Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/7

first short story. The short story was published in the old Obrazovanye.

“Well, what else do you want? That meant that I was going to write short stories and was going to publish them. Therefore for the following three years I wrote about nothing but ice cutters, steam engines, refillers, and ‘The Theoretical Exploration of the Works of Floating Steam Shovels.’ I couldn’t help myself. I was attached to the chair of Ship Architecture and busied myself with teaching in the shipbuilding faculty, where I teach until now.

“If I mean anything in Russian literature, I owe this completely to the Petrograd Secret Service. In 1911 this service exiled me from Petrograd and I was forced to spend two years in a non-populated place in Lachta. There, in the midst of the white winter silence and the green summer silence, I wrote my ‘Provincial.’ After that the late Ismaylov expressed in print his belief that I wore very high boots and was a long-haired provincial type, carrying a heavy stick, and he was later very much surprised that I ‘didn’t look a bit like that.’ Incidentally, ‘not a bit like that’ I became in England where, during the war, I spent about two years, building ships and visiting the ruins of ancient castles. I listened to the banging of the German Zeppelin bombs and wrote a short novel ‘The Islanders.’

“I regret immensely that I did not witness the Russian Revolution in February and know only the October Revolution, because it was in October, a life preserver around my body and all the lights out, passing German submarines, that I returned to Petrograd. Because of this I felt like one who never having been in love gets up one morning and finds himself married about ten years.

“Now I write little, perhaps because my requirements toward myself become greater. Three new volumes are in the hands of the publisher and begin to be published only now. The fourth will be my novel We, the funniest