refusenik

In 1974, a handful of brave Soviet Jews haunted foreign embassies in Moscow hoping for exit visas. Refuseniks, they were called; the Brezhnev Government wouldn't let them out.

Richard Ellmann once referred to Samuel Beckett as “Nayman from Noland”—the author as national refusenik. Beckett famously refused to allow a national representative from either Ireland or France to pick up his Nobel Prize, sending his publisher instead […]