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Who was the Russian author, in 1920, of the dystopia “We”, which inspired Orwell? Giuliano da Empoli explains to us why it is at the heart of his novel.
By Francois-Guillaume Lorrain
© DR
Published on
“DEver since I discovered him, Zamyatin had become my obsession. It seemed to me that his work concentrated all the questions of the time that was ours. We did not only describe the Soviet Union, it told above all about the smooth world, without asperities, of the algorithms, the global matrix under construction. » Nearly 300,000 French people bought The Kremlin Magus, by Giuliano da Empoli (Gallimard), and no doubt they picked up the name, often quoted, of the Russian author Evgueni Zamyatin (1884-1937). It is a password for the meeting between its narrator and the protagonist, Baranov, the occult adviser to Tsar Putin, equally obsessed with this naval engineer.
READ ALSOWho is Giuliano da Empoli, winner of the French Academy’s Grand Prix for the novel with “Le Mage du K…
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