"I think the first discovery I made for myself which I didn't necessarily share with my family or my friends, but came…"

"Alexander Solzhenitsyn"

"I calculated once that the acknowledged best in the way of Russian fiction and poetry which had been produced since t…"

"Russia has always been a curiously unpleasant country despite her great literature."

"[I]t redounds to the honour of Russian literature that the leading spirits of that literature were the most efficient…"

"Only in Russia [under the Soviet Union] poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poe…"

"But the history of totalitarian societies, or of groups of people who have adopted the totalitarian outlook, suggests…"

"Russia is old; her literature is new. Russian history goes back to the ninth century; Russian literature, so far as i…"

"But I hope you know I go on about these things not simply to extol the virtues of my own country but to speak to the …"

"From mid-1988, the growing weakness of the Soviet state, and the division and confusion of the government’s response …"