5/21/2023 0 Comments ZamyatinAldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Orwell believed, “must be partly derived from it”. Reviewing the book in Tribune in 1946, Orwell called the futuristic dystopian fable “one of the literary curiosities of this book-burning age”. More than anyone else, it was George Orwell who made Zamyatin’s novel We known in the West. Accompanied by his wife, Lyudmila, he left Russia in November 1931 and settled in Paris, where he died of a heart attack in 1937. Maxim Gorky interceded on Zamyatin’s behalf, and his request was granted. In September 1929 he resigned from the Soviet Union of Writers, and in June 1931 wrote to Stalin asking permission to leave the country. For Zamyatin, one of the best known authors living in the Soviet Union, the attack was the culmination of years of dangerous insecurity. With its threatening references to degeneration and eugenics, this ditty would not have been out of place in Der Stürmer, the Nazi tabloid that was being published in Germany at the time. Appearing in the Leningrad edition of the prestigious Literary Gazette under the title “Certificate concerning social eugenics”, one of them read: In May 1929 Yevgeny Zamyatin was the target of hostile verses composed by the poet Aleksandr Bezymensky, a member of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers.
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