Literature and the Field of Dissidence

IN HIS HIGHLY READABLE memoirs,¹ dissident Andrei Amalrik described the room he and his wife Gusel shared in a communal apartment in Moscow in the late 1960s. Amalrik had inherited a huge piano from his aunt, which amounted to a sort of white elephant for the impecunious pair. Neither he nor Gusel could play the massive instrument, which dominated the room and often confounded visitors. Amalrik wrote: Some people—especially foreigners—used to laugh at us, because while we didn’t even have a table to eat at, half the room was occupied by a useless grand piano. But its very