write for the drawer

English

Etymology

Calque of Czech psát do šuplíku.

Verb

write for the drawer (third-person singular simple present writes for the drawer, present participle writing for the drawer, simple past wrote for the drawer, past participle written for the drawer)

1. To write a work for posterity and/or friends that one cannot publish except as samizdat.
   • 2013, Martin Cruz Smith, Tatiana: An Arkady Renko Novel, page 19:

     It was a middle-aged intellectual crowd. Publishers who abandoned their writers, writers who wrote for the drawer, artists who had become wealthy by turning Social Realism into kitsch.

   • 2015, Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter, →ISBN, pages 341–342:

     It seemed suddenly miraculous that she was here, in America, holding in her hands a book that she had written for the drawer four years earlier in Moscow.

   • 2016, Our Mythical Childhood, page 351:

     Since I first began to write I had to write for the drawer.