The life and fate of Grossman’s manuscript hung in the balance after being arrested by the authorities.  He never knew if it would see the light of day, and he had to wait years for publication.  It is to this he refers in saying he’d been strangled in a dark corner.

‘They strangled me in a dark corner.’

Source: Vasily Grossman quoted in the introduction to Vasily Grossman, An Armenian Sketchbook, trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler (New York: New York Review Books, 2013), p. viii

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