In his autobiography The Oak and the Calf, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn recalls how he "wrote" in the concentration camps, where writing was forbidden, and how vulnerable his work was:
In the camp, this meant committing many thousands of lines to memory. To help me with this, I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit to prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentence, I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prosedialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages . But more and more of my time in the end as much as one week every month went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.
Then came exile, and right at the beginning of my exile, cancer . In December [1953] the doctors comrades in exile confirmed that I had at most three weeks left.
All that I had memorized in the camps ran the risk of extinction together with the head that held it. This was a dreadful moment in my life: to die on the threshold of freedom, to see all I had written, all that gave meaning to my life thus far, about to perish with me .
I hurriedly copied things out in tiny handwriting, rolled them, several pages at a time, into tight cylinders and squeezed these into a champagne bottle. I buried the bottle in my garden and set off for Tashkent to meet the new year and to die. [In fact, he was treated and recovered completely.]
