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I remembered those words with a sinking feeling a decade later, when as a precondition of Western political support and investment, global development agencies and lending institutions prescribed Russia a course of economic "shock therapy" — a one-size-fits-all program for planned or developing economies aimed at magically jump-starting a free market via sudden neoliberal reform: widespread privatization, budgetary "austerity," slashing of social services and so on.

"And yet, when I imagined the total victory of those other things over poetry, when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium, without the sort of absurd ritual I'd participated in that evening, then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual, and I realised that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills."

I felt as if something had caught me by the stomach—inside: a sinking feeling, a feeling of nausea: and for a while I lay still.

He could not stir, only stand gazing there with a horrible sinking feeling—a terrible dread, and though the sun rose slowly, his light seemed pale and sickly to the heart-stricken man, whose worst fears seemed confirmed when the door opened, and the heavy, burly figure of the doctor appeared, coming softly down the gravel-walk.