Escape and Death
In 1931, Zamyatin appealed directly to Joseph Stalin, requesting permission to leave the Soviet Union. In his letter, Zamyatin wrote, "True literature can only exist when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics". With the encouragement of Maxim Gorky, Stalin decided to grant Zamyatin's request.
Zamyatin settled with his wife in Paris, where he collaborated with French film director Jean Renoir. Renoir's 1936 adaptation of Gorky's The Lower Depths was co-written by Zamyatin.
Yevgeny Zamyatin died in poverty of a heart attack in 1937. Only a small group of friends were present for his burial. However, one of the mourners was his Russian language publisher Marc Slonim, who had befriended the Zamyatins. Zamyatin's grave lies in Thiais, France, at a secular cemetery on Rue de Stalingrad.
Read more about this topic: Yevgeny Zamyatin
Famous quotes containing the words escape and/or death:
“We perceive no charms that are not sharpened, puffed out, and inflated by artifice. Those which glide along naturally and simply easily escape a sight so gross as ours.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“He should be as vigorous as a sugar maple, with sap enough to maintain his own verdure,... and not like a vine, which being cut in the spring bears no fruit, but bleeds to death in the endeavor to heal its wounds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)