This was a fascinating read, I hadn't heard about his thing with Pasternak or how they thought that the Soviets 'leaked' his novel; nowadays it seems sort of odd to see exporting culture as something furtive. Did regimes used to try to prevent their nation's literature from spreading, or am I misunderstanding something?

"We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of ages, the history of gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read, but at the miracle of it's being readable."

- Pale Fire