Every month a new chapter from the book by historian Ilya Venyavkin “The Master’s Inkwell: A Soviet Writer Inside the Great Terror” was published on Arzamas. The book is dedicated to Alexander Afinogenov, the most popular Soviet playwright of the 1930s. It was possible to observe the process of creating historical non-fiction almost in real time.

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Afinogenov’s fate was so closely intertwined with the unstable artistic conjuncture of his time that through the biography of the playwright you can see the tragedy of the world in which he worked and lived. Moreover, he was one of the few who dared to keep diaries at that time. They became the basis for the work of historian Ilya Venyavkin. This book is about how terror invades private life, making every intimate conversation in the kitchen a political gesture. It is about how terror permeates the consciousness of the hero, who is trying to find, if not an explanation, then at least a description of the hell that is happening. About what motivates a person when he writes down a fictitious conversation with an investigator in his diary, trying either to get ahead of events, or to avoid them through the “anti-evil eye,” turning the nightmare into words. About the attempt of the word to overcome the inability to survive.