His main work, though, was as a writer of satiric novels and essays. Initially a Bolshevik, he was a rebel and a heretic during the Tsarist regime as well as after the Russian Revolution. He was both exiled and jailed. In 1931, with the help of Maxim Gorky, he got permission from Stalin to leave Russia, and he lived for the remainder of his life in Paris. His writing was translated and made available all over the world, but not in Russia.
Freedom is restricted, for freedom and happiness are incompatible.
The daily activities of the inhabitants, including sex, are strictly programmed and monitored, if not by direct bugging, then by the issuance of chits. Irrational numbers and imaginary numbers are used to symbolize the tension between what can and what cannot exist when projected onto the human sphere. They have their imaginations removed by a newly invented machine that does brain washing. It is interesting that apart from the machines used to zap refractory personalities, Zamyatin is not much interested in dreaming up technological miracles of the future. Mathematical terms and allusions permeate the entire text.