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Zamyatin, Yevgenii Ivanovich
(1884-1937)
writer
Fiercely independent and nonconformist, Zamy-
atin wrote satire in the tradition of
GOGOL
and
SALTYKOV
-
SHCHEDRIN
and ran afoul of the Soviet
literary authorities during the 1920s. Born in
rural Tambov province, which he satirized in
early works like
District Tales
(1913), Zamyatin
was trained as a naval engineer. A sojourn in
Great Britain during World War I provided mate-
rial for
The Islanders
(1918), a highly critical col-
lection about English life. An early
BOLSHEVIK
,
Zamyatin left the party soon after the October
Revolution of 1917. A member of the Union of
Soviet Writers, Zamyatin took part in early Soviet
literary politics. As a mentoring influence on the
“Serapion Brothers,” a group of mostly irreverent
young writers who sympathized with Commu-
nist goals but rejected the subordination of liter-
ature to propaganda, he exercised considerable
influence. His opposition to the regime became
more pronounced during the 1920s, and he
joined the “inner emigration” of intellectuals
who remained in Russia but stood aloof from the
postrevolutionary order, or actively opposed it.
Zamyatin's most important work is the dystopian
novel
We,
written in 1919-20, but first published
in English in 1925, before a Russian-language
edition came out in 1927. In it he portrays a
world of regimented mechanization where char-
acters are known by numbers and that stands in
contrast to the optimistic views of technology in
the work of the English writer H. G. Wells. An
artistically richer forerunner of the genre later
mined by George Orwell in
1984
and Aldous
Huxley in
Brave New World,
the novel was widely
perceived as a critique of the utopian promises of
the new regime and contributed to its growing
hostility toward Zamyatin. This hostility escalated
after the Russian-language edition appeared in
an émigré journal in Czechoslovakia, and Zamy-
atin's works were no longer staged or published
in the Soviet Union. He withdrew from the
Writers' Union and personally wrote to
STALIN
asking for permission to emigrate, which he did
by moving to Paris in 1932. His last years were
not happy, and the petty intrigues of the émigré
movement only nourished his misanthropic
tendencies.
zapovednik
(pl.
zapovedniki
)
The term for a scientific nature preserve,
zapoved-
niki
are vast areas of land in the Russian Federa-
tion closed off to human activity, with the
exception of ecological research. Scholars have
maintained that the development of
zapovedniki
from the time of the
OCTOBER REVOLUTION
was
testimony to the unlikely survival of a surpris-
ingly persistent and independently minded
nature conservancy movement in the face of
increased Communist ideological orthodoxy.
There are presently 95
zapovedniki
across the
Russian Federation, ranging in size from the
570-acre Galichia Gora natural preserve in
Lipetskaya province in the Black Earth region
south of Moscow to the 10.3-million-acre Great
Arctic Zapovednik in the Krasnoyarsk region of
Siberia. Altogether, the 95 nature preserves
cover an area of about 110 million acres. The
first
zapovednik,
the Barguzinsky Zapovednik in
the present-day Buriat republic east of Lake
Baikal, was established in 1916.
Zapovedniki
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