Chapter 3 Summary

In the post-Stalin era, the Soviet state is compared to a dying old man. Without Stalin, the State barely manages to survive, yet somehow avoids death. The effects of the Stalin years are illustrated through the lives of Russian citizens, this time through its writers and poets. The well-known ones like Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and Akhmatova, and the lesser-known ones, like Venedikt "Benny" Yerofeyev. Now in his seventies, Benny was a writer once, but now he is just one of the many survivors, who found comfort in a bottle. In her earlier years, Lydia Korneievna Chukovskaya was a writer. While her husband was in a prison camp, she wrote a novel about the purges. She was courageous, a true rebel against the government. However, mostly, Lydia was a symbol of hope. This type of "anti-Soviet" behavior ended her writing career. Now in her...