Portrait of Zamyatin By Boris Kustodiev (1923)
“As the first major anti-utopian fantasy…(Zamyatin’s) We has its own peculiar wryness and grace, sharper than the pamphleteering of 1984 or the philosophical scheme of Brave New World, its celebrated descendants.” — Kirkus Reviews
“…why should one get one’s work to the largest number of people possible? Do mere numbers of readers really signify anything? Art is not a democracy, but only an aristocracy of excellence.”– S.T. Joshi in Classics & Contemporaries
One author who is obscure, but also excellent, is the great, forgotten Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937). In fact, I would argue that Zamyatin is an exception to Joshi’s rule. I feel compelled to take time off from my own writing and self-promotion to mount a posthumous campaign on behalf of the Russian author, to increase his readership, because he is so obscure that a great many speculative fiction readers have never even heard of him.
Their loss is great.
In fact, I only happened onto him by chance. One day last summer, I browsed an old, small town, brick-and-mortar bookstore and happened onto a mass market paperback translation of the dystopian novel We. In the course of reading translator Mirra Ginsburg’s introduction, and then (in short order) finishing the 230 page novel, I felt so impressed by his talent and so frustrated by his obscurity that I decided I had to blog about him. I finally have a few moments to do this, so let’s get started.
I should start by pointing out that when I say Zamyatin is “obscure” , this is relative. His work was, after all, published as a mass market paperback by Harper Collins’ Eos Science Fiction imprint two generations after his death. But the real injustice is that his work remains lesser-known that that of the authors he influenced (George Orwell, Ayn Rand, and Aldous Huxley). This, in spite of the fact that he, more than any of his literary descendants, lived the dystopia he wrote about and (arguably) wrote a novel that achieved a much greater sense of dread, and even horror.
