Definition
To write a work for posterity or for friends that one cannot publish except as samizdat.
Origins
Calque of Czech psát do šuplíku.
In Context
- "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."