Pushkin, of all people, was not at all opposed to the censorship of his time. 'Let us have a strict censorship by all means, but not a senseless one,' he writes to a friend, as if strictness (strogost) were a cosy and reassuring fact of Russian life, as it might be in England village cricket or well-rolled umbrellas. How else explain the perverse logic of the business, on the face of it so unnecessary and counterproductive, even by Marxist standards?

LRB 7 August 1986 | PDF Download