Zamyatin’s most famous work is his novel
In 1922 the authorities arrested Zamyatin and put him in solitary confinement. An ironic twist of fate had him in the same prison (even the same cell block) as the one in which he had spent time before the revolution for being a Bolshevik. After his release, they first planned to expel him to the West but then changed their minds. Zamyatin went abroad only in 1931, after appealing to Stalin with a desperate letter stating that he preferred exile to “literary death.” Zamyatin died in Paris in 1937. In his own country he was recalled only a half-century later, even though some of the most noted Soviet writers were his pupils.
Called the “grand master of literature” in Petrograd, Zamyatin believed that the craft of writing could be learned. He was an outstanding mentor for Petrograd prose, as Gumilyov had been for Petrograd poetry. In the former palace of the merchants Eliseyev (renamed the House of the Arts), Zamyatin founded a literary studio. In a small room that smelled like a tobacco shop, and furnished with a metal bed and a rickety chair, Zamyatin, dressed elegantly in the British manner, offered students a course of lectures on the mastery of fiction, with titles like “Plot and Story,” “Rhythm in Prose,” “Style,” “Spacing Words,” and “The Psychology of Creativity.” This was like a monastery for budding authors, with a strict, demanding, but just abbot.
The most talented of Zamyatin’s students organized a literary group in 1921 called the Serapion Brothers, after the novel by E. T. A. Hoffmann. (“They were going to call themselves Nevsky Prospect originally,” recalled Viktor Shklovsky.68) They were young men but rich in life experience; according to one of the Serapion Brothers,
Eight people embodied among themselves an orderly, a typesetter, an officer, a cobbler, a physician, a fakir, a clerk, a soldier, an actor, a teacher, a cavalryman, and a singer; they had to hold down dozens of the most menial jobs, they had fought in a world war, participated in a civil war, and could not be impressed by hunger, or disease, for they had looked death in the face too long and too often.69
The Serapions insisted on their apolitical stance. When asked whether they were for or against the Communists, they would reply, “We are with the hermit Serapion.” This sounded quite daring under a Communist dictatorship. Lev Lunts, the group’s theoretician, insisted: “We do not want utilitarianism. We do not write for propaganda.”
Besides Zamyatin, another strong influence on the Serapion Brothers came from Shklovsky, who was so attached to his disciples that he considered himself part of their group. Encouraged by Zamyatin and Shklovsky, the Serapion Brothers blissfully experimented, especially in the area of plot, which they tried to make entertaining and fast-paced in the Western manner. In general, the Serapion Brothers’ Western orientation made them a typical Petersburg group. Gorky wrote of the Serapions, “They understand that Russia can live normally only in constant communication with the spirit and genius of the West.” Zamyatin even compared these young writers with the acmeists. Both groups shared a desire to avoid abstract symbolism, a heightened awareness of the objects of everyday life, a striving to make each word meaningful, and a love for vivid psychological detail, often with an exotic flavor.
