Dictionary

write for the drawer en · VERB

Etymology

Calque of Czech psát do šuplíku.

Meanings

1. (idiomatic) To write a work for posterity or for friends that one cannot publish except as samizdat.
   • 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. 2013, Martin Cruz Smith, Tatiana: An Arkady Renko Novel, page 19:
   • Since I first began to write I had to write for the drawer. 2016, Our Mythical Childhood, page 351:
   • 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. 2015, Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter, →ISBN, pages 341–342:

Forms