First Sentence

"EVEN BY the idiosyncratic standards of Russian literature, the literary debut proper of Victor Erofeyev (the author's preferred transliteration) was one of the more striking confirmations of the unofficial but popular Soviet self-definition that "we were born to turn Kafka into real life," exemplifying as it did the various phenomena of samizdat, tamizdat, censorship, repression, tragedy and farce that in some combination or other inform the relationship between state power, writer and reader in Russia."