Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?' "Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.
One of the major principles is that Soviet literature must be inseverably linked with the policy of the Communist party
Under Stalin, artists weren't dissidents; all they hoped was to survive and write.
I love 'The Master And Margarita' by Mikhail Bulgakov, which is about repression in Soviet Russia in the 1930s.
Bobby Fischer has an enormous knowledge of chess and his familiarity with the chess literature of the USSR is immense.
Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.
During the last years of Mayakovski's life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.
