Curtis, J. A. E. The Englishman from Lebedian': A Life of Evgeny Zamiatin (1884–1937) (review)

Abstract

SEER, 92, 4, OCTOBER 2014 746 more at home in the empyrean of speculative, over-ingenious conceptualizing (nonetheless interesting and thought-provoking) than on the firmer terrain of social being and theatre practice. Apart from the occasional semantic glitch, the scrupulous editors have done their author proud, although he must have had them tearing their hair at times, not only over questions of verbal profligacy and opacity of meaning but in fulfilling very precise and pedantic demands for varieties of type-font and typographical specifications on almost every page. In the event, they have produced an extremely handsome tome (reflected in its price) with some beautiful colour photographs of a recent Israeli production of The Seagull, while others of The Cherry Orchard adorn its cover. They have also provided a state-of-the-art index. Fellow Chekhovians seeking nods of approval from the author will be gratified by their number and frequency; less so the few given the imperial ‘thumbs down’, one of whom is present in a footnote (p. 92) but absent from the bibliography. London Nick Worrall Curtis, J. A. E. The Englishman from Lebedian´: A Life of Evgeny Zamiatin (1884–1937). Ars Rossica. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2013. x + 394 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $75.00. 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. The volume is arranged chronologically, with each chapter treating a successiveperiodofZamiatin’slifeandwork.Abriefintroductionsetsthetheme of paradox that threads throughout his biography: provincial/cosmopolitan, engineer/writer, Bolshevik/émigré. The first chapter takes us through Zamiatin’s relatively happy childhood in Lebedian to his matriculation at the St Petersburg Polytechnic Institute and his involvement with the Bolshevik Party. Zamiatin’s developing talents and convictions are intertwined with his budding emotional life, the beginning of his lifelong love affair with Liudmila Nikolaevna Usova. In the second chapter, we follow Zamiatin’s early career as a maritime engineer and his first forays into literature, up to his departure for England to oversee the construction of icebreakers in 1916. Chapter three recounts his rather unhappy stay in Newcastle and his watching the February REVIEWS 747 Revolution from afar. The fourth chapter recounts Zamiatin’s experience of the October Revolution and the Civil War. It is in this period, fraught with danger and deprivation, that Zamiatin established friendships with Gor´kii, Blok, Remizov, Chukovskii and many others. His participation in Gor´kii’s ‘World of Literature’ is detailed, as is his involvement in the House of Arts and the Serapion Brotherhood. We are privy to his reactions to burgeoning emigration, Blok’s death, and Gumilev’s arrest and execution. Against this gatheringstormZamiatin’sventuresintothetheatreandhisattemptstopublish We seem dangerously naive, but Curtis persuasively constructs context that demonstrates why Soviet writers and artists remained optimistic: the borders were open, letters flowed freely to Europe and back, contact with émigrés was fully possible. Chapter five, covering 1922–25, provides an account of Zamiatin’s arrest and brief imprisonment in 1922 and his initial attempts to emigrate. When We is definitively banned in the Soviet Union in 1924, convoluted negotiations for its publication abroad in Russian and in translation ensue. The late twenties, the focus of chapter six, find Zamiatin struggling with the censorship and wrangling with the literary bureaucracy. The scope of chapter seven is brief, only 1929–31, but those years initiated the systematic persecution of Zamiatin, Pil´niak and other Soviet ‘heretics’. At chapter’s close Zamiatin’s request for permission to leave the country, hand-delivered to Stalin by Gor´kii, is finally granted. The Zamiatins’ peregrinations in Riga, Berlin and Prague and their settling in Paris are recounted in chapter eight. Curtis’s account of Zamiatin’s relationship with White émigrés and with other Soviet citizens in Paris is fascinating; it is clear that he felt keenly the decade of...