Nevertheless, the Oblit not only banned the article, but even forbade the publisher to mention my name as editor of the translation. Needless to say, there was nothing of a scandalous nature that I said or could have said in this article. I had edited Sheridan’s comedy The School for Scandal and written an article about his life and work for the Academy Publishing House. Last March the Leningrad Oblit took steps to eliminate any remaining doubts of this. In order to seek it out, they have even gone to the length of in vesting me with prophetic gifts: thus, in one of my tales (“God), published in the journal Letopis in 1916, one critic has managed to find… “a travesty of the revolution in connection with the transition to the NEP” in the story “The Healing of the Novice Erasmus,” written in 1920, another critic (Mashbits-Verov) has discerned “a parable about leaders who had grown wise after the NEP.” Regardless of the content of the given work, the very fact of my signature has become a sufficient reason for declaring the work criminal. In each of my published works, these critics have inevitably discovered some diabolical intent. Spitting at the devil is regarded as a good deed, and everyone spat to the best of his ability.

Just as the Christians had created the devil as a convenient personification of all evil, so the critics have transformed me into the devil of Soviet literature. This campaign has continued, on different pretexts, to this day, and it has finally resulted in a situation that I would de scribe as a sort of fetishism. 1, 1920) in a form that many people found to be sharp and offensive, and this served as a signal at the time for the launching of a newspaper and magazine campaign against me. I raised this problem in one of my articles (published in the journal Dom Iskusstv, No. Specifically, I have never concealed my attitude toward literary servility, fawning, and chameleon changes of color: I have felt and I still feel that this is equally de grading both to the writer and to the revolution. I know that I have a highly inconvenient habit of speaking what I consider to be the truth rather than saying what may be expedient at the moment. I know that among the works I wrote during the first three or four years after the revolution there were some that might provide a pretext for attacks. I have no intention of presenting myself as a picture of injured innocence. Yet the situation that has come about is such that I cannot continue my work, because no creative activity is possible in an atmosphere of systematic persecution that increases in intensity from year to year. To me as a writer, being deprived of the opportunity to write is nothing less than a death sentence. The author of the present letter, condemned to the highest penalty, appeals to you with the request for the substitution of this penalty by another.

Yevgeni zamyatin