Yevgeny Zamyatin

      It was the little known Bolshevik writer Yevgeny Zamyatin who for all practical purposes invented the literary genre called distopia with the novel We published in 1920. Zamyatin was a dedicated communist prior to the Russian revolution. He quickly became disillusioned after the Bolsheviks took power and wrote the novel We about a society where there is no privacy and all facets of people's lives are controlled by the government 24 hours a day, total conformity is required and demanded from everyone, even sex is rationed by coupons. This book sparked severe criticism from the Soviet Government making Zamyatin an outcast and provoked his emigration to Paris where he died under mildly suspicious circumstances in 1937.
       Although there has never been a truly satisfactory English translation of We both George Orwell (1984) and Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) read We before they wrote their distopian novels.
       The common themes of Distopian literature and films is complete conformity and government attempts to wipe out imagination and independent thought. It is impossible not to view these novels in relation to our own time which is inching, sometimes slowly and sometimes more rapidly, but seemingly inexorably towards this iron-fisted conformity which justifies itself by the very real material and security benefits it bestows upon those who accede to it and is an anathema to the happy few, and we are becoming fewer every day, who understand the joys and necessity of independent thought and a certain amount of non-conformity.

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Yevgeny Zamyatin
distopia