Poverty, arbitrary law, physical and emotional abuse, fatalism, argumentativeness, alcoholic men prone to violence, and women and children at the mercy of volatile men: no one characteristic is unique to Russian culture, but in the aggregate recurrence as topics in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction over the past 150 years they create an enduring literary portrait, whether or not they accurately describe every Russian life. Whether under tsarist or communist thumbs, at any given time, most of the population is discontent with their lot and evaluate regimes more for what they prohibit than what they permit. Depending on the era, the government is either in the background or at the forefront of the works under review.