A tale of the intelligentsia

via Languagehat, a glorious story: Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian author, spent the two worst years of the Terror, 1938-40, when Akhmatova was queing outside the prisons in Leningrad, working on a study of the German novel. It was accepted for publication, and then, in the war, the publishing house was bombed. Bad news, in a time of paper shortage — a paper shortage so acute that there was not even any to make cigarettes with, so by the time the war ended, he had torn up almost all of his manuscript, starting from the end, to roll cigarettes with the ruins.