The problems, dangers, and even the possibility itself of what Voltaire in Candide termed “seeing into the hearts” of historical subjects have become the subject of much historical and literary inquiry in recent years. As scholars engage in dialogue with voices from other eras through the legacy of fiction, memoirs, diaries, and letters, one of the challenges that presents itself is how to decipher the relationship between an author as a free and autonomous producer of a text and his or her “entrapment” within a system where meaning has already been fixed. If literary works are derivative of cultural discourses, they also serve as the venues through which their authors refract and transform the experience of their particular cultural discourse. Thus the historical and cultural “entrapment” of the author within a particular system of signification does not necessarily exclude the possibility of creative self-expression through that same system.

In Soviet Russia during Stalin's time, the possibility of finding room for autonomous expression within an official literary life may seem especially problematic. Indeed, official Soviet literary life held little interest for western critics who preferred to turn their attentions to those writers on the margins of Soviet society who produced narratives of camp resistance, prison survival, and dissident subversion “for the drawer.” The decades-long interest in the latter group on the part of critics in the West is paralleled by a nearly complete silence about the former.