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Yevgeny Zamyatin was born in 1884. He was arrested as a student in 1905 by Tsarist police for being a Bolshevik. He was then sent to England to work on Russian ice breakers in Newcastle. He has been described as a 'dapper, tweedy naval engineer'. He was also a fan of H.G. Wells . After the revolution in 1917 he returned to Russia and worked for Gorky. He was arrested again by the Soviet authorities in 1919 and 1922 and forbidden to publish his work. In 1931 Stalin surprisingly granted him permission to move to Paris. He died there in March, 1937.

"This is a book to look out for" -- George Orwell "Zamyatin reminds us, Adam did not wish to be happy, he wished to be "free" -- Anthony Burgess "Precursor to much more famous works by Huxley and Orwell, this antidote to totalitarianism, written by someone who genuinely knew what that sort of existence was like, is the anti-Stalinist dystopia to beat them all - even Brave New World, 1984, and Koestler's Darkness at Noon" -- Toby Green "Two of the most iconic novels in the English language - Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and 1984 by George Orwell - owe an enormous debt to Zamyatin. We is the ur-text of science-fiction dystopias...the product of a powerful imagination" Wall Street Journal "One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century" -- Irving Howe