The research on which this book is based was made possible thanks to a Leverhulme Trust/British Academy Early Career Fellowship, held at the University of Cambridge in 2014–2017 and generously supplemented by the Isaac Newton Trust. I finished the manuscript during my Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship (Horizon 2020, MSCA-IF) at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, a place that furnished me with ideal working conditions.
Ideas develop best in conversation with a knowledgeable and creative interlocutor. I am most grateful to Irina Flige, who inspired and encouraged me to interview typists and others who manufactured samizdat in Leningrad-St Petersburg and introduced me to many of those whose voices feature in this volume. The idea of surveying samizdat readers belongs to Gennadii Kuzovkin. He developed the reader questionnaire which helped us collect much of the data I have used for this volume and continues to collect more responses.
This is a book about people and social interaction, and it would have been impossible to realize without the hospitality of those I have come to know over many years of researching the unofficial culture of Leningrad-St Petersburg in the 1970s. For many of them, this period forms part of their own biography, and they have been generous with time, stories, knowledge, books, samizdat and additional contacts. I am most grateful. Special thanks to Polina Bezprozvannaia, who tirelessly collected survey responses from among her friends. Many colleagues have supported me at various stages during the research and writing period. Among them are Susan Larsen, who provided very insightful feedback on my initial grant application to the Leverhulme Trust, and Martin Dewhirst, who attentively read a draft of what became Chapter 2. A big thank you also to Kirsty Jane Falconer for her invaluable help with questions of style!
Material that has made its way into the various chapters of this book has appeared in the following publications:
• A previous version of Chapter 2 and parts of Chapter 1 appeared as ‘Reading Samizdat’, in Reading Russia: A History of Reading in Modern Russia, edited by Damiano Rebecchini and Raffaella Vassena (Milan: Ledizioni, 2020).
• ‘Vielseitige Persönlichkeit: Befunde über den Leser des Samizdat’, Osteuropa 1–2 (2019): 149–62.
• ‘Self-Canonisation as a Way into the Canon: the Case of the Leningrad Underground’, Australian and East European Studies 31 (2017): 197–228.
• ‘Reader Questionnaires in Samizdat Journals: Who owns Alexander Blok?’, in Dropping out of Socialism, edited by Juliane Furst and Josie McLellan (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016), 107–27.
• ‘Introduction’, with Ann Komaromi, to the samizdat journal 37 for the Electronic Archive ‘Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat’, University of Toronto Libraries. Available online: http://samizdatcollections.library.utoronto.ca/islandora/object/samizdat%3A37 (accessed 1 October 2019).
Josephine von Zitzewitz
October 2019