write for the drawer

Verb

write for the drawer (third-person singular simple present writes for the drawer, present participle writing for the drawer, simple past wrote for the drawer, past participle written for the drawer)

1. (idiomatic) To write a work for posterity or for friends that one cannot publish except as samizdat.
   • 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.2013, Martin Cruz Smith, Tatiana: An Arkady Renko Novel, page 19
   • 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.2015, Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter, →ISBN, pages 341–342