"Thirteen years ago in the month of May--and that May was remarkable in that the snow covered the flowers--I simultaneously finished my work for my diploma and my 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 ship-building 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 towards 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 and most earnest thing I have written. However, the most serious and most interesting novels I never wrote. They happened to me in my life." * * * Zamiatin continues to live in Russia and continues to live with Russia, but such is the sarcasm of Fate that the first Russian novel giving a real synthesis of the Russian revolution and its greater universal meaning, this novel written by Zamiatin, should remain unknown to the Russians in Russia. Gregory Zilboorg. _New York_, 1924. CONTENTS page Foreword Gregory Zilboorg v