Zamyatin, Bulgakov, and Platonov – writers of dystopian fiction – are included in the Russian canon of the twentieth century proposed by Igor Sukhikh in the volume of essays he published under the title Books of the Twentieth Century (Knigi XX veka, 2001). It is a small canon that comprises only seven more writers, among whom are Chekhov, Gorky, Nabokov, and Fadeyev, but not Ostrovsky, Gladkov, or Sholokhov. Of course, Sukhikh’s canon represents a subjective selection. Yet the difference from official Soviet literary history is too striking not to notice. The history of Soviet Russian literature published by the Soviet Academy of Sciences in three volumes in 1958-61 (Istoriya Russkoj Sovetskoj literatury) mentioned Platonov only once, as a war correspondent, while Bulgakov received three brief mentions, and only Zamyatin was treated slightly more elaborately though without any particular appreciation of his work.

Nowadays, Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937) is generally considered to have written one of the most impressive anti-utopian texts of the twentieth century. His novel We(My, 1921), of which an English translation appeared in New York in 1924, preceded both Huxley’s and Orwell’s dystopian narratives. Huxley claims not to have been acquainted with Zamyatin’s novel when he wrote Brave New World, but Orwell was aware of We and expressed his admiration for it in a review published prior to the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four (Hollis 1956: 199).

Zamyatin may not have known Souvestre’s mid-nineteenth-century dystopian novel Le Monde tel qu’il sera, but he was well acquainted with H. G. Wells’s early dystopian fiction of the 1890s, as appears from his long essay on Wells in the Russian journal Epokha (Zamyatin 1922, translated in Zamyatin 1970: 259-290). In several details he was probably also inspired by the Russian anti-utopian novel A Night in 2217 (Vecher v 2217, 1906) by Nikolai Fyodorov, which is situated in a city – built of stone, steel, and glass and covered by a half-transparent roof that hides the sky – where everybody earns according to their needs and family life has been abolished. Sexual services are rendered on an impersonal basis and children are brought up by the state.