What drawer?

What is "writing for the drawer", anyway? Google this phrase surrounding it with quotes, to learn more, in the meantime, I'll tell you where I picked it up.

I picked it up from a newspaper review of a collection of Susan Sontag's writings. It was a quote from something she had written. Where did she pick it up? Google suggests an answer. Susan Sontag was known for her interest in writers behind the Iron Curtain, writers who had to put up with strict government censorship, and often "wrote for the drawer", unable to publish their works. (She was also known for her relentless, extreme Leftism, which leaves us with a question about Sontag's state of mind and her reasoning for reconciling her support for oppressed artists with a belief in the ideology that spawned that oppression.)

You will see that Google hits refer to many such Eastern European writers, who for a time wrote for the drawer.

Needless to say, this blog misuses the phrase in a way, as blogger.com is a public, uncensored (?) forum. On the other hand though, I think that, unless one's an exhibitionist or a megalomaniac, vanity press projects are similar to writing for the drawer, since no editor or publisher is given a chance to scrutinize them and decide whether our rants and rages deserve to be seen by the public at large.

Censored and ostracized writers in totalitarian states who wrote for the drawer, wrote for that drawer, but also for a few trusted friends and acquaintances, and this is what we are doing here now.