"But then why have literature at all? After all, the writer is a teacher of the people; surely that's what we've always understood? And a greater writer–forgive me, perhaps I shouldn't say this, I'll lower my voice–a greater writer is, so to speak, a second government. That's why no regime anywhere has ever loved its great writers, only its minor ones."

-Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle (1968)