The Englishman From Lebedian (a Life Of Evgeny Zamiatin)

By (author) Curtis, J.A.E.
Short description/annotation:
After Evgeny Zamiatin emigrated from the USSR in 1931, he was systematically airbrushed out of Soviet literary history. This book 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.
Description:
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.
Table of contents:
List of Illustrations VIII Introduction 1 Chapter 1: From Lebedian’ to St Petersburg (1884-1906) 6 Chapter 2: From Astrakhan to Arkhangel’sk (1906-1916) 25 Chapter 3: From Petrograd to Newcastle upon Tyne (1916-1917) 51 Chapter 4: Petrograd (1917-1921) 86 Chapter 5: Petrograd/Leningrad (1922-1925) 117 Chapter 6: Leningrad (1926-1929) 154 Chapter 7: From Koktebel’ to the Warsaw Station (1929-1931) 198 Chapter 8: From Riga to Cagnes (1931-1932) 225 Chapter 9: Paris (1933-1937) 258 Conclusion 307 Bibliography 357 Acknowledgments 373 Index 375
Review quote:

“This new biography, the product of many years research in archives in the US, France, and Russia, is by far the most detailed account of this writer’s life to have been published so far and constitutes a landmark in the study of twentieth-century modernist fiction and Russian cultural life more broadly. The appeal of this monograph lies not only in its patient exploration of the significant personal events in Zamiatin’s life, but also in its impressive grasp of the social, political, and cultural events which shaped him. … Not only has Curtis woven this existing body of material into an elegantly written and compelling biographical narrative, she has also discovered archival materials of her own which shed important light on aspects of Zamiatin’s life and literary career which were hitherto shrouded in relative mystery. … It is a model of judicious and meticulous excavation, and a monumental achievement.” —Philip Cavendish, University College London, Canadian-American Slavic Studies Vol. 53

Biographical note:
Julie Curtis is a Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford, UK 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.