Inspired by the sentencing to a nine year prison term of billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the sponsor of “Russia’s Booker prize,” Victor Sonkin considers whether the imprisonment will have any effect on Russian literature. In an article for The Moscow Times, he calls the occasion “a good time to look back at the role of government repression in Russian literature,” because, in Russia, “it seems to have become almost a necessary stage in the development of literary talent.” He considers how the state has treated writers from Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov andFyodor Dostoevsky to Vladimir Nabokov, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky and on. Observing that Khodorkovsky wrote a newspaper column during his trial that won praise for its prose, Sonkin observes, “Perhaps we are witnessing the first stages of a successful literary career.”