Yevgeni Zamyatin died of a hear attack in Paris on 10th March, 1937. We , although never published in the Soviet Union, deeply influenced other novels about the future such as Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell . Today is doomed to die - because yesterday died, and because tomorrow will be born. Such is the wise and cruel law. He who has found his ideal today is, like Lot's wife, already turned to a pillar of salt, has already sunk into the earth and does not move ahead.
Today negates yesterday, but tomorrow is a negation of negation.
Thesis yesterday, antithesis today, and synthesis tomorrow. In America there is a society for the suppression of vice which once decided, in order to prevent temptation, that all the naked statues in a New York museum must be dressed in little skirts like those of ballet dancers. But when a writer dresses his novel in such a skirt, it is no longer laughable. And when this is done not by one, but by dozens of writers, it becomes a menace. These skirts cannot be removed, and future generations will have to learn about our epoch from tinseled, straw-filled dummies.