In often moving passages that frequently blend prose with poetry, he embraces his loneliness: ''I shall never find happiness: of course not. (Other characters, mostly gay men, are refered to only by first names, or by initials.) For Kharitonov's narrator, self-confidence and indifference are the only things that protect him from the humiliation and indignity he faces as a Soviet citizen with a suspect sexual life.
Kharitonov's narrator, a writer, remains unnamed in these stories, and we learn little about the particulars of his existence - facts that reinforce the sense of a man leading a hidden life. ''Under House Arrest,'' a collection of autobiographical fiction and poetry about gay life amid the Kafkaesque Soviet bureaucracy, is his first book to be released in English. When the openly homosexual writer and Soviet dissident Yevgeny Kharitonov died in Moscow in 1981 at the age of 40, his work had been circulated in samizdat but never officially published.
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