'The publication in 1962 of Solzhenitsyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich released a flood of popular memory. Overnight Solzhenitsyn became, as it were, honorary archivist for a nation which had lacked its own memory.
This was the "return of the repressed" not in the individual psyche, but in the cultural community. And as Freud has taught us, the repressed always returns with tremendous emotional force.'
The 41st BBC Reith Lectures: The rediscovery of Politics, Authority, Culture and Community on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)