In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote: “If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath [and here he goes on to compile a long and terrible list of other Stalinist tortures that I’ll spare you from], not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off
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