Sandro of Chegem and Soviet Censorship

This essay analyses how the complex mechanism of censorship was organized in the Brezhnev era, and how it worked, more specifically, with regard to Iskander's masterpiece, Sandro of chegem. Emphasis is placed not only on the repressive modes of censorship, but also on its "productive" side, in showing how a censor's knowledge of an author's writing process can allow the censor to re-write a text, giving it new and different meanings and sense.