Just not the kind of crap that we print

“the one truly inspired character in Angels is not a dissident hero, à la Druzhnikov, but a cynical and corpulent editor named Yakov Rappoport. Drained of all his ideals by years in a labor camp followed by years of ghostwriting speeches and articles, Rappoport is a genuine late-Soviet type. He does not think truth can be mined and extracted and presented whole and immutable to the world. ‘I’ll be honest with you,’ he says to a man who’s brought a manuscript to the newspaper. ‘Everything we print in this newspaper is crap. What you’ve written is also crap. But it isn’t the kind of crap that we print.’”

     Keith Gessen, reviewing Yuri Druzhnikov’s Angels on the head of a pin, New York review of books 51, no. 20 (16 December 2004): 65.