translate English to French: In Stalin's second purge he was publicly excoriated, deprived of work and reduced to near-starvation while writing the last sonatas about, as Richter said, "a world which had lost its balance".
Les étrangers ignoraient que sa première femme, Lina, et leurs deux fils étaient détenus en otages en Sibérie afin d'assurer sa soumission.