commented: "Like Bulgakov and like Babel, Zamyatin gives us a glimpse of what post-revolutionary Russian literature might have become had independence, daring, and individuality not been stamped out so ruthlessly by the dictatorship. The Russian reader - and by the same token, the Russian writer - was deprived of the work of these rich and germinal writers, and the effects, alas, are sadly evident." But even as she wrote the words that have just been quoted, Ginzburg's understanding of Soviet society was incomplete. The writings of Yevgeny Zamyatin, like those of all other writers whose works were banned by the State, were already being circulated in secret. In what was termed samizdat, or "self-publishing", hand-typed paper copies of Zamyatin's novel and his short stories were copied in secret, read, and then passed from hand-to-hand. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union's vengeance, however, against Zamyatin for sending his novel We to the West for publication was remembered by Soviet poets and writers long after the writer's death. This is why it was 1957 before another Soviet writer took the risk of doing so again. In that year, when he handed the manuscript to his novel Doctor Zhivago over to an emissary from billionaire Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Boris Pasternak said: "You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad." Even though Pasternak was accordingly subjected to State-organized character assassination, ostracism, and blacklisting almost identical to what had been experienced by Zamyatin, Pasternak's decision to publish Doctor Zhivago in the West also helped him to win the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature. Not surprisingly, many other Soviet dissidents after Pasternak would also go on to both use and expand upon the ideas and tactics pioneered by the author of We. For example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was Christianizing Zamyatin's attacks against State-enforced conformity when he wrote, in his 1973 Letter to Soviet Leaders: "Our present system is unique in world history, because over and above its physical and economic constraints, it demands of us total surrender of our souls, continuous and willing participation in the general, conscious lie. To this putrefaction of the soul, this spiritual enslavement, human beings who wish to be human cannot submit. When Caesar, having exacted what is Caesar's, demands still more insistently that we render unto him what is God's - that is a sacrifice we dare not make." In the same year, Solzhenitsyn responded to