It has in fact been recognized in Russian cultural circles for more than a Century that the aesthetic changes in a literature under the influence of censorship have a specific character. First in the spoken language of the intelligentsia and then in criticism and literature itself, this wide ränge of observed phenomena received the special designation "Aesopian language." The present work seeks to describe "Aesopian language" as a special literary System, one whose structure allows interaction between author and reader at the same time that it conceals inadmissable content from the censor. The work has seven chapters, with a summation in the eighth. Chaper One outlines the area of investigation and provides a history of "Aesopian language" and its critics. The following two chapters take up general theoretical aspects of "Aesopian language": there, in particular, an attempt is made to uncover the structure of the Aesopian text and to classify its component literary devices. The analysis of actual literary texts in Chapters Four, Five, Six, and Seven demonstrates the various paths to the realization of Aesopian aesthetics. This is also the place to give notice of a special circumstance which necessarily limits the content of this work. The investigator of "Aesopian language" is faced with an ethical dilemma: to what extent has the critic the right to expose a writer's anticensorship tactics when in Russia ideological censorship has not only not been abolished but, on the contrary, is patently on the increase? The majority of those who write about Russian literature of the Soviet period have arrived at a common-sense Solution: inasmuch as the simple fact of the existence of "Aesopian language" is common knowledge, it is permissible to discuss the general outlines of "Aesopian language," but without delving into any specifics of the work of individual writers. (This, for example, is the approach of Dewhirst and Farrell.) Herein the following Solution has been adopted: a considerable portion of this study is based upon the work of writers who are either deceased or who have emigrated from the USSR; the works of writers still living in the USSR are included only if their authors have already been unmasked and branded or have repented; in every other instance it has been necessary to reject highly relevant material in favor of less impressive examples. As for its revelation of the devices of "Aesopian language" themselves, this study will scarcely be to the detriment of any working writer since, for all their structural uniformity, these devices change their appearance with every realization. Writers always leave censorship behind, as did the fabulous tortoise who beat Achilles. (It is, incidentally, one of the tasks of these pages to demonstrate this.)