Russia, that half-barbarous country, whose leaders, be they czars or commissars, Rasputins or Putins, have always treated their own people as if they were a conquered nation, this same Russia, in the course of little more than a century brought forth the greatest body of literature the world has ever known. That is a large but, I believe, not risky generalization. Think only of the dazzling cavalcade of Russian writers: Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Goncharov, Leskov, Chekhov, and then, later, Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Vasily Grossman, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.