A Great Disaster Had Befallen Russia: Men

If You Ever Get Twenty-five Years For Nothing, If You Find Yourself Wearing Four Number Patches On Your Clothes, Holding Your Hands Permanently Behind Your Back, Submitting To Searches Morning And Evening, Working Until You Are Utterly Exhausted, Dragged Into The Cooler Whenever Someone Denounces You, Trodden Deeper And Deeper Into The Ground-from The Hole You're In, The Fine Words Of The Great Humanists Will Sound Like The Chatter Of The Well-fed And Free.

A Decline In Courage May Be The Most Striking Feature That An Outside Observer Notices In The West Today.

A Great Number Of Publications And Movies On The History Of The 20th Century - Albeit Of Uneven Quality - Are Evidence Of A Growing Demand. Quite Recently, The State-owned Tv Channel 'russia' Aired A Series Based On Varlam Shalamov's Works, Showing The Terrible, Cruel Truth About Stalin's Camps. It Was Not Watered Down.

It Is A Brave Man Who Is The First To Sit Down During A Standing Ovation.

Literature Cannot Develop Between The Categories "permitted"—"not Permitted"—"this You Can And That You Can't." Literature That Is Not The Air Of Its Contemporary Society, That Dares Not Warn In Time Against Threatening Moral And Social Dangers, Such Literature Does Not Deserve The Name Of Literature; It Is Only A Facade. Such Literature Loses The Confidence Of Its Own People, And Its Published Works Are Used As Waste Paper Instead Of Being Read. -letter To The Fourth National Congress Of Soviet Writers