Yefim Davidovich Zozulya (1891–1941) was a Soviet-era writer and editor noted for his satirical stories about the Soviet state. Born in Moscow, Zozulya spent part of his childhood in the manufacturing town of Łódź in Poland before going to school in Odessa, now part of the country of Ukraine. Both Łódź and Odessa were part of the Russian Empire when Zozulya lived there.
In 1914 Zozulya started writing short stories and moved to St. Petersburg (Petrograd) to pursue a full-time literary career as an author and editor, his genre of choice being satire. His first collection, The Doom of Principal City, was published in 1918. A resident of Moscow from 1919 till his final years, Zozulya took active part in the literary life of the era, encouraging younger authors and founding an influential literary magazine among other things.
His contemporaries describe him as writing “easily and quickly.” He considered literature a kind of fanciful sermon and preferred forms like the short stories, which he described as “shorter than a sparrow’s beak.” His work is rich with vivid worldly morals as well as symbolical and philosophical-satirical fables/tales, reminiscent of the contes philosophiques, which represented pressing social issues through allegorical images and situations. Later in his career Zozulya shifted to realism but the background of his stories still tended to be largely conventional, with few specific details about time and place. It may go without saying that Soviet realism-oriented critics did not approve of this approach and more than once Zozulya was jailed for engaging in revolutionary activities.
In the 1930s Zozulya tried his hand at larger forms, creating perhaps his most remarkable work, the novel The Workshop of Men (like the biblical “Fisher of Men”), which was published only partially and remained unfinished. As the Great Patriotic War broke out in 1941, he joined the editorial staff of a war newspaper after serving two months in the artillery troops but died from a severe illness at a military hospital on November 3. Despite his prominent position in the literary landscape of the prewar era, Zozulya’s name is virtually unknown among present-day readers; most of his work was never republished.
Zozulya wrote several stories with a science-fictional quality. In “Story of Ak and Humanity,” citizens vote to bestow total authority on their government, essentially making it totalitarian, and the government reciprocates with a demand that all citizens prove their right to exist, indicating that failure to comply will result in “departure from life” within twenty-four hours. His tale “Moscow of the Future” featured a community of fifty thousand writers, all in their twenties, with no children, with the implication that the children have been taken away to healthier, less subversive zones.
“The Doom of Principal City” may be one of the earliest depictions of dystopia in Russian (and perhaps world) history and represents his debut within these pages in the English language. The story also seems to contain an awareness of Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, an experimental, fragmented novel, much lauded by Vladimir Nabokov, that tells the story of a man ordered to set off a time bomb in the titular city in the run-up to the 1905 revolution. In “Doom…,” the surreal elements of the satire make the story timeless—well positioned to predict the absurdities and counterlogic of Soviet life to come.