Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (1884–1937), who was born in Lebedyan, Tamov district, Russia on February 1, is best known for having written We (1920), the archetypal anti-utopian novel. The son of a Russian Orthodox priest and a mother who had received a liberal education, he was a constant critic, siding with the Bolsheviks before the revolution and chiding the new government after their victory.

Zamyatin's critical posture was not limited to Russia. Although he was a naval architect by training, when he was in Great Britain (1916–1917) to supervise the building of Russian icebreakers, he published The Islanders, a satire of the English. Over the course of his career Zamyatin wrote about forty books, a few of which were quite influential in their time, but he is remembered primarily for one he could not publish. When the Soviets began to censor literature in 1922, the first manuscript banned was We...