There's a famous line from Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, spoken to a writer who has tried to burn his work (just as Bulgakov did with an earlier version of his novel) only to find it reappear: "Manuscripts don't burn."
For all the immense crack-downs on writers and their work during the Stalinist era, I'm fascinated by any documents that still managed to live on past the terror. Some of Osip Mandelstam's work of course exists today, and his poems are still read and well-regarded (by students of Russian literature in America at the very least). The victims of the era, like Bulgakov, and those locked away to vanish in prisons, like the absurdist writer Daniil Kharms, still survive through works that are still printed in Russia and regarded as classics. Akhmatova even managed to outlive Stalin.
This memoir really portrays the extent of Stalinist oppression, and with all the accounts of the ways that artist are not only stamped out but disappeared, I find some consolation in the resilience of literature (even though plenty more works probably did vanish). Still whenever we read one of these surviving works, we are doing so against the best efforts of the Stalinist system.
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