Yefim Zozulya

Born in Moscow, Yefim Zozulya was a Soviet-era writer who spent part of his childhood in Poland before schooling in Odessa, now part of Ukraine. Yefim Zozulya may have been the greatest fabulist of his generation, and one of the most interesting writers of dark, speculative, and macabre short fiction in 1920s Russia. He was both prolific and successful, his works published in popular literary magazines. His short story "The Tale of Ak and Humanity" directly inspired Zamyatin's We and may be the foundational work of the anti-utopian genre. And yet, save for a loyal but relatively minor cult following, most people today have never heard of him as his works were supressed by the state. Zozulya worked as a magazine editor throughout the 1920s and helped nurture a generation of influential writers and poets in Russia. He wrote several novels and many short stories, but it became increasingly more difficult for him to be published as the Soviet censorship machine grew more pervasive with each year. His career had stalled, and during the 1930s he could only get an occasional short story published in magazines. When Nazi Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Zozulya volunteered to fight for his motherland. He was mortally wounded and died two months later, just a few weeks shy of his fiftieth birthday.