Volume 26, Number 5 · April 5, 1979
From the Pit
By Clive James
To Build a Castle—My Life as a Dissenter
by Vladimir Bukovsky, translated by Michael Scammell
Viking, 438 pp., $17.50
Alarm and Hope
by Andrei D. Sakharov, edited by Efrem Yankelevich, by Alfred Friendly Jr.
Vintage, 224 pp., $2.95 (paper)
Before the Revolution, there was Russian literature. Since the Revolution, except for an early and brief period when the good writers were as optimistic as the bad, there has been, for the most part, the literature of Russian dissidence. Its qualities and categories are hard to define, but lately the sheer output has become difficult to keep up with even for the expert, while the layman must simply resign himself to leaving the most of it unread—a harsh fact, when you consider that there is hardly any such thing as a dissident book which is not written at the risk of its author's neck.
Review, 2808 words
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