Warning from a disillusioned Old Bolshevik

True literature can only exist where it is created not by diligent and trustworthy officials, but by madmen, misfits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and sceptics. When a wrtiter must be sensibly and rigidly orthodox, when he must make himself useful today, when he cannot lash out at everyone, like Swift, or smile at everything, like Anatole France, there can be no bronze literature, there can only be a paper literature, a pulp literature read today and used for wrapping bars of soap tomorrow.

Yergeny Zamyatin I am Afraid (1921)