The Soviet translator Natalya Leonidovna Trauberg on the Russian poet and translator Valentin Stenich, who made the first Russian translation of "Ulysses" and was shot in 1938:

"Nobody was particularly surprised about him [that he would be arrested], because in 1937 they were locking up people who, with all their soul.. and he was very much.. really.. if they were locking people up for anecdotes and stories, then that was all he ever did. In the first place, he was a nobleman, not a grand one, but a nobleman. And besides, he was foul-mouthed, a teller of jokes, a deeply ironic man who never curried favour, a Russian dandy, as Blok described him. How could anyone have endured that in the 1930s? Everyone else hid it, and he did not."

Stenich was repeatedly summoned to the Big House on Liteyny, where he was given a dressing-down for his undisguised hostility to the Soviet regime. He was arrested in November 1937. For many years the time of his death remained unknown; it was assumed that he had most likely perished in 1937, but in the 1990s a certificate issued upon his rehabilitation revealed that Stenich had been shot on 21 September 1938.