Author's Corner
Z

Nikolai Zablotsky (1903-1958) - He was a poet, arrested in the Stalinist purges of the late 1930's. He surivived eight years of imprisonment and was rehabilitated.*

Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937) - A Prose writer, hostile to the Soviet regime; his stories warned of coercion and uniformity in a Communist society. He was silenced after the late 1920's, permitted to emigrate in 1932 and died in Paris.* He is the author of the initial dystopia, WE, which George Orwell cited as his inspiration to write 1984. WE is a fantastic futuristic novel, set in the 26th century. The nation of OneState rules supreme. Zamyatin wrote it in the early twenties, I think, and it was published in his own country, in Russian, only in the 1980's. Howeverm, it's easy to find these days in bookstores, and it extremely interesting to read. The first in a long line of dystopic novels, such as 1984, Brave New World, The Handmaid's Tale, and others.

Mikhail Zoshchenko (1893-1946) - Author of outspoken satirical short stories. Denounced with Anna Akhmatova in 1946 during crackdown on arts.*    Picture.

* (This information was found in a publisher's note,following Solzhenitsyn's "Letter to the Congress of Soviet Writers", nestled in a copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Bantam Books.)

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