Mirra Ginsburg

Acknowledgments

We was first published in Russian in book form in 1952 by the Chekhov Publishing House in New York. I wish to express my gratitude to the National Board of Young Men’s Christian Associations, present owner of legal rights to books published by the Chekhov Publishing House, for permission to translate We into English.

Thanks are also due to the University of Chicago Press for permission to quote from A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, published in 1970.

Author Yevgeny Zamyatin was born in Russia in 1884. Arrested during the abortive 1905 revolution, he was exiled twice from St. Petersburg, then given amnesty in 1913, by which time he was turning to a literary career. We, composed in 1920 and 1921, was denied publication in Russia and, when read at a meeting of the Writers’ Union in 1923, elicited attacks from party-line critics and writers. Nevertheless, throughout the 1920s, Zamyatin, outspoken and courageous as always, published his essays, plays and tales. In 1929, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers launched an all-out attack against him. Denied the right to publish his work, he requested permission to leave Russia, which, surprisingly, Stalin granted in 1931. Zamyatin went to Paris, where he died in 1937.

Mirra Ginsburg is a distinguished translator of Russian and Yiddish works by such well-known authors as Mikhail Bulgakov, Isaac Babel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Editor and translator of three anthologies of Soviet science fiction, she has also edited and translated A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, and History of Soviet Literature by Vera Alexandrova.