Laudator Temporis Acti

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Row, n.d.), pp. 485-486 (Part III, Chapter 18, "The Muses in Gulag," tr. Thomas P. Whitney):

Take Aristid Ivanovich Dovatur—a real eccentric for you. A native of St. Petersburg, of French and Rumanian extraction, a classical philologist, for all the past and future a bachelor and a solitary. He was torn away from Herodotus and Caesar, like a cat from meat, and imprisoned in a camp. His heart was still full of unexpounded texts. And in camp he acted as if he were in a dream. He would have been finished off in the first week, but the doctors provided him with protection and set him up in the enviable position of medical statistician; and in addition, not without benefit to the freshly recruited camp medical assistants, Dovatur was instructed to give lectures twice a month! This was in camp—and they were in Latin! Aristid Ivanovich stood at a small blackboard—and glowed, just as in his best university years! He wrote down strange columns of conjugations which had never ever loomed before the eyes of the natives, and at the sound of the crumbling chalk his heart beat voluptuously. His life was so quiet and so well set up! But disaster crashed on his head too: the camp chief considered him a rarity—an honest person! And he named him . . . manager of the bakery—the most lucrative of all camp positions! The man in charge of bread was in charge of men's lives! The road to this position was paved with the bodies and the souls of camp inmates—but few got there. And then and there this position fell from the heavens—to Dovatur, who was crushed by it. For one week he went about like a person condemned to death, even before taking over the bakery. He begged the camp chief to have mercy on him and to allow him to live, to keep his Latin conjugations and an unconfined spirit. And pardon came: a routine crook was named manager of the bakery.

Hat tip: Joel Eidsath.