Yevgeny Zamyatin

A trained naval engineer who helped build icebreakers in England during the First World War, Zamyatin had already been arrested twice under the Tsarist police for revolutionary activity before 1917, and was arrested again under the Bolsheviks he'd once supported, once his early enthusiasm curdled into open dissent. We, drafted in 1920, was banned outright at home and published only abroad, in Czech and English translation, provoking a campaign against him in the Soviet press.

Hounded out of the Writers' Union, he wrote directly to Stalin requesting permission to leave the country, a request improbably granted in 1931, reportedly after Gorky interceded on his behalf. He spent his remaining years in Paris, mostly cut off from the Russian readership he'd written for, and died there in poverty in 1937 without ever seeing We published in his own language.