write for the drawer

Etymology

Definitions

1. 1

   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.
   • 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.
   • Since I first began to write I had to write for the drawer.

The neighborhood