Vasily Grossman's Lost Epic

In the Soviet Union, every literary work was a political statement, whether the writer liked it or not. Soviet censorship allowed some room for negotiation, but outside the USSR, official and dissident literature were perceived as polar opposites. This stark distinction imbued Soviet-era literature with a gratifyingly Manichaean quality, and Western readers became enamored of the stories of books that had escaped to liberty while their authors remained at the mercy of the Soviet authorities. The more strenuous the Soviet efforts to suppress a work, the greater its frisson of the forbidden. Meanwhile, literature that had been published in the Soviet Union was most often ignored. This left Western readers with an imperfect understanding of the many authors who resorted to illicit publication only at desperate moments.