“Several years after hearing of its existence, I have at last got my hands on a copy of Zamyatin 's We, which is one of the literary curiosities of this book-burning age.” (“Freedom and Happiness (Review of ‘We’ by Yevgeny Zamyatin)”). This is the first sentence of George Orwell’s article about Zamyatin’s dystopian novel, WE. This sentence is enough to conclude that Zamyatin had a great influence on Orwell to write his masterpiece, 1984. It is pointless to see and know the tragedy of Soviet Russian literature in the absolute existence of great numbers of literary hacks __since even democratic societies are heavily oppressed by inferior writers. The real tragedy of post-revolutionary Russian literature lies in what has happened to a small number of exceptional authors. Through unofficial and official pressures, these few talented men were forced into silence, into varying degrees of conformity, or into exile. The names of most of them are hardly known to the world, or even to their countrymen. One of these incognito and literary men was Eugene Ivanovich Zamiatin, who died in France as a voluntary exile in 1937. Zamiatin was born in 1884 in the Central Russian town of Lebedian and developed himself as an interested Russian in social and political problems__ his interesting …show more content…
Orwell 's novel is consistently acclaimed as one of the finest of the last 100 years – two years ago Guardian readers voted it as the 20th century 's "definitive" book –, and it remains a consistent bestseller. Orwell reviewed We for Tribune in 1946, three years before he published 1984. Indeed, he analyzed this novel; for instance he acclaimed, “It is easy to see why the book was refused publication.” (“Freedom and Happiness (Review of ‘We’ by Yevgeny Zamyatin)”), and he brought a conversation between D-503 and I-330 from the novel, WE, to support his