Socialist Realist fiction was too obviously occupied with schematic surface: A man is discharged from the Red Army a hero and returns to reorganize his hometown around a hyperprogressive cement factory (the novel Cement by Fyodor Gladkov). It was all exterior, a series of events or plot points demonstrating fate, synonymous in these books with political calling. By contrast, the corpora of censored or banned writers were usually more interested by the inner life—the mind, the one space from which no citizen can be exiled. Show a veteran working productively in a plant and you have created propaganda, but tell the thoughts of this man, tell us what he feels when he boozes at night and beats his children and wife, and you have an artwork—a dangerous artwork.