So it is with the great Russian writers. Their cries for liberation, their appeals to the drowsy conscience of the West are strident and genuine. But they are not always meant to be heard or anwered in any straightforward guise. Solutions can come only from within, from an inwardness with singular ethnic and visionary dimensions. The Russian poet will hate his censor, he will despise the informers and police hooligans who hound his existence. But he stands toward them in a relationship of anguised necessity, be it that of rage or of compassion. The dangerous conceit that there is a magnetic bond between tormentor and victim is too gross to characterize the Russian spiritual-literary ambience. But it gets nearer than liberal innocence. And it helps explain why the worst fate that can befall a Russian writer is not detention or even eath but exile in the Western limbo of mere survival.

And, to make matters worse, the good burghers are about to stage another one of their tomfool carnivals.

Punctuating these homilies are the literal "voices from the chorus"

In the Soviet Union, Chukovskaya's writings circulate, where at all, by clandestine mimeographs.

pellucidly translated

The time is February 1949, and the zhdanovshchina--the purge of intellectuals by Stalin's culture hoodul, Andrei Zhdanov--is beginning.