Overview

After Evgeny Zamiatin emigrated from the USSR in 1931, he was systematically airbrushed out of Soviet literary history, despite the central role he had played in the cultural life of Russia's northern capital for nearly twenty years. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, his writings have gradually been rediscovered in Russia, but with his archives scattered between Russia, France, and the USA, the project of reconstructing the story of his life has been a complex task. This book, the first full biography of Zamiatin in any language, draws upon his extensive correspondence and other documents in order to provide an account of his life which explores his intimate preoccupations, as well as uncovering the political and cultural background to many of his works. It reveals a man of strong will and high principles, who negotiated the political dilemmas of his day-including his relationship with Stalin-with great shrewdness.

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9781618112804

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Reviews

Julie Curtis's The Englishman from Lebedian' A Life of Evgeny Zamiatin is an indispensable new biography for readers who want to learn more about one of Russia's most important 20th-century writers. Curtis has unearthed fascinating new details about Zamiatin's early years in England, and she brings to life the world of Revolutionary Russia as he wrote what would become his masterpiece, We. The biography's concluding chapters are especially riveting, as Curtis describes Zamiatin's final years in emigration and his relationship with friends and colleagues in Soviet Russia and abroad. Beautifully written and deeply researched, The Englishman from Lebedian' will undoubtedly become the English language standard for both scholars and general readers. --Justin Weir, Harvard University

The Englishman From Lebedian' by J. A. E. Curtis is a welcome and significant contribution to the scholarship on Evgenii Zamiatin. Weaving together a detailed account of his dual career as an engineer and a writer with insights into his complicated personal life, Curtis creates a narrative fabric that is both comprehensive and nuanced. This book will be useful to students getting acquainted with Zamiatin and to scholars who have known him for many years. . . . Curtis's access to Zamiatin's archives and especially his voluminous correspondence has resulted in a full, balanced and meticulously detailed account of his life and work. Of particular value to scholars of this period are accounts of Zamiatin's friendships and collaborations with Bulgakov, Akhmatova, Fedin, Annenkov, Kustodiev, Chukovskii and many other figures in Russian modernism. The photographs and illustrations included in the book add significantly to the story Curtis tells in this volume. It is a story that expands and enriches our understanding of early twentieth-century Russian and Soviet culture as a whole. --Karen L. Ryan Slavonic and East European Review, 92, 4, October 2014

Julie Curtis's The Englishman from Lebedian' A Life of Evgeny Zamiatin is an indispensable new biography for readers who want to learn more about one of Russia's most important 20th-century writers. Curtis has unearthed fascinating new details about Zamiatin's early years in England, and she brings to life the world of Revolutionary Russia as he wrote what would become his masterpiece, We. The biography's concluding chapters are especially riveting, as Curtis describes Zamiatin's final years in emigration and his relationship with friends and colleagues in Soviet Russia and abroad. Beautifully written and deeply researched, The Englishman from Lebedian' will undoubtedly become the English language standard for both scholars and general readers. --Justin Weir, Harvard University

Author Information

Julie Curtis is a Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford, where she has been teaching Russian since 1991. She is the author of two books about Evgeny Zamiatin's close friend and contemporary Mikhail Bulgakov, including a biography (Manuscripts Don't Burn: Mikhail Bulgakov-A Life in Letters and Diaries). She also has a particular interest in Russian drama from Pushkin to the present day. In the course of her research on Zamiatin's life she discovered a unique original typescript of his most famous novel, the science-fiction anti-utopia We (1920), which George Orwell read and admired as he was planning his own Nineteen Eighty Four. Her scholarly edition of Zamiatin's We, co-edited with Marina Liubimova, was published in St Petersburg in 2011, and provided Russian readers for the first time with an authentic text of this classic work.

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