Zamyatin

YEVGENI ZAMYATIN (1884 - 1937)

'Often in the evening as I was returning from the yard in my little Renault, I would be met by a dark, blinded city, all lights extinguished. This meant that German Zeppelins were in the offing and their bombs would soon be crashing down. At night, sitting at home, I would listen to the explosions, some far off, some near at hand, as I checked through [icebreaker] drawings and worked on my novel about the English - Islanders.'

So writes Yevgeni Zamyatin (1884-1937), one of the most influential and unsettling writers of the twentieth century, referring to his time in Newcastle during World War I. Zamyatin had been sent to England early in 1916 by the Imperial Russian government to oversee the construction of a number of icebreakers at Armstrong Whitworth in Low Walker and Swan Hunter in Wallsend. He also visited South Shields and Sunderland. These vessels included the Sviatogor, later renamed Krasin, which became the most famous rescue ship in the world in 1928 for its role in rescuing Nobile's Arctic airship expedition off Spitzbergen. This story was filmed as The Red Tent with Peter Finch and Sean Connery.

Zamyatin's letters to his wife in 1916 are brief, censored postcards but they show him to be bored and lonely, immersed in his shipyard work and cut off from people by his poor command of the language. He was also comically preoccupied by the state of his innards. He mentions a pleasant park near Sanderson Road (Jesmond Dene) and a pleasant note occurs when he spends a balmy July night lying out in the front garden until midnight. The letters cease around August 1916, when his wife came to join him via the Norway ferry.

Zamyatin was already a promising writer by 1916, and the culture-shock of arriving among the well-to-do of Jesmond, where he lived at 19 Sanderson Road (plaque erected 8 November 2002), stung him into producing two dazzling novellas Islanders and A Fisher of Men, which made savage fun of them in brilliant style. Martin Amis, in his 1984 Observer review calls the novellas 'remarkable in every way'. Zamyatin was exasperated by the way the Jesmondians always repressed spontaneity in favour of order:

'By Sunday, the stone doorsteps of the Jesmond houses had been scrubbed to a dazzling whiteness. The houses were of a certain age and smoke-begrimed, but the steps were gleaming rows of white, like the Sunday gentlemens' false teeth. The Sunday gentlemen were produced at one of the Jesmond factories and on Sunday mornings, thousands of them appeared on the streets with the Sunday edition of the St Enoch parish newspaper. Sporting identical canes and identical top-hats, the Sunday gentlemen strolled in dignified fashion along the street and greeted their doubles.'
'Lovely weather, isn't it?'
'Oh yes, much better than yesterday.'

Zamyatin's notebooks also display a relentless hostility. For all his contempt for the hidebound Jesmondians, however, by a supreme irony, Zamyatin himself seemed to fall under the spell of Jesmond. After he returned to the artistic circles of the Russian capital, late in 1917, he became known as 'the Englishman'. He affected a reserved English manner; he preferred tweed suits, cultivated a small moustache and smoked a pipe.

In Islanders the citizens of Jesmond are dominated by the repellent Dewley (a pun from Tristram Shandy) and happiness by timetable is his creed. Even Mrs Dewley's needs are catered for every third Saturday. A Fisher of Men is supposedly set in London, and features a Zeppelin raid on Hammersmith; the text, however, is stuffed with Newcastle allusions. The extensive boating-lake and wooded island, where respectable banker Mr Craggs, torch in hand, goes in search of hanky-panky after dark - and supplements his income with a little blackmail - is clearly Leazes Park lake in Newcastle.

The preoccupations of the two Newcastle novellas all find reflection in Zamyatin's masterpiece WE, where they are magnified to nightmarish dimensions. As the first draft of WE dates to 1919, it must have been commenced shortly after Zamyatin's return to Russia (if not in Newcastle itself). The dreams of the repellent Rev. Dewley, vicar of St Enoch's (St George's, Jesmond), in Islanders have, in the thirtieth century, come true. Every hour in the One State is accounted for in the Table of Hourly Commandments. Privacy in the glass buildings is non-existent, and a green glass wall shelters the city from the free, dirty, natural and disordered world outside. The inhabitants, known only by numbers, are not unhappy, but it is a rational happiness, imposed from above, leaving no room for human variety and spontaneity. Life there is characterised by extreme regimentation and conformism in thought and deed, supervised by the Guardians and, ultimately, the Benefactor. It is clear that Zamyatin's Newcastle experience prompted him to imagine such a state, and there are many hidden references to the city and to working practices in the Tyne shipyards. Even the numbers of the main characters belong to the specification of Zamyatin's favourite icebreaker! WE became the first literary work to be banned by Glavlit, the censoring body of the new USSR. In fact, WE was not published in the USSR until 1988, when it came out there at the same time as Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, a piquant conjunction. In this country it has long been a Penguin Modern Classic. George Orwell read it in French and reviewed it in Tribune in 1946. He considered that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World must have been influenced by it, but it is Orwell's novel which seems to have by far the more striking parallels with Zamyatin's work. Thus Tyneside may be said to have instigate both the first great modern anti-utopia, and, as a consequence, one of the most influential books of the 20th century.

A curious footnote to Zamyatin's English preoccupations has come to light. Harold Heslop presented him in 1930 with a copy (in Russian) of his novel Goaf which had been translated into Russian by Lidiya Vengerova in 1926 under the title Pod vlast'yu uglia. It had sold half a million copies (no royalties) and was to a large extent responsible for Heslop's invitation to the USSR in 1930. The English first edition of Goaf, incidentally, did not appear until 1934. In London, Vengerova, like Heslop, unaware of Zamyatin's precarious political position, had asked through Heslop that he assist in promoting the latter's work in the Soviet Union. Zamyatin replied that he was not now in a position to be of much help. In 1931, however, just a few months before his emigration from the USSR, Zamyatin produced a screenplay, rejected by the censorship, entitled Podezemelye Guntona or Hunton Pit. This is set in and around a colliery on the Tyne, a coalfield milieu unique in Zamyatin's output. Heslop's novel is similarly set in and around Hunton colliery in South Shields, the name presumably a combination of his birthplace, New Hunwick, near Bishop Auckland, and Harton colliery in South Shields, where he worked for some years. Zamyatin's screenplay, in fact, which is extant only in pencilled form, is a direct adaptation of Heslop's novel, with every character's name preserved. The plot hardly varies from Heslop's either, except for a few touches designed to heighten the 'class' elements of the action - not enough, as it turned out, much to Zamyatin's disappointment. Zamyatin excises a good deal of the background material of the novel, a procedure which makes sense in cinematic terms but places the personal rivalry of the two main characters in sharper prominence than the censor felt able to accept. Zamyatin's portrayal of the independence of English courts was also probably tactless, to say the least, in 1930.

Myers Literary Guide:	The North-East
YEVGENI ZAMYATIN (1884 - 1937) 'Often in the evening as I was returning from the yard in my little Renault, I would be met by a dark, blinded city, all lights extinguished. This meant that German Zeppelins were in the offing and their bombs would soon be crashing down. At night, sitting at home, I would listen to the explosions, some far off, some near at hand, as I checked through [icebreaker] drawings and worked on my novel about the English - Islanders.' So writes Yevgeni Zamyatin (1884-1937), one of the most influential and unsettling writers of the twentieth century, referring to his time in Newcastle during World War I. Zamyatin had been sent to England early in 1916 by the Imperial Russian government to oversee the construction of a number of icebreakers at Armstrong Whitworth in Low Walker and Swan Hunter in Wallsend. He also visited South Shields and Sunderland. These vessels included the Sviatogor, later renamed Krasin, which became the most famous rescue ship in the world in 1928 for its role in rescuing Nobile's Arctic airship expedition off Spitzbergen. This story was filmed as The Red Tent with Peter Finch and Sean Connery. Zamyatin's letters to his wife in 1916 are brief, censored postcards but they show him to be bored and lonely, immersed in his shipyard work and cut off from people by his poor command of the language. He was also comically preoccupied by the state of his innards. He mentions a pleasant park near Sanderson Road (Jesmond Dene) and a pleasant note occurs when he spends a balmy July night lying out in the front garden until midnight. The letters cease around August 1916, when his wife came to join him via the Norway ferry. Zamyatin was already a promising writer by 1916, and the culture-shock of arriving among the well-to-do of Jesmond, where he lived at 19 Sanderson Road (plaque erected 8 November 2002), stung him into producing two dazzling novellas Islanders and A Fisher of Men, which made savage fun of them in brilliant style. Martin Amis, in his 1984 Observer review calls the novellas 'remarkable in every way'. Zamyatin was exasperated by the way the Jesmondians always repressed spontaneity in favour of order: 'By Sunday, the stone doorsteps of the Jesmond houses had been scrubbed to a dazzling whiteness. The houses were of a certain age and smoke-begrimed, but the steps were gleaming rows of white, like the Sunday gentlemens' false teeth. The Sunday gentlemen were produced at one of the Jesmond factories and on Sunday mornings, thousands of them appeared on the streets with the Sunday edition of the St Enoch parish newspaper. Sporting identical canes and identical top-hats, the Sunday gentlemen strolled in dignified fashion along the street and greeted their doubles.' 'Lovely weather, isn't it?' 'Oh yes, much better than yesterday.' Zamyatin's notebooks also display a relentless hostility. For all his contempt for the hidebound Jesmondians, however, by a supreme irony, Zamyatin himself seemed to fall under the spell of Jesmond. After he returned to the artistic circles of the Russian capital, late in 1917, he became known as 'the Englishman'. He affected a reserved English manner; he preferred tweed suits, cultivated a small moustache and smoked a pipe. In Islanders the citizens of Jesmond are dominated by the repellent Dewley (a pun from Tristram Shandy) and happiness by timetable is his creed. Even Mrs Dewley's needs are catered for every third Saturday. A Fisher of Men is supposedly set in London, and features a Zeppelin raid on Hammersmith; the text, however, is stuffed with Newcastle allusions. The extensive boating-lake and wooded island, where respectable banker Mr Craggs, torch in hand, goes in search of hanky-panky after dark - and supplements his income with a little blackmail - is clearly Leazes Park lake in Newcastle. The preoccupations of the two Newcastle novellas all find reflection in Zamyatin's masterpiece WE, where they are magnified to nightmarish dimensions. As the first draft of WE dates to 1919, it must have been commenced shortly after Zamyatin's return to Russia (if not in Newcastle itself). The dreams of the repellent Rev. Dewley, vicar of St Enoch's (St George's, Jesmond), in Islanders have, in the thirtieth century, come true. Every hour in the One State is accounted for in the Table of Hourly Commandments. Privacy in the glass buildings is non-existent, and a green glass wall shelters the city from the free, dirty, natural and disordered world outside. The inhabitants, known only by numbers, are not unhappy, but it is a rational happiness, imposed from above, leaving no room for human variety and spontaneity. Life there is characterised by extreme regimentation and conformism in thought and deed, supervised by the Guardians and, ultimately, the Benefactor. It is clear that Zamyatin's Newcastle experience prompted him to imagine such a state, and there are many hidden references to the city and to working practices in the Tyne shipyards. Even the numbers of the main characters belong to the specification of Zamyatin's favourite icebreaker! WE became the first literary work to be banned by Glavlit, the censoring body of the new USSR. In fact, WE was not published in the USSR until 1988, when it came out there at the same time as Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, a piquant conjunction. In this country it has long been a Penguin Modern Classic. George Orwell read it in French and reviewed it in Tribune in 1946. He considered that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World must have been influenced by it, but it is Orwell's novel which seems to have by far the more striking parallels with Zamyatin's work. Thus Tyneside may be said to have instigate both the first great modern anti-utopia, and, as a consequence, one of the most influential books of the 20th century. A curious footnote to Zamyatin's English preoccupations has come to light. Harold Heslop presented him in 1930 with a copy (in Russian) of his novel Goaf which had been translated into Russian by Lidiya Vengerova in 1926 under the title Pod vlast'yu uglia. It had sold half a million copies (no royalties) and was to a large extent responsible for Heslop's invitation to the USSR in 1930. The English first edition of Goaf, incidentally, did not appear until 1934. In London, Vengerova, like Heslop, unaware of Zamyatin's precarious political position, had asked through Heslop that he assist in promoting the latter's work in the Soviet Union. Zamyatin replied that he was not now in a position to be of much help. In 1931, however, just a few months before his emigration from the USSR, Zamyatin produced a screenplay, rejected by the censorship, entitled Podezemelye Guntona or Hunton Pit. This is set in and around a colliery on the Tyne, a coalfield milieu unique in Zamyatin's output. Heslop's novel is similarly set in and around Hunton colliery in South Shields, the name presumably a combination of his birthplace, New Hunwick, near Bishop Auckland, and Harton colliery in South Shields, where he worked for some years. Zamyatin's screenplay, in fact, which is extant only in pencilled form, is a direct adaptation of Heslop's novel, with every character's name preserved. The plot hardly varies from Heslop's either, except for a few touches designed to heighten the 'class' elements of the action - not enough, as it turned out, much to Zamyatin's disappointment. Zamyatin excises a good deal of the background material of the novel, a procedure which makes sense in cinematic terms but places the personal rivalry of the two main characters in sharper prominence than the censor felt able to accept. Zamyatin's portrayal of the independence of English courts was also probably tactless, to say the least, in 1930.
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