After Orhan Pamuk left for a lecture tour of the United States earlier this month, some media outlets reported that the outspoken, Nobel Prize-winning novelist had abandoned his native Turkey, never to return, because of death threats from Turkish nationalists. Later, other reports suggested that Pamuk would actually come home in April.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the story has touched on the plight of a writer in exile -- a motif that has been rich with symbolism since at least the time of Ovid, who was banished to what is now Romania by Emperor Augustus almost exactly 2,000 years ago. Alexander Pushkin, exiled in 1820 to roughly the same area, invoked Ovid's ghost many times in his poems, feeling affinity with the Roman classic. Pushkin himself was in exile more than once, and it was there, far from the urban crowds, that he wrote some of his best works.

The list of Russian authors who spent large chunks of their lives in forced or self-imposed banishment includes almost everyone of any significance. Mikhail Lermontov was dispatched to the Caucasus. Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to death, pardoned and sent to a prison camp instead. Ivan Turgenev, who wrote touching descriptions of Russian nature, saw very little of Russia outside the capitals and his country estate, preferring to live in France and Germany. So did the poet Fyodor Tyutchev, a career diplomat. Nikolai Gogol lived in Rome. Alexander Herzen lived in London. Maxim Gorky lived on the island of Capri. The list goes on and on.

But how many Russian writers went into exile to avoid death threats? In the 19th century, it wasn't that many; the poet Kondraty Ryleyev was indeed hanged, but it was for actively taking part in the Decembrist rebellion, not for his poetry. After 1917, however, staggering numbers of authors lost their lives to firing squads or the gulag, so those who went into exile were the lucky ones. The famous "philosophy steamer," which forcibly took the creme de la creme of the Russian intelligentsia abroad in 1922, was definitely a blessing in disguise.

Perhaps the perfect example of a Russian literary exile is Vladimir Nabokov. Having fled the Crimea in 1919 to escape the Bolsheviks, he lived in England and later in Berlin, but by the outbreak of World War II he had to flee again -- his wife was Jewish, and being Russian wasn't exactly popular with the Germans either. After creating a new life for himself in the United States, Nabokov, now a famous and wealthy author, went to neutral Switzerland, where he spent the rest of his days living in a hotel, as the ultimate symbol of the writer whose home had been taken away from him.