.

"[9] Zamyatin later recalled, "In England, I built ships, looked at ruined castles, listened to the thud of bombs dropped by German Zeppelins, and wrote The Islanders.

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 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.

"[13]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!

D-503, a mathematician, lives in the One State,[16] an urban society constructed almost entirely of glass apartment-buildings, which assist mass surveillance by the secret police, or Bureau of Guardians.

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.

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 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.

When the flaming, seething sphere (in science, religion, social life, art) cools, the fiery magma becomes coated with dogma – a rigid, ossified, motionless crust.

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.

According to Mirra Ginsburg: "Zamyatin's vision was too far-reaching, too nonconformist, and too openly expressed to be tolerated by the purveyors of official and compulsory dogma.

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.

One of the most active and influential figures in the All-Russian Writers' Union [ru], which included a variety of literary schools, he became the object of a frenzied campaign of vilification.

"[28]Instead of surrendering, Zamyatin, whom Mirra Ginsburg has dubbed "a man of incorruptible and uncompromising courage,"[1] on 24 September 1929, wrote and mailed a letter resigning his membership in the Union of Soviet Writers.

"[34] After the film premiered, Zamyatin wrote articles for French magazines and worked on a novel titled The Scourge of God, with Attila as the main character.

[37] Writing in 1967, Mirra Ginsburg commented: "Like Bulgakov and like Babel, Zamyatin gives us a glimpse of what post-revolutionary Russian literature might have become had independence, daring, and individuality not been stamped out so ruthlessly by the dictatorship.

In that year, when he handed the manuscript to his novel Doctor Zhivago over to an emissary from billionaire Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Boris Pasternak said: "You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad."

For example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was Christianizing Zamyatin's attacks against State-enforced conformity when he wrote, in his 1973 Letter to Soviet Leaders: "Our present system is unique in world history, because over and above its physical and economic constraints, it demands of us total surrender of our souls, continuous and willing participation in the general, conscious lie.

As part of last Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's reformist policies of glasnost and perestroika, Zamyatin's writing began to again be published legally in his homeland in 1988.

Even since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Zamyatin's many denunciations of enforced conformity and groupthink, as well as his belief that writers and intellectuals have a duty to oppose the calcification and entropy of human thought has meant that his writings continue to have both readers and admirers.