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(This is a test effort. The text is copyrighted, I took it from Biography.com. This
will not be the final version of the text I use.)
Writer, born in Lebedyan, Russia. In 1914 he wrote a novella, At the
World's End, satirizing the life of army officers, and was tried but acquitted of
"maligning the officer corps'. He lived in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1916--17, where he wrote
two satires on the English, Islanders and A Fisher of Men, both set in Newcastle. Although
supportive of the 1917 revolution, he was also an outspoken critic, and he was among the
first writers to be hounded by the party apparatchiks. In 1920 he wrote My (We), which was
circulated in manuscript (and never published in the USSR), a fantasy set in the 26th-c AD;
this prophesied Stalinism and the totalitarian state, and led to the banning of his works.
His best stories are contained in The Dragon, first published in English in 1966. With
Gorky's help he was allowed to leave Russia in 1931, and he settled for exile in Paris.
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*[T]he speed of the tongue
should always be some seconds less than the speed of thought.
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- D-503, the hero in Yevgeny Zamyatin's
We, 1920-1921
Second Entry
Mirra Ginsburg, trans., 1972
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*Is it not clear, however,
that bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator of the fraction called
happiness?
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- D-503, the hero in Yevgeny Zamyatin's
We, 1920-1921
Fifth Entry
Mirra Ginsburg, trans., 1972
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*Let my notes, like the
most sensitive seismograph, record the curve of even the most insignificant
vibrations of my brain.
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- D-503, the hero in Yevgeny Zamyatin's
We, 1920-1921
Fifth Entry
Mirra Ginsburg, trans., 1972
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*Every true poet is
inevitably a Columbus.
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- D-503, the hero in Yevgeny Zamyatin's
We, 1920-1921
Twelfth Entry
Mirra Ginsburg, trans., 1972
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*From my own experience I
know that the cruelest thing is to make a person doubt his own reality, his
three-dimensional---not and other---reality.
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- D-503, the hero in Yevgeny Zamyatin's
We, 1920-1921
Twenty-First Entry
Mirra Ginsburg, trans., 1972
(cf. HAPPINESS : Ibsen)
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*[H]omo sapiens is
human in the full sense of the word only when his grammar is entirely free of
question marks, when it has nothing but exclamation points, periods, and
commas.
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- D-503, the hero in Yevgeny Zamyatin's
We, 1920-1921
Twenty-First Entry
Mirra Ginsburg, trans., 1972
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*It is said there are
flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be
some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years Perhaps we never
knew about them simply because this "once in a thousand years" has come only
today?
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- D-503, the hero in Yevgeny Zamyatin's
We, 1920-1921
Twenty-Third Entry
Mirra Ginsburg, trans., 1972
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*I am like a machine set
at excessive speed: the bearings are overheated; another minute, and molten
metal will begin to drip, and everything will turn to naught. Quick---cold
water, logic. I pour it by the pailful, but logic hisses on the red-hot
bearings and dissipates into the air in whiffs of white, elusive steam.
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- D-503, the hero in Yevgeny Zamyatin's
We, 1920-1921
Twenty-Fourth Entry
Mirra Ginsburg, trans., 1972
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*A human being is like a
novel: until the last page you don't know how it will end. Or it wouldn't
be word reading. . . .
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- I-330, a hero in Yevgeny Zamyatin's
We, 1920-1921
Twenty-Eighth Entry
Mirra Ginsburg, trans., 1972
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*Children are the only
bold philosophers.
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- D-503, the hero in Yevgeny Zamyatin's
We, 1920-1921
Thirtieth Entry
Mirra Ginsburg, trans., 1972
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*Harmful literature is
more useful than useful literature, for it is antientropic, it is a means
of combating calcification. . . . It is utopian, absurd. . . . It is right
150 years later.
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-Yevgeny Zamyatin
A Soviet Heretic: Esssays by Yegeny Zamyatin, 1972
"On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters"
Mirra Ginsburg, trans., 1972
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