Introduction
1 Lev Kopelev and Raisa Orlova, My zhili v Moskve. 1956–1980 (Moscow: KNIGA, 1990), 31–7, 36.
Chapter 1
1 An early example is the first (re-)publication of forty-two poems by Marina Tsvetaeva in the literary miscellany Pages from Tarussa (Tarusskie stranitsy) in 1961.
2 For the survey, see Gennadii Kuzovkin and Josephine von Zitzewitz, ‘Neskol’ko voprosov o samizdate’ (‘A Few Questions About Samizdat’), Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat. Available online: https://samizdatcollections.library.utoronto.ca/content/survey (Accessed 13 May 2020). In reply to Question 4: ‘What was the first samizdat text you saw or read?’
3 Respondent #64 (b.1956), in reply to Question 54.1: ‘If you came across samizdat in school or university (for example, if your peers were interested in or reproducing samizdat texts) please give details.’
4 Described by Alexander Daniel in ‘Istoki i smysl sovetskogo samizdata’, in V. Igrunov, M. Barbakadze and E. Shvarts (eds), Antologiia samizdata: nepodtsenzurnaia literatura v SSSR 1950-e – 1980-e (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi institut gumanitarno-politicheskikh issledovanii, 2005), vol. 1, 18. Five respondents to the samizdat survey explicitly identify this episode as the origin of samizdat (#4, #11, #50, #56, #57; questions 3.1 and 7.1).
5 The first eleven issues were published in one volume as Uncensored Russia, edited and translated by Peter Reddaway (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972). In 1971, Amnesty International began publishing individual issues in English translation.
6 Founded in 1951 and 1953 respectively; RFE broadcast to Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Poland, RL to the Soviet Union. The two stations were merged in 1976.
7 V. Igrunov, M. Barbakadze and E. Shvarts, Antologiia samizdata. Available online: http://antology.igrunov.ru/ (accessed 15 May 2020).
8 M. Ishkov, I. Akhmet’ev, V. Kulakov and T. Gromova (eds), Samizdat veka: Neofitsial’naia poeziia; Antologiia (The Samizdat of the Century: Unofficial Poetry; An Anthology) (Minsk: Polifakt, 1998). Available online: http://rvb.ru/np/ (accessed 15 May 2020).
9 OSA Catalog, ‘Russian’. Available online: http://catalog.osaarchivum.org/?f%5Blanguage_facet%5D%5B%5D=Russian&f%5Brecord_origin_facet%5D%5B%5D=Digital+Repository (accessed 13 May 2020).
10 Memorial Moscow/International Memorial, ‘Overview of the Archives of the History of Dissent’. Available online: https://www.memo.ru/ru-ru/collections/archives/dissidents/guide/ (accessed 15 May 2020). Research and Information Centre Memorial St Petersburg, ‘Public Archive on the History of Soviet Terror: Electronic Archive’. Available online: http://iofe.center/elarch (accessed 15 May 2020). In both cases, the majority of documents is not online.
11 Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen (Forschungsstelle Osteuropa, FSO), ‘Archives and Research News’. Available online: https://www.forschungsstelle.uni-bremen.de/en/9/20110606113229/Archive_Library.html (accessed 15 May 2020). The archive itself is not online.
12 For the main website of the project, see Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat. Available online: https://samizdatcollections.library.utoronto.ca/ (accessed 15 May 2020). For the database of samizdat periodicals, see Soviet Samizdat Periodicals. Available online: https://samizdat.library.utoronto.ca/ (accessed 15 May 2020).
13 For information, see Keston Center for Religion, Politics and Society. Available online: https://www.baylor.edu/kestoncenter/ (accessed 15 May 2020).
14 The Centre is now using a wiki platform for its growing archive, see Andrei Belyi Centre, ‘Index of Authors’, last updated 13 December 2013. Available online: http://samizdat.wiki/%D0%97%D0%B0%D0%B3%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%B0 (accessed 15 May 2020).
15 ‘Second Literature’: Andrei Siniavskii Electronic Archive of Foreign Countries. Available online: https://vtoraya-literatura.com/ (accessed 15 May 2020).
16 The stenogram is published in Acta Samizdatica: Zapiski o samizdate, 2nd edition (Moscow: GPIB Rossii – Mezhdunarodnyi ‘Memorial’, 2015), 10–39.
17 Friederike Kind-Kovacs and Jessie Labov, ‘Introduction’, in Friederike Kind-Kovacs and Jessie Labov (eds), Samizdat, Tamizdat and Beyond: Transnational Media during and after Socialism (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 2.
18 Alexander Daniel, ‘Istoki i smysl sovetskogo samizdata’.
19 Elena Strukova, ‘Samizdat kak pamiatnik knizhnoi kul’tury vtoroi poloviny XX veka’, in Acta Samizdatica, pilot edition (Moscow: GPIB Rossii – Mezhdunarodnyi ‘Memorial’ – ‘Zvenia’, 2012), 7–13.
20 Ann Komaromi, ‘Samizdat and Soviet Dissident Publics’, Slavic Review 71, no. 1 (2012): 70–90, 72.
21 Ann Komaromi, Uncensored: Samizdat Novels and the Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Dissidence (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015).
22 Valentina Parisi, Il lettore eccedente: edizioni periodiche del samizdat sovietico, 1956–1990 (Bologna: Società editrice Il mulino, 2013).
23 See International Samizdat [Research] Association. Facebook community, created 22 October 2012. Available online: https://www.facebook.com/samizdat.community/; and Samizdat. Facebook group. Available online: https://www.facebook.com/groups/353375628083079/ (both accessed 16 May 2020).
24 Information about the case, the transcript of the trial and many of the letters of protest, were collated by Alexander Ginzburg and circulated in samizdat. Ginzburg, who had signed this White Book (Belaia kniga) with his own name, sent one copy to the KGB and another abroad. It was ultimately published by Posev Publishing House in Frankfurt in 1967. For this he and three friends received labour camp sentences. In English collected in Leopold Labedz and Max Hayward (eds), On Trial: The Case of Sinyavsky (Tertz) and Daniel (Arzhak) (London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1967). For information about the demonstration inspired by the case, which became an annual event, and this arrest, including many interviews, see D. Zubarev, N. Kostenko, G. Kuzovkin, S. Lukashevskii and A. Papovian (eds), 5 dekabria 1965 goda (Moscow: Obshchestvo ‘Memorial’, Izdatel’stvo ‘Zvenia’, 2005).
25 For information, see Natalia Gorbanevskaia, Polden’: Delo o demonstratsii 25 avgusta 1968 goda na Krasnoi ploshchadi (Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo, 2007).
26 The history of the group, including historical documents, can be found on their website, see Moscow Helsinki Group. Available online: https://mhg.ru/ (accessed 17 May 2020).
27 The Foundation was set up by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who pledged all present and future royalties he would receive for The Gulag Archipelago. It became operative in 1974 and ceased open activity in 1983, following intense persecution. Khodorovich tells his story in an interview with Gleb Morev: Sergei Khodorovich, ‘My nakhodili v sebe sily protivostoiat’ idiotskomu bezumiu’, interview with Gleb Morev, in Gleb Morev (ed.), Dissidenty: Dvadtsat’ razgovorov (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo AST, 2017), 247–75.
28 Leonid Zhmud’, ‘Studenty-istoriki mezhdu ofitsiozom i ‘liberal’noi’ naukoi’, Zvezda, no. 8 (1998): 204–09, 205.
29 Igor’ Golomshtok, Zaniatie dlia starogo gorodovogo. Memuary pessimista (Moscow: AST, 2015), 150–51; all ellipsis in brackets are mine.
30 Olga Sedakova and Slava I. Yastremski, ‘A Dialogue on Poetry’, in Olga Sedakova, Poems and Elegies, edited by Slava I. Yastremski (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003), 15.
31 The Chronicle of Current Events – founded in 1968 to document human rights abuses and with an information and distribution chain that was highly conspiratorial – was heavily persecuted. The editors changed regularly, usually due to arrest. For information, see Liudmila Alekseeva, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights, translated by Carol Pearce and John Glad (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 285–87.
32 Golomshtok, Zaniatie dlia starogo gorodovogo, 149.
33 The Miting glasnosti (Rally for Transparency), the first human rights demonstration, took place on 5 December 1965, the day of the Soviet constitution. Organized by Alexander Esenin-Volpin, the participants held banners bearing the slogan ‘Respect the Soviet Constitution!’ (Uvazhaite sovetskuiu konstitutsiiu) and demanded an open trial for Andrei Siniavskii and Yulii Daniel. See D. Zubarev et al., 5 dekabria 1965 goda; also cf. n. 24, above. On dissidents acting on a moral imperative and a certain passivity among the dissidents of the 1960s, see Vera Lashkova, ‘U nas ne bylo zhelaniia uvidet’ zariu svobody’, interview with Gleb Morev, in Gleb Morev (ed.), Dissidenty: Dvadtsat’ razgovorov (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo AST, 2017), 111. Solzhenitsyn’s famous exhortation to ‘Zhit’ ne po lzhi’ (Live not by lies), a three-page essay published in samizdat in 1974, was a call to boycott the Soviet way of life and placed the emphasis on individual moral responsibility.
34 Liudmila Alekseeva, Istoriia inakomysliia v SSSR (New York: Khronika Press, 1984; New edition, Moscow: RITs Zatsepa, 2001), 112.
35 Liudmila Alekseeva, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights, translated by Carol Pearce and John Glad (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 283 ff.
36 Gleb Morev (ed.), Dissidenty: Dvadtsat’ razgovorov (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo AST, 2017).
37 Lev Losev, ‘Samizdat i samogon’, in Zakrytyi raspredelitel’ (Ann Arbor, MI: Hermitage, 1984), 170–74. Attentive readers will notice that the first three categories named by Losev roughly correspond to the three categories of dissent identified by Liudmila Alekseeva, which are national, religious and civic dissent (see Alekseeva, Istoriia inakomysliia v SSSR, 1).
38 Elizaveta Starshinina, ‘Iz istorii irkutskogo samizdata’, report on a lecture by Vladimir Skrashchuk, 21 March 2014. Available online: http://baikal-info.ru/iz-istorii-irkutskogo-samizdata (accessed 17 May 2020).
39 On Kolokol, see S. Peskov [pseudonym of V. Iofe], ‘Delo “Kolokola”, Pamiat’, istoricheskii sbornik, no. 1 (1976); published New York, 1978: 269–84.
40 Natalia Volokhonskaia, interview with the author, 12 July 2015.
41 Alekseeva, Istoriia inakomysliia, 112.
42 For example, Kopelev and Orlova, My zhili v Moskve; Liudmila Alekseeva, Pokolenie ottepeli (Moscow: Zakharov, 2006); Natalia Trauberg, Sama zhizn’ (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Ivan Limbakha, 2008); Liudmila Miklashevskaia, Povtorenie proidennogo (St Petersburg: Zvezda, 2012); Golomshtok, Zaniatie dlia starogo gorodovogo.
43 Archive of the International Memorial Society in Moscow. Fond 175, opis 4. Avrutskii’s organization is the subject of Chapter 4, in this volume.
44 Archive of the Research Centre for East European Studies, University of Bremen, Fond I-86. The interviews are presently being prepared for publication as a commented edition with Novoe Literaturnoe obozrenie, under the direction of Gennadii Kuzovkin. Updates are published regularly on ‘Memorial: Soviet History Project’, Facebook group. Available online: https://www.facebook.com/groups/235003858273/ (accessed 13 May 2020).
45 In collaboration with the Russian State Historical Library (GPIB), proceedings published in Acta Samizdatica. The roundtable on ‘Cultural Life of Unofficial Moscow in the 1960s–1980s’ contains detailed accounts of samizdat experience by a number of invited guests. See Acta Samizdatica, no. 3 (2016): 195–220.
46 Seven interviews are available, see Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat, ‘Interviews’. Available online: https://samizdatcollections.library.utoronto.ca/interviews (accessed 17 May 2020).
47 For example: Andrei Rogachevskii, ‘Novosibirskii samizdat glazami podrostka: (Konets 1970-kh – seredina 1980-kh)’, Solnechnoe spletenie (Jerusalem), no. 16/17: 208–12; also, Aleksei Smirnov, ‘Biography’. Available online: http://gendirector1.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html (accessed 15 May 2020). On his website, Viacheslav Igrunov not only details his own extensive experience of samizdat but also provides a platform for accounts by others: ‘Dissidentism: The Origins and Meaning’. Available online: http://igrunov.ru/vin/vchk-vin-dissid/smysl/1058065392/ (accessed 15 May 2020).
48 Elena Strukova, ‘Delo ob odesskoi biblioteke samizdata’, Bibliografiia, no. 2 (2012): 50–9, 51.
49 Simon Franklin uses the term ‘hybrid’ in order to describe a writing culture situated between manuscript and print in ‘Mapping the Graphosphere: Cultures of Writing in Early 19th-Century Russia (and Before)’, Kritika 12, no. 3 (2011): 531–60.
50 Five collections of poetry were published during his lifetime, in 1961, 1964, 1967, 1972 and 1977.
51 For a study of how the authorities curated young writers in the 1960s, see Emily Lygo, Leningrad Poetry 1953–1975: The Thaw Generation (Berne: Peter Lang, 2010). For bibliographical information on the Leningrad poets see the personal entries in D. Severiukhin, V. Dolinin, B. Ivanov and B. Ostanin (eds), Samizdat Leningrada: 1950e—1980e gody; Literaturnaia entsiklopediia (Мoscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2003).
52 These publishing houses included Ann Arbor, Grani, Posev, YMCA Press, Beseda. Their role is discussed in detail in Chapter 2, in this volume.
53 The process of tamizdat gradually replacing samizdat during the 1970s is described by Alexander Daniel in ‘Istoki i smysl sovetskogo samizdata’. An eloquent confirmation is the interview Lev Kopelev gave to a group of researchers from Bremen University in the 1980s (unpublished). Archive of the Research Centre for East European Studies, University of Bremen, Fond I-86.
54 Robert Darnton, ‘What Is the History of Books?’, Daedalus 111, no. 3 (1982): 65–83. For an alternative, simplified model that emphasizes the role of external influences (intellectual, political, social and commercial, see Thomas R. Adams and Nicholas Barker, ‘A New Model for the Study of the Book’, in A Potencie of Life: Books in Society [London: British Library, 1993], 5–44.)
55 The insights offered by this diagram have been used by Valentina Parisi in ‘Scribes, Self-Publishers, Artists: Performing the Book in the Samizdat Writing Scene’, in Annette Gilbert (ed.), Publishing as Artistic Practice (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 156; and Olga Zaslavskaya in ‘Samizdat as Social Practice and Alternative “Communication Circuit”’, in Valentina Parisi (ed.), Samizdat: Between Practices and Representation; Lecture Series at Open Society Archives, Budapest, February–June 2013 (Budapest: Central European University/IAS, 2015), 92. Darnton specifically pointed out that reading remains the most difficult phase in the circuit to understand and describe.
56 The mechanisms of Soviet book publishing after Stalin are discussed by Stephen Lovell in The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), ch. 3, in particular p. 55 ff.
57 This term is also used in reference works, for example, B. Ivanov and B. Roginskii (eds), Istoriia leningradskoi nepodtsenzurnoi literatury (SPb: DEAN, 2000). Fifteen respondents to the samizdat survey used this term in order to define samizdat.
58 Described by Alekseeva, Soviet Dissent, 285.
59 Cited in Aleksei Makarov, ‘Putevoditel’ po vystavke ‘Ot tsenzury i samizdata k svobode pechati: 1917–1990’, Acta samizdatica, no. 3 (2016): 224.
60 Daniel, ‘Istoki i smysl sovetskogo samizdata’, 17.
61 Irina Tsurkova, interview with the author, 13 August 2015. As early as 1975, F.J. Feldbrugge described this phenomenon, where control over circulation rests with the reader rather than the publisher or author, as ‘snowballing’. See F.J. Feldbrugge, Samizdat and Political Dissent in the Soviet Union (Leyden: A.W. Sijthoff, 1975), 7. Ann Komaromi likens the circulation to ‘mushroom spores’ (in ‘Samizdat and Soviet Dissident Publics’, 74). Olga Zaslavskaya discusses both in ‘Samizdat as Social Practice and Alternative “Communication Circuit”’, 89.
62 To give one single, easily verifiable example, the Leningrad poet Alexander Mironov wrote a prose piece entitled ‘Pietà’, published in the journal 37, no. 3 (1976). The title, in Latin script, complete with the accent grave on the letter ‘a’, was inserted by hand in the journal’s table of contents as well as above the actual piece. See Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat, ‘Tridtsat’ Sem’ [Thirty-Seven] No 03’. Available online: https://samizdatcollections.library.utoronto.ca/islandora/object/samizdat%3A3675 (accessed 17 May 2020).
63 This phenomenon is discussed by Dar’ia Sukhovei, ‘Krugi komp’iuternogo raia’, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 62 (2003).
64 Respondent #120 (b.1949): ‘Akhmatova’s Requiem – I typed it myself and I still remember manuscript versions that didn’t always correspond to the final published text.’ In reply to Question 23/23.1: ‘Did you keep any samizdat at home?; If yes, can you remember the name of any texts you kept at home and/or the approximate number of texts?’
65 See Natalia Trauberg, ‘Vsegda li pobezhdaet pobezhdennyi?’, in Sama zhizn’ (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Ivan Limbakha, 2008), 411–12.
66 Elena Rusakova, interview with the author, 9 August 2015.
67 Respondent #6 (b.1977), in reply to Question 7.1: ‘Do you have a definition what samizdat is? Please explain your definition?’
68 Viacheslav Igrunov, ‘Odesskaia biblioteka samizdata: 1967–1982’, interview with Elena Strukova, July–August 2005. Available online: http://igrunov.ru/cv/odessa/dissident_od/samizdat/1123138219.html (accessed 4 September 2019).
69 On the topic of authorial control, see Valentina Parisi, ‘The Dispersed Author: The Problem of Literary Authority in Samizdat Textual Production’, in Valentina Parisi (ed.), Samizdat: Between Practices and Representation; Lecture Series at Open Society Archives, Budapest, February–June 2013 (Budapest: Central European University/IAS: 2015), 63–72.
70 Printing as a means of standardization is discussed by Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communication and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
71 Konstantin Kuzminskii, ‘O Grigorii Kovaleve’, in Konstantin Kuzminskii and Grigorii Kovalev (eds), The Blue Lagoon Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1980–1986), vol. 1, 23. Also, Boris Belenkin, ‘“Rukopisnoe” ili “pechatnoe”? “Pechatnoe” kak “rukopisnoe”? Malotirazhnye izdaniia v kontekste sovremennogo kul’turnogo protsessa’, in Acta Samizdatica, pilot edition (Moscow: GPIB Rossii – Mezhdunarodnyi ‘Memorial’ – ‘Zvenia’, 2012), 14–23.
72 Komaromi, ‘Samizdat as Extra-Gutenberg Phenomenon’; see also Ann Komaromi, ‘Ardis Facsimile and Reprint Editions: Giving Back Russian Literature’, in Friederike Kind-Kovacs and Jessie Labov (eds), Samizdat, Tamizdat and Beyond: Transnational Media During and After Socialism (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 45.
73 Sabine Hänsgen, ‘The Media Dimension of Samizdat: The Präprintium Exhibition Project’, in Valentina Parisi (ed.), Samizdat: Between Practices and Representation; Lecture Series at Open Society Archives, Budapest, February–June 2013 (Budapest: Central European University/IAS: 2015), 47–62.
74 On such dynamics see D.F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9.
75 For example by Ann Komaromi, ‘The Material Existence of Samizdat’, Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (2004): 597–618.
76 On readers as publishers who ensured that copies ended up in Western archives, see Komaromi, ‘Samizdat and Soviet Dissident Publics’, 74–5.
77 The editors of the Leningrad journals Chasy and Mitin zhurnal remember this practice and described it: Boris Ostanin and Dmitrii Volchek, interviews with the author, 2015.
78 Ilya Kukulin comments on this in Ilya Kukulin, ‘Prodistsiplinarnye i antidistsiplinarnye seti v pozdnesovetskom obshchestve’, Sotsiologicheskoe obozrenie 16, no. 3 (2017): 136–74, 137.
79 In her volume Russische Literatur im Internet: Zwischen digitaler Folklore und politischer Propaganda (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2011), Henrike Schmidt includes a three-essay section on ‘Internetliteratur und die Tradition des Samizdat: Historischer Kontext’.
80 The journal Osteuropa devoted issue number 11 (November 2010) to the topic of ‘Blick zurück nach vorn: Samizdat, Internet und die Freiheit des Wortes’.
81 Eugene Gorny, A Creative History of the Russian Internet (Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag, 2009), 189. Gorny hosts the Russian Virtual Library (https://rvb.ru).
82 Quoted in Henrike Schmidt, ‘Postprintium? Digital Literary Samizdat on the Russian Internet’, in Friederike Kind-Kovacs and Jessie Labov, Samizdat, Tamizdat and Beyond : Transnational Media During and After Socialism (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 221–44, 222.
83 Maria Haigh, ‘Downloading Communism: File Sharing as Samizdat in Ukraine’, Libri 57 (2007): 165–78.
84 Schmidt’s, ‘Postprintium? Digital Literary Samizdat on the Russian Internet’ is a significantly expanded version of a chapter from her German study Russische Literatur im Internet.
85 One such platform is LibraryThing, discussed in detail by Julian Pinder, ‘Online Literary Communities: A Case Study of LibraryThing’, in Anouk Lang (ed.), From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 68–87.
86 Zhmud’, ‘Studenty-istoriki mezhdu ofitsiozom i “liberal’noi” naukoi’, 205.
87 Andrew D. Murray, The Regulation of Cyberspace: Control in the Online Environment (Oxford: Routledge, 2006), discussed in Melissa de Zwart and David Lindsay, ‘Governance and the Global Metaverse’, in Daniel Riha and Anna Maj (eds), Emerging Practices in Cyberculture and Social Networking (Amsterdam: Rodopi 2010), 74.
88 Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 127–28.
89 Ibid., chs. 3 and 4.
90 Kukulin, ‘Prodistsiplinarnye i antidistsiplinarnye seti v pozdnesovetskom obshchestve’, 151.
91 On this topic also see Emily Lygo’s Leningrad Poetry. Appendix 1 lists (official) LITOs as well as (unofficial) literary groups.
92 In an extended Facebook post dedicated to the woman who introduced Natalia Pervukhina to samizdat, see Facebook post, 2 August 2017. Available online: https://www.facebook.com/natalia.pervukhin/posts/1658603657483763 (accessed 17 July 2019).
93 Irina Tsurkova, interview with the author, 13 August 2015.
94 Ann Komaromi writes about this in ‘Samizdat as Extra-Gutenberg Phenomenon’, 656.
95 Komaromi, ‘Samizdat and Soviet Dissident Publics’, 85 ff. She is referring to Nancy Fraser’s critique of Habermas in ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, in Craig Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
Chapter 2
1 For example journalist Gleb Morev in his recent volume of interviews with dissidents, which includes prominent names such as Sergei Grigoriants, Vera Lashkova, Pavel Litvinov, Sergei Khodorovich, Viacheslav Igrunov and Alexander Daniel: Morev, Dissidenty.
2 One such historiographer is Alexander Daniel. A founding member of the Memorial Society, where he set up the History of Dissent in the USSR programme, he is the son of Yulii Daniel, whose arrest and camp sentence in 1964 for publishing literature abroad was one of the decisive moments in the history of the dissident movement, and the prominent dissident Larisa Bogoraz. Born in 1951, he is old enough to have participated in samizdat himself. His many published articles are a popular source for scholars, including myself. He is regularly interviewed on human rights in the USSR (a list of interviews given to Ekho Moskvy radio station is available online: https://echo.msk.ru/guests/8880/ [accessed 13 May 2020]) and has recently given a lecture series on ‘The Human Being against the USSR’ for the online academy Arzamas, including a lecture on the dangers of literary samizdat and another on the Chronicle of Current Events, available online: https://arzamas.academy/courses/40 (accessed 15 June 2018).
3 International Memorial, ‘Research Program “History of Dissent in the USSR: 1954–1987”’. Available online: https://www.memo.ru/ru-ru/history-of-repressions-and-protest/protest/dissidents/programma-istoriya-inakomysliya-v-sssr-1954-1987-gg/ (accessed 15 June 2018).
4 We are most grateful for the expert advice of Andrei Alekseev, Leonid Blekher, Liubov’ Borusiak, Natalia Vasil’eva, Dmitrii Ermoltsev, Natalia Kigai and Margarita Samokhina.
5 Kuzovkin and von Zitzewitz, ‘Neskol’ko voprosov o samizdate’.
6 For a timeline, see Aleksei Makarov, ‘Putevoditel’ po vystavke “Ot tsenzury i samizdata k svobode pechati: 1917–1990”’, Acta samizdatica, no. 3 (2016): 221–39.7 In reply to question 6.1.: “What did you do after reading your first samizdat text? Please provide details”.8 The two last quotations are in reply to question 2.: “When did you first hear the term ‘samizdat’? When did this happen, and how?”
9 Rogachevskii, ‘Novosibirskii samizdat glazami podrostka’, 211–12.
10 Starshinina, ‘Iz istorii irkutskogo samizdata’.
11 Vsevolod Rozhniatovskii, ‘Vlianie Olega Okhapkina na krug pskovskikh poetov: Miroslav Andreev, Evgenii Shesholin, drugie avtory’, in Tat’iana Koval’kova (ed.), Okhapkinskie chtenie: Almanakh No 1 (St Petersburg: Oriental Research Partners, 2015), 17–27.
12 Konstantin Kuzminskii and Grigorii Kovalev (eds), The Blue Lagoon Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1980–1986). Available online: http://kkk-bluelagoon.ru/ (accessed 15 June 2018).
13 Respondent #120 (b.1949), in reply to Questions 20.1: ‘Which textual genre was predominant in your samizdat reading? Please explain your choice or choices – why did you read those texts?’ and 21.1: ‘What was for you the most valuable element in the samizdat texts you knew? Please tell us why?’
14 Respondent #83 (b.1968), in reply to Question 20.1.
15 Respondent #6 (b.1977), in reply to Question 4: ‘What was the first samizdat text that you saw or read?’
16 Both replies to Question 4.
17 Respondent #113 (b.1960), in reply to Question 20.1.
18 Respondent #98 (b.1961), in reply to Question 19: ‘Would you say that at some point in your life you became a regular samizdat reader?’
19 Both replies to Question 2: ‘When did you first hear the term “samizdat”? When did this happen, and how?’ and/or Question 4.
20 The Master and Margarita (written 1929–1940) was serialized in the journal Moskva, in a heavily censored version, in 1966–1967. The first unabridged book edition appeared in tamizdat (Paris: YMCA Press, 1967). In 1973, the novel, which had become a cult book, was published in the USSR in a print run of 30,000 copies. Tale of the Troika was published in 1968 in the almanac Angara, which was removed from public libraries a year later. A longer version was published in book form in 1989.
21 Both replies to Question 4.
22 Lev Turchinskii, ‘Kollektsioniruite tekh, kto neizvesten i nedootsenen’, Arzamas, 13 June 2018. Available online: https://arzamas.academy/mag/551-turchinsky (accessed 5 March 2019).
23 The cult of Gumilev in the Soviet Union is charted by Roman Timenchik in Istoriia kul’ta Gumileva (Moscow: Mosty kul’tury, 2018).
24 Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 401–02.
25 In reply to Question 6.1: ‘What did you do after reading your first samizdat text? Please provide details.’
26 In reply to Question 11: ‘In your opinion, what was the role of samizdat in the transformations that happened in the USSR (Russia) in the 1980s–1990s?’
27 In reply to Question 28: ‘Which samizdat texts were particularly popular and circulated widely in your opinion? In other words, which texts would you call “samizdat hits”?’
28 In reply to Question 29.1: ‘Do you remember incidents when samizdat texts were read collectively (e.g. when one person would read a page and then pass it on to the next)? Which texts were read in this way, and when was that?’
29 In reply to Question 21/21.1.
30 Emily Lygo describes his popularity in Leningrad Poetry 1953–1975, 7 ff. I discuss his influence on the poetics of poets prominent in the 1970s in Josephine von Zitzewitz, Poetry and the Leningrad Religious-Philosophical Seminar 1976–1980: Music for a Deaf Age (Oxford: Legenda/MHRA and Routledge, 2016), esp. ch. 2.
31 The sheer popularity of Vysotsky can be gleaned from Wikipedia, ‘List of works by Vladimir Vysotsky’, last edited May 12, 2020. Available online: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%BA_%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%B2%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%92%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%B0_%D0%92%D1%8B%D1%81%D0%BE%D1%86%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE (accessed 13 May 2020).
32 The poem-in-prose was first published in print in Israel in 1973 (in Russian).
33 Cf. Note 20 of this chapter.
34 Turchinskii, ‘Kollektsioniruite tekh, kto neizvesten i nedootsenen’.
35 As told by Simon Franklin in ‘Mapping the Graphosphere’, 554.
36 Respondent #59 (b.1951), in reply to Question 7/7.1: ‘Do you have a definition for samizdat? If yes, please explain briefly.’
37 In reply to Question 9: ‘Do you thing that the term samizdat can be applied without qualification to the following: books on palmistry, erotica, crime fiction, reports on UFOs and similar texts?’
38 Discussed by Olga Zaslavskaya in ‘Samizdat as Social Practice and Alternative “Communication Circuit”’, 92.
39 Compare the statement that ‘writers are engineers of the human soul’, popularized by and attributed to Stalin, who used it in 1932 at a meeting with Soviet writers. In fact he was quoting the novelist Yurii Olesha. See ‘Inzhenery chelovecheskikh dush’, in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ krylatykh slov i vyrazhenii (Moscow: Lokid-Press, 2003). Available online: http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/dic_wingwords/1087/Инженеры (accessed 13 May 2020).
40 For a chronological analysis of the ‘Soviet reader’, see Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution.
41 Golomshtok, Zaniatie dlia starogo gorodovogo, 130.
42 The Gulag Archipelago is also mentioned as a seminal text by individuals whose memoirs I have used for this monograph and/or who have given me interviews, cf. Rogachevskii, ‘Novosibirskii samizdat glazami podrostka’, 209; Irina Tsurkova, interview with the author, 13 August 2015.
43 V. Glotser and E. Chukovskaia (eds), Slovo probivaet sebe dorogu: Sbornik state ii dokumentov ob A.I. Solzhenitsyne: 1962–1974 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Russkii put’, 1998), 459–60.
44 The Gulag Archipelago and Avtorkhanov’s Technology of Power are among the texts frequently mentioned on the pages of the Chronicle of Current Events. The list, as well as a description of the process of indexing, can be found in Gennadii Kuzovkin, ‘Nauchnoe izdanie “Khroniki tekushchikh sobytii” i novye vozmozhnosti dlia izucheniia samizdata’, in Acta Samizdatica, pilot edition (Moscow: GPIB Rossii – Mezhdunarodnyi ‘Memorial’ – ‘Zvenia’, 2012), 36–45.
45 For information on the rallies, see A. Podrabinek, ‘10 dekabria: Moskva; Pushkinskaia ploshchad’; 18 chasov’, 6 December 2015. Available online: http://www.cogita.ru/a.n.-alekseev/kontekst/10-dekabrya-moskva-pushkinskaya-ploschad-18-chasov (accessed 15 June 2018).
46 Viacheslav Dolinin and Dmitrii Severiukhin (eds), Preodolenie nemoty: Leningradskii samizdat v kontekste nezavisimogo kul’turnogo dvizheniia (1953–1991) (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo N.I. Novikova, 2003), 61–2.
47 Anatolii Vershik, ‘“Summa” za svobodnuiu mysl’, in ’Summa’ za zvobodnuiu mysl’ (St Petersburg: Zvezda, 2002), 6.
48 Both replies to Question 21.1.
49 In reply to Question 44: ‘It is well-known that during the Soviet era people were persecuted for samizdat. Were you affected by persecution?’
50 A major new research project, led by Yasha Klots from Hunter College of the City University of New York, is underway. See the Tamizdat Project’s website, http://tamizdatproject.org/en (accessed 13 May 2020), which lists and links institutions, imprints and individuals who produced and promoted tamizdat. The papers given at the project’s inaugural conference can be listened to at Russian and East European Cultures at Hunter College, https://www.reechunter.com/tamizdat-conference.html#Program (accessed 6 March 2019).
51 See Natalia Pervukhina, Facebook post, 2 August 2017. Available online: https://www.facebook.com/natalia.pervukhin/posts/1658603657483763 (accessed 17 July 2019).
52 The novel was published in Italy in Italian translation in 1957. The first Russian-language editions appeared in the Netherlands in 1958 and Italy in 1959. The edition in Holland was produced with the support of the CIA and distributed for free to Russian tourists at the World Exhibition in Brussels and the VII World Youth Festival in Vienna. The novel was published in the USSR only in 1988. Twenty-five respondents remember reading it, seven of which specify a tamizdat edition. Anatolii Vershik talks about the novel’s popularity in ‘“Summa” za svobodnuiu mysl’, 9.
53 Lev Kopelev and Raisa Orlova, unpublished interview, Archive of the Research Centre for East European Studies, University of Bremen, Fond I-86.
54 For details, see Gleb Struve, ‘Kak byl vpervye izdan “Rekviem”’, in Anna Akhmatova, Rekviem: 1935–1940, 2nd edition (New York: Tovarishchestvo zarubezhnykh pisatelei, 1969). A collection of reminiscences about the fate of the cycle, including how Akhmatova typed out the first copy in 1962, uniting the poems into a cycle, and planned to offer them to Novyi mir journal, whose editor turned them down, see Iakov Klots, ‘“Rekviem” Akhmatovoy v tamizdate: 56 pisem’ COLTA, 24 June 2019. Available online: https://www.colta.ru/articles/literature/21637-rekviem-ahmatovoy-v-tamizdate-56-pisem?fbclid=IwAR0CTmzFHK_QlQGB_slVbQkabMytb_KS3QA12aHqgIUz1_PfOjaBw5deimw (accessed 4 August 2019).
55 For example the YMCA Press, transferred from Russia to Berlin in 1925. Initially focused on Christian works, in the 1970s it published a range of contemporary texts, including Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle (1969) and The Gulag Archipelago (1973). For an account of the early years, see Matthew Lee Miller, The American YMCA and Russian Culture: The Preservation and Expansion of Orthodox Christianity, 1900–1940 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012). For a list of titles plus images, see Tamizdat Project, ‘Publishers: YMCA-Press; Paris’. Available online: http://tamizdatproject.org/en/publisher/ymca-press (accessed 6 July 2019).
56 For details on the case see Labedz and Hayward, On Trial.
57 The case against the compilers of the Brodsky samizdat edition is described by Efim Etkind, one of the participants, in his memoir Zapiski nezagovorshchika (London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1977). For some of the books published by Ekho after 2000, see ‘Izdatel’stvo “Ekho”’. Available online: http://russianemigrant.ru/tag/izdatelstvo-eho (accessed 7 October 2019).
58 For example, Viktor Krivulin, Stikhi, 2 vols. (Paris and Leningrad: Beseda, 1988); Elena Shvarts, Stikhi (Leningrad: Beseda, 1987); Oleg Okhapkin, Stikhi (Leningrad: Beseda, 1989). Also discussed in Chapter 6, in this volume.
59 The history of the publishing house has been studied by Ann Komaromi in ‘Ardis Facsimile and Reprint Editions’, 27–50. For a list of titles see pp. 333–38. For title images, see Tamizdat Project, ‘Publishers: Ardis; Ann Arbor, MI’. Available online: http://tamizdatproject.org/en/publisher/ardis (accessed 13 May 2020). For a statement by publisher Ellendea Proffer herself, see Ellendea Proffer Teasley, ‘How Censorship Leads to Samizdat: Ardis Publishers’, keynote lecture, ‘Tamizdat: Publishing Russian Literature in the Cold War’ conference, Russian and East European Cultures at Hunter College, New York, 10 December 2018. Available online: https://www.reechunter.com/tamizdat-conference.html#Keanote1 (accessed 6 March 2019).
60 In reply to Question 32/32.2: ‘Did you have contact with tamizdat? If you can, give a precise date.’
61 The Gulag Archipelago was published in Paris in 1973 by YMCA Press; this publication was instrumental in the decision of the authorities to force Solzhenitsyn into exile in February 1974.
62 Four respondents mention this edition, which is most likely the three-volume collected works that came out in 1967, six years before the much more modest Soviet edition: Osip Mandelshtam, Sobranie sochnineniia v trekh tomakh, introduction by Clarence Brown, G.P. Struve and B.A. Filippov (Washington, DC: Inter-Language Literary Associates/Mezhdunarodnoe Literaturnoe Sodruzhestvo, 1967).
63 In reply to Question 32.3: ‘Did you ever come across tamizdat, and when?’
64 In reply to Question 32.3.
65 For a timeline and general description of the process, see Alekseeva, Soviet Dissent, 284–85. Andrei Rogachevskii describes specifically how his first source of samizdat texts in 1970s Novosibirsk would have longer texts in tamizdat editions, sometimes photographed or photocopied, for example Georgii Vladimov’s Vernyi Ruslan (Faithful Ruslan), or the works of Zinoviev, in Rogachevskii, ‘Novosibirskii samizdat glazami podrostka’, 209.
66 In reply to Question 18: ‘Which of the samizdat texts you read left the strongest impression with you, and why?’
67 In reply to Question 23/23.1: ‘Did you keep any samizdat at home?’; ‘If yes, can you remember the name of any texts you kept at home and/or the approximate number of texts?’
68 In reply to Question 32.3.
69 In reply to Question 4.
70 Larisa Bel’tser, ‘Operatsiia “Gutenberg-1984”’, Cogita, 9 March 2017. Available online: http://www.cogita.ru/a.n.-alekseev/publikacii-a.n.alekseeva/operaciya-gutenberg20131984 (accessed 20 June 2018).
71 For a detailed account of how books that were reserved for various members of the social hierarchy ended up on the black market, see Losev, ‘Samizdat i samogon’, 152–55.
72 All replies to Question 32.4: ‘How did you manage to obtain tamizdat?’
73 For information on CIA involvement in Russian-language book publishing, see, for example, John Matthews, ‘The West’s Secret Marshall Plan for the Mind’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counter Intelligence 16 (2003): 409–27.
74 Irina Roskina, letter to Gennadii Kuzovkin, July 2017.
75 Yurii Kolker, ‘Ostrova blazhennykh: Vtoraia literatura i samizdat v Leningrade’, Strana i mir, nos. 1–2 (1985). Available online: http://yuri-kolker.com/articles/Ostrova_blazhennykh.htm (accessed 21 September 2018).
76 Kirill Kozyrev, interview with the author, 7 July 2015.
77 Viacheslav Igrunov’s samizdat ‘library’ operated mainly from Odessa, but the material was mostly procured via Moscow. See Viacheslav Igrunov, ‘O biblioteke Samizdata, o Gruppe sodeistiia kul’turnomy obmenu i o Larise Bogoraz-Brukhman’, interview with E.S. Shvarts, 2001. Available online: http://www.igrunov.ru/cv/vchk-cv-memotalks/talks/vchk-cv-memotalks-talks-bogoraz.html (accessed 20 August 2019).
78 NTS: Mysl’ i delo; 1930–2000 (Moscow, 2000). I owe this reference to Ann Komaromi. One of our respondents seems to have known these editions: ‘In the 1970s, when I caught a glimpse of a volume of Solzhenitsyn in pocketbook format, which my father had borrowed in order to make a copy’ (#93, b.1966, in response to Question 32.2).
79 The two-volume selection of Alexander Vvedenskii was published with Ardis between 1980 and 1984. The first collected poems of Daniil Kharms Meilakh published together with Vladimir Erl with K-Presse (Bremen) between 1978 and 1988.
80 Mikhail Meilakh, ‘Pervym moim sledovatelem byl Viktor Cherkesov’, interview with Gleb Morev in Gleb Morev (ed.), Dissidenty: Dvadtsat’ razgovorov (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo AST, 2017), 332; also Mikhail Meilakh, ‘Kak zhizn’ pobedila smert’’, interview with Vitalii Leibin, Russian Reporter, no. 16 (455), 11 August 2018. Available online: https://expert.ru/russian_reporter/2018/16/kak-zhizn-pobedila-smert/ (accessed 26 June 2019).
81 Anatolii Vershik, ‘“Summa” za svobodnuiu mysl’, 9.
82 In reply to Question 32.3.
83 Turchinskii, ‘Kollektsioniruite tekh, kto neizvesten i nedootsenen’.
84 The BBC is funded by the British taxpayer and out of the TV licensing fee, and is nominally independent of the government; the Russian Service is part of the BBC World Service’s foreign-language output, which is provided in about forty languages. Voice of America, in Russian Golos Ameriki, is the US government’s official international broadcasting arm. One major sponsor of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty was the CIA. Friederike Kind-Kovacs, ‘Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty as the “Echo Chamber” of Samizdat’, in Friederike Kind-Kovacs and Jessie Labov (eds), Samizdat, Tamizdat and Beyond: Transnational Media during and after Socialism (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 90 n.54.
85 On the Free Europe Press and its efforts to increase the exchange of written texts across borders, see Kind-Kovacs, ‘Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty as the “Echo Chamber” of Samizdat’, 73–9; she uses mostly the example of Poland.
86 For an overview of studies that consider this angle, see ibid., p. 89, n. 15, n. 16.
87 Ibid., 73, 72. See ch.1, n. 6.
88 By 1971, as detailed during the conference The Future of Samizdat: Significance and Prospects, transcript of conference held in London, by Radio Liberty Committee. 23 April 1971, HIA, RFE/RL Corporate Records, see Albrecht Boiter, ‘Radio Liberty’s Present Use of Samizdat’, sheet 3. I owe this reference to Friederike Kind-Kovacs.
89 OSA Catalog, ‘RFE/RL Russian Broadcast Recordings’. Available online: http://catalog.osaarchivum.org/?f%5Bdigital_collection%5D%5B%5D=RFE%2FRL+Russian+Broadcast+Recordings (accessed 13 May 2020).
90 According to research carried out in the year 2004, 62 per cent of Arkhiv Samizdata (3,284 items) consist of material that can be classified as political. Hyung-Min Yoo from the University of Chicago used the published Arkhiv Samizdata as a basis for a quantitative analysis of samizdat documents by genre, applying Liudmila Alekseeva’s classification of different kinds of dissent (national, religious and political/human rights) to samizdat texts. This approach itself is not without problems. More importantly, Yoo was aware that ‘Arkhiv Samizdata as a rule did not include literary writings’ and that only about 50 per cent of samizdat texts mentioned in the Chronicle of Current Events, which was itself orientated towards human rights, found their way into RFE/RL’s archive. But although he concluded that ‘Arkhiv Samizdata covered less than 50% of the entire samizdat phenomenon’, he claimed that ‘The best source of samizdat is without doubt Arkhiv Samizdata … it is the best collection of samizdat available.’ Hyung-Min Yoo, ‘Voices of Freedom: Samizdat’, Europe-Asia Studies 56, no. 4 (2004): 573–74.
91 Kozyrev, interview.
92 OSA Catalog, ‘Literary Readings’. Available online: http://catalog.osaarchivum.org/?utf8=%E2%9C%93&f%5bgenre_facet%5d%5b%5d=Literary+Readings&f%5bprimary_type_facet%5d%5b%5d=Audio&q=poetry (accessed 13 May 2020).
93 All replies to Question 37/37.1: ‘Did you listen to samizdat texts on the radio? Could you tell us about the texts you heard? Which radio stations broadcast them?’
94 Goldberg was the main voice of the BBC Russian service in the 1970s, succeeded by Seva Novgorodtsev.
95 Lev Kopelev and Raisa Orlova, unpublished interview, Archive of the Research Centre for East European Studies, University of Bremen, Fond I-86.
96 Irina Lashchiver, ‘Posleslovie’ to Asia Lashchiver, “Dissidentskie vospominaniia”’, in Acta Samizdatica, pilot edition (Moscow: GPIB Rossii – Mezhdunarodnyi ‘Memorial’ – ‘Zvenia’, 2012), 120.
97 Igrunov, ‘O biblioteke Samizdata, o Gruppe sodeiztviia kul’turnomu obmenu i o Larise Bogoraz-Brukhman’.
98 Sergei Stratanovskii, interview with the author, 14 August 2015.
99 R. Eugene Parta, Discovering the Hidden Listener: An Assessment of Radio Liberty and Western Broadcasting to the USSR during the Cold War; A Study Based on Audience Research Findings, 1970–1991 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2007).
100 The Mission of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty Broadcast, reprint in A. Buell, ‘Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in the Mid 1980s’, in K.R.M. Short (ed.), Western Broadcasting Over the Iron Curtain (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 85.
101 Liudmila Alekseeva, Pokolenie ottepeli (Мoscow: Zakharov, 2006), 91.
102 Schmidt, ‘Postprintium?’, 225.
103 The process people used to establish to whom they could give texts is described in great detail by Lev Kopelev, unpublished interview, Archive of the Research Centre for East European Studies, University of Bremen, Fond I-86.
104 The origin of the term is discussed by Polly McMichael, ‘“A Room-Sized Ocean”: Apartments in Practice and Mythology of Leningrad’s Rock Music’, in William Jay Risch (ed.), Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 183–209, 187 ff. Also see Artemy Troitsky, Tusovka: Who’s Who in the New Soviet Rock Culture (London: Omnibus Press, 1990).
105 All three replies to Question 20.1.
106 In reply to Question 29.1.
107 In reply to Question 23/23.1.
108 Pervukhina, Facebook post, 2 August 2017.
109 Raisa Orlova, unpublished interview with Elena Vargaftik, 30 April 1983. Archive of the Research Centre for East European Studies, University of Bremen, Fond I-86. Excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago were published in the German weekly Der Spiegel, nos. 1–5 (1974).
110 Franklin, ‘Mapping the Graphosphere’, 552. Studied in detail in M. Aronson and S. Reiser, Literaturnye kruzhki i salony (1929; St Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2001); Irina Murav’eva, Salony pushkinskoi pory: Ocherki literaturnoi i svetskoi zhizni Sankt-Peterburga (St Petersburg: Kriga, 2008).
111 One of the best-known salons of the Silver Age, Viacheslav Ivanov’s ‘Tower’, is researched in great detail in V. Bagno et al., Bashnia Viacheslava Ivanova i kul’tura serebrianogo veka (St Petersburg: Filologicheskii Fakultet Gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2006).
112 Franklin, ‘Mapping the Graphosphere’, 552.
113 Pervukhina, Facebook post, 2 August 2017.
114 Sergei Semanov, Russkii klub: Pochemu ne pobediat evrei (Moscow: Litres, 2017, ebook).
115 In reply to Question 5: ‘What was the impression left by your first encounter with a samizdat text? Give details if possible.’
116 Irina Roskina, Letter to Gennadii Kuzovkin, July 2017.
117 For a very similar statement, see Viacheslav Igrunov, ‘Ia byl dissident v dissidenstve’, interview with Gleb Morev, in Gleb Morev (ed.), Dissidenty: Dvadtsat’ razgovorov (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo AST, 2017), 195–218, 205.
118 Both replies to Question 24/24.2:‘Did you ever reproduce samizdat texts? If so, what influenced your decision to do so?’
119 In reply to Question 20.1.
120 This and the previous replies in this section are to Question 24/24.2.
121 In reply to Question 17/17.1: ‘Which samizdat activity were you involved in? You can tick several options. Please give details about your answer.’
122 This and the previous replies in this section are to Question 24/24.2.
123 When respondents combined two definitions, i.e. ‘forbidden literature in typescript’ (e.g. #16, b.1959), their answer was counted in both categories.
124 In reply to Question 32.3.
125 For a criticism of the way in which sociology describes late Soviet social networks, which includes the absence of systematic research into samizdat as a system of social networks, with the help of social network theory, see Kukulin, ‘Prodistsiplinarnye i antidistsiplinarnye seti v pozdnesovetskom obshchestve’, 136–74.
Chapter 3
1 Examples include the title pages of the encyclopaedia Samizdat Leningrada and the specialist series Acta Samizdatica, published by the Memorial Society in collaboration with various partners.
2 Interview with Liudmila Alekseeva, taken by Raisa Orlova in August 1983. Archive of the Research Centre for East European Studies (Forschungsstelle Osteuropa, FSO), University of Bremen. Publication forthcoming in the volume Neskol’ko interv’iu o samizdate, edited by Gennadii Kuzovkin. Partial pre-publication available online: https://urokiistorii.ru/article/55967?fbclid=IwAR1JJqennOLl27L5OONaHeaENVYs0N_bNcR3j3cRP0X_D_Z_rAeDba_eLxs (accessed 15 May 2019).
3 Boris Likhtenfel’d, interview with the author, 25 July 2015.
4 For the role of the author as typesetter, see Hänsgen, ‘The Media Dimension of Samizdat’.
5 Elena Rusakova, interview with the author, 9 August 2015. All further quotations by Elena Rusakova are from this interview and will not be referenced in this chapter unless necessary.
6 One researcher who draws attention to this is Ilya Kukulin, see ‘Prodistsiplinarnye i antidistsiplinarnye seti v pozdnesovetskom obshchestve’, 159. I consider this issue from a gender angle in the final section of this chapter.
7 Natalia Volokhonskaia, interview with the author, 12 July 2015. All further quotations by Natalia Volokhonskaia are from this interview and will not be referenced in this chapter unless necessary.
8 Tatiana Pritykina, interview with the author, 13 July 2015. All further quotations by Tatiana Pritykina are from this interview and will not be referenced in this chapter unless necessary.
9 Rusakova, interview.
10 ‘My ne khuzhe Goratsiia’ (1966), music and text available online: http://www.bards.ru/archives/part.php?id=4132 (accessed 4 June 2019).
11 Irina Tsurkova, interview with the author, 13 August 2015. All further quotations by Irina Tsurkova are from this interview and will not be referenced in this chapter unless necessary.
12 Tsurkova, interview.
13 Her personal entry in Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 249, features a list of works she typed – most of it Silver Age, but also new editions. Among the poetry she typed was the samizdat journal Golos in 1978 (ten issues, see Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 398).
14 Pritykina, interview.
15 Arsenii Roginskii (1946–2017), human rights activist and historian, one of the founders of the Memorial Society, from 1998 to 2017 chairman of the executive board of the International Memorial Society. Between 1975 and 1981 he edited the samizdat historical almanac Pamiat’ (Memory), which was published abroad from 1978. In 1981, Roginskii received a four-year camp sentence. The texts mentioned by Rusakova were intended for Pamiat’.
16 Olga Abramovich, telephone interview with the author, 27 August 2015.
17 Ilya Kukulin analyses this phenomenon using French sociologist Laurent Thevenot’s theory of ‘engagement’. For details on how people regulate different types of engagement, see Laurent Thevenot, ‘The Plurality of Cognitive Formats and Engagements: Moving between the Familiar and the Public’, European Journal of Social Theory 10, no. 3 (2007): 409–23.
18 Published in samizdat on 13 February 1974, the day after Solzhenitsyn’s arrest. For the text, see Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ‘Zhit’ ne po lzhi!’. Available online: http://www.solzhenitsyn.ru/proizvedeniya/publizistika/stati_i_rechi/v_sovetskom_soyuze/jzit_ne_po_ljzi.pdf (accessed 8 October 2019). The story of the essay’s publication is described in Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Bodalsia telenok s dubom: Ocherki literaturnoi zhizni (Moscow: Soglasie, 1996), 388–89.
19 Dolinin and Severiukhin, Preodolenie nemoty, 61.
20 The practice is confirmed by respondent #26 (b.1969) to the samizdat survey, who remembers copying a tract of traditional folk medicine in Moscow in 1983.
21 See A.V. Korotkov, S.A. Mel’chin and A.S. Stepanov (eds), Kremlevskii samosud. Sekretnye dokumenty Politburo o pisatele A. Solzhenitsyne (Moscow: Rodina Edition ‘Q’, 1994), 250–51.
22 Sergei Stratanovskii, interview with the author, 14 August 2015.
23 Yurii Avrutskii, unpublished memoir – manuscript. Archive of the Memorial Society in Moscow, Fond 175, opis 4.
24 Rusakova, interview.
25 Cf. Chapter 1, n. 24.
26 Vera Lashkova, ‘Vera Lashkova – zhivoi golos russkoi istorii’, interview with Iaroslav Gorbanevskii, 2011. Available online: http://ru.rfi.fr/rossiya/20111113-vera-lashkova-zhivoi-golos-russkoi-istorii (accessed 14 April 2019).
27 Lashkova, ‘U nas ne bylo zhelaniia uvidet’ zariu svobody’, 103–04.
28 Ibid., 104–05.
29 Zhmud’, ‘Studenty-istoriki mezhdu ofitsiozom i “liberal’noi” naukoi’, 205–06.
30 Kuzminskii, ‘O Grigorii Kovaleve’, 22.
31 An iconic example is the one used by Viktoria Apter, typist of the literary journal Chasy, which punched through the letter ‘o’. I myself own a table of contents for the journal, where this fault is clearly visible. Boris Ostanin maintains that only the first copy of any set was marked in this way. (Boris Ostanin, interview with the author, 20 August 2015).
32 Repin was the Leningrad coordinator for Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Foundation for Political Prisoners and their Families. See Chapter 1, n. 27.
33 Volokhonskaia is possibly referring to two types of paper commonly used for tracing, rough ‘pergament’ and smooth ‘kal’ka’. I am grateful to Irina Flige for the clarification.
34 Both Tsurkova and Rusakova use it frequently. For written sources see Lashkova, ‘U nas ne bylo zhelaniia uvidet’ zariu svobody’, 108; for Natalia Pervukhina’s story see Facebook post, 2 August 2017.
35 The term as well as the general practice of disposing of carbon paper down the toilet are also remembered by Natalia Dobkina, interview with the author, 11 August 2015.
36 The activity of another prominent samizdat binder from Moscow, Sergei Lar’kov, is described by Ann Komaromi in ‘The Material Existence of Samizdat’, 600–03.
37 Turchinskii, ‘Kollektsioniruite tekh, kto neizvesten i nedootsenen’. All quotations by Lev Turchinskii are from this publication and will not be referenced in this chapter unless necessary.
38 Golomshtok, Zaniatie dlia strarogo gorodovogo, 68.
39 Respondent #82 (b.1948), in reply to Question 26/26.1: ‘Did you know about samizdat being reproduced in state enterprises, either using photocopy or office typewriters? If yes, please tell us more. Which texts were reproduced in this way?’
40 ‘Leningradski feminism 1979’, Facebook post, 26 April 2019. Available online: https://www.facebook.com/kulturwerkstatt.zhaba/posts/1698022777162868?__tn__=KH-R (accessed 14 May 2020). The case documents are held in the archive of the Memorial Society in St Petersburg.
41 Strukova, ‘Delo ob odesskoi biblioteke samizdata’, 50. The copy of the Archipelago she describes used to form part of Viacheslav Igrunov’s samizdat library in Odessa, studied in Chapter 4.
42 For a description of this process, see Alekseeva, Soviet Dissent, 285.
43 Replies to Question 21.1: ‘What was for you the most valuable element in the samizdat texts you knew? Please tell us why?’; and Question 15: ‘If you feel that your interest in samizdat arose as the consequence of certain events in your life, could you name these events?’.
44 Sergei Stratanovskii, interview with the author, 14 August 2015. Names of typists supplied.
45 All replies to Question 43/43.1: ‘Did you ever have to buy samizdat? If yes, can you remember the works and their price?’
46 Bel’tser, ‘Operatsiia “Gutenberg-1984”’.
47 It is worth noting that Irina and Arkadii Tsurkov are not mentioned.
48 For Abramovich, see Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 69–70; Volokhonskaia features under her maiden name, Lesnichenko, p. 249.
49 Barbara Martin and Anton Sveshnikov, Istoricheskii sbornik ‘Pamiat’’, Issledovaniia i materialy (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2017).
50 Barbara Martin and Anton Sveshnikov, ‘Between Scholarship and Dissidence: The Dissident Historical Collection Pamiat’’, Slavic Review 76, no. 4 (2017): 1003–026, 1022.
51 Kuzminskii, ‘O Grigorii Kovaleve’, 22.
52 Konstantin Kuzminskii, ‘Boris Taigin’, in Konstantin Kuzminskii and Grigorii Kovalev (eds), The Blue Lagoon Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1980–1986), vol. 1, reprint edition, 2006 (pagination different from original), 25.
53 Igrunov, ‘Ia byl dissident v dissidenstve’, 205.
54 Meilakh, ‘Kak zhizn’ pobedila smert’’.
55 The only mention of male typists – mashinisty – alongside women that I have come across is Zhmud’, ‘Studenty-istoriki mezhdu ofitsiozom i “liberal’noi” naukoi’, 205.
56 Kirill Kozyrev, interview with the author, 7 July 2015.
57 Alekseeva, interview with Raisa Orlova, see Gennadii Kuzovkin, ‘Samaia znamenitaia mashinistka samizdata’, Uroki istorii: XX vek, 22 July 2019. Available online: https://urokiistorii.ru/article/55967?fbclid=IwAR1JJqennOLl27L5OONaHeaENVYs0N_bNcR3j3cRP0X_D_Z_rAeDba_eLxs (accessed 14 May 2020).
58 Alekseeva, Istoriia inakomysliia v SSSR.
59 Petr Kazarnovskii and Ilya Kukui, ‘Vmesto predisloviia’, in Leonid Aronzon (ed.), Sobranie Proizvedenii, vol. 1 (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Ivana Limbakha, 2006), 11.
60 For details, see Genrikh Sapgir, ‘Sapgir ob avtorakh i gruppakh’, RVB, 21 August 2019. Available online: http://rvb.ru/np/publication/sapgir5.htm#67 (accessed 21 October 2019).
61 Lashkova, ‘U nas ne bylo zhelaniia uvidet’ zariu svobody’, 108.
62 Dobkina confirmed this in the interview she gave me; this detail is also remembered by Volokhonskaia.
63 Galina Drozdetskaia, interview with the author 10 July 2015.
64 For a general overview, see Natalia Pushkareva, ‘Feminism in Russia’, in Encyclopaedia Round the World. Available online: https://www.krugosvet.ru/enc/istoriya/FEMINIZM_V_ROSSII.html (accessed 14 May 2020); Natalia L. Pushkareva, ‘U istokov russkogo feminizma: skhodstva i otlichiia Rossii i zapada, in G.A. Tishkin (ed.), Rossiiskie zhenshchiny i evropeiskaia kul’tura (St Petersburg: Sankt-Peterburgskoe filosofskoe obshchestvo, 2001), 79–84; Alexandra Talaver, ‘Samizdat of the Soviet Dissident Women’s Groups, 1979–1982’, submitted MA thesis (Central European University Department of Gender Studies, Budapest). The German-Russian culture workhop Zhaba is preparing a travelling exhibition on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the appearance of Woman and Russia that will open in December 2019 in St Petersburg. See https://www.leibniz-gwzo.de/de/transfer/ausstellungen/leningradski-feminism-eine-wanderausstellung?fbclid=IwAR2YAgLb_YF7Tcndpbj28BhKk4En8zNXflIxokUyh8E_lbmS_glI345pteM (accessed 21 October 2019). The project’s Facebook page (‘Leningradski feminism 1979’. Available online: https://www.facebook.com/kulturwerkstatt.zhaba/ [accessed 14 May 2020]) collects and displays related materials.
65 As we have seen in this chapter, binding was often done by men, more examples will follow as part of the discussion on the journals Chasy and Severnaia pochta in Chapter 5.
66 Natalia Malakhovskaia, ‘Feministskii samizdat: zhurnal “Mariia”’, Live Journal, 24 January 2013. Available online: https://feministki.livejournal.com/2499778.html (accessed 5 May 2018). Malakhovskaia observes that women themselves have imbibed the hostile atmosphere and turned against women.A rare example of a woman poet who was a full participant, an active agent rather than a facilitator for others, was Elena Shvarts. Very feminine in her appearance, she claimed several male domains of behaviour as her own: she drank and smoked heavily, failed to turn up for readings and publicized her notorious love life. For detail, see Josephine von Zitzewitz, ‘From Underground to Mainstream: The Case of Elena Shvarts’, in Katharine Hodgson and Alexandra Smith (eds), Reconfiguring the Canon of Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry, 1991–2008 (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2017), 225–64.
67 In 1917–1918, the Bolsheviks decreed equal political and property rights; women were obliged to work; in the 1977 Constitution, Article 53 declares men and women equal; Article 36 specifies the need to protect women.
68 Malakhovskaia, ‘Feministskii samizdat’.
69 Tatiana Mamonova, ‘Introduction’, in Tatiana Mamonova (ed.), Women and Russia: Feminist Writings from the Soviet Union (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), xiv.
70 Malakhovskaia, ‘Feministskii samizdat’. She is referring to, for example, the fact that while women did have workers’ rights and obligations, they were expected to do the housework and look after the children.
Chapter 4
1 Discussed in Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution, 60–9.
2 All replies to Question 23/23.1: ‘Did you keep any samizdat at home?’; ‘If yes, can you remember the name of any texts you kept at home and/or the approximate number of texts?’
3 In reply to Question 32.3: ‘Did you ever come across tamizdat, and when?’
4 In reply to Question 23/23.1
5 In reply to Question 23/23.1.
6 In reply to Question 23/23.1.
7 Zhmud’, ‘Studenty-istoriki mezhdu ofitsiozom i “liberal’noi” naukoi’, 205–06.
8 For a exposition of how books and periodicals, including foreign ones, might end up in a spetskhran special collection, see Losev, ‘Samizdat i samogon’, 158–62.
9 Tatiana Goricheva, interview with the author, 4 July 2015.
10 On Mnukhin’s activity, see Anastasia Kostriukova, ‘Chitat’ i slyshat’ nastoiashchuiu literaturu’, in Acta Samizdatica: Zapiski o samizdate, pilot edition (Moscow: GPIB Rossii – Mezhdunarodnyi ‘Memorial’ – ‘Zvenia’, 2012), 84–94. This publication contains excerpts from an interview with Lev Mnukhin in Paris on 3 November 2007, see ‘Lev Mnukhin’, interview with Ann Komaromi, Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat, August 2014. Available online: https://samizdatcollections.library.utoronto.ca/interviews/ru/lev-mnukhin (accessed 2 October 2019).
11 This categorization is described in Aleksei Makarov, ‘Ot lichnoi kollektsii samizdata k obshchestvennoi biblioteke. Trudnosti granits i definitsii’, in Acta Samizdatica: Zapiski o samizdate, pilot edition (Moscow: GPIB Rossii – Mezhdunarodnyi ‘Memorial’ – ‘Zvenia’, 2012), 24–35, esp. 28–9.
12 In response to Question 23/23.1. The importance of such figures is confirmed, for example, in Rogachevskii, ‘Novosibirskii samizdat glazami podrostka’; see also Turchinskii, ‘Kollektsioniruite tekh, kto neizvesten i nedootsenen’.
13 In response to Questions 23/23.1 and 34: ‘Did you know of any samizdat libraries (associations which regularly exchanged texts)?’.
14 One respondent remembers a further library in Obninsk that functioned as late as the early 1990s. Respondent #86 (b.1959), in reply to Question 34.
15 Makarov, ‘Ot lichnoi kollektsii samizdata k obshchestvennoi biblioteke’, 30–1.
16 Respondent #116 (b.1966), in reply to Question 34.
17 The process is described in Viacheslav Igrunov, ‘Beseda o “Khronike tekushchikh sobytii” i biblioteke samizdata’, interview with Gennadii Kuzovkin and Nikolai Kostenko, 31 January 2004. Available online: http://www.igrunov.ru/cv/vchk-cv-memotalks/talks/about-chronika-et-samisd.html (accessed 4 September 2019) and in ‘Odesskaia biblioteka samizdata’. Yurii Avrutskii also describes it in his unpublished memoir. Manuscript, archive of the Memorial Society in Moscow, Fond 175, opis 4. Cited after Makarov, ‘Ot lichnoi kollektsii samizdata k obshchestvennoi biblioteke’, 34.
18 Igrunov, ‘Odesskaia biblioteka samizdata’.
19 Igrunov, ‘Ia byl dissident v dissidenstve’, 196.
20 Igrunov, ‘Odesskaia biblioteka samizdata’.
21 Ibid.
22 Here we can see an intriguing parallel between Igrunov’s group and the nationalist and monarchist underground VSKhSON (Vserossiiskii sotsial-Khristianskii soiuz osvobozhdeniia naroda; All-Russian Social-Christian Union for the Liberation of the People). This group, whose members professed the intention of overturning the Soviet system, started as a reading group and collected large amount of contemporary and pre-revolutionary literature for the purpose of self-education. It never developed beyond this stage: founded in 1964, it was uncovered by the KGB in 1967 and its members were sentenced to lengthy labour camp terms. For information, see Alekseeva, Istorial inakomysliia v SSSR, chs. ‘Stanovlenie’ and ‘Russkoe Natsional’noe dvizhenie’, esp. 200–02. Materials relating to the group, including their manifesto, are compiled in John Dunlop (ed.), VSKhSON: Materialy suda i programma; Vol’noe slovo; Samizdat. Izbrannoe, vol. 22 (Frankfurt: Posev, 1976).
23 Igrunov, ‘Beseda o “Khronike tekushchikh sobytii”’.
24 For example, in Igrunov, ‘Beseda o “Khronike tekushchikh sobytii”’.
25 Igrunov, ‘Beseda o “Khronike tekushchikh sobytii”’.
26 Igrunov (#21, b.1948), in reply to survey Question 8/8.1: ‘Did you know about any museums, libraries, private collections etc that were used as sources for copying and circulating literature or documents that were not in print in the USSR? Your personal experience is especially valuable.’; ‘If yes, can you name these institutions or private collections? If you visited them, we would be grateful for details.’
27 Igrunov, ‘Odesskaia biblioteka samizdata’.
28 Igrunov remembers: ‘Through the Chronicle of Current Events I not only found out about people I needed to become acquainted with because their views and behaviour were close to my own, but also about books and articles. It represented a truly free view of the world. All other samizdat was something like an appendix to the Chronicle of Current Events. The Chronicle of Current Events represented the pivotal aspect of my life back then, and everything else revolved around it’ (Igrunov, ‘Beseda o “Khronike tekushchikh sobytii”’). The editors of the Chronicle observed strict conspiratorial principles. In soliciting information from their readers, they exhorted contributors to pass material on to the person from whom they had received their copy rather than try to find the editors, to avoid being taken for an informer. See Khronika tekushchikh sobytii, no. 5 (1968), cited after Maria Fokin (ed.), ‘Chronicle of Current Events’, translated by Julie Draskoczy. Available online: http://www.memo.ru/history/diss/chr/ (accessed 4 September 2019).
29 Viacheslav Igrunov, ‘Neofitsial’naia literatura i nekotorye voprosy praktiki’ and ‘K problematike obshchestvennogo dvizhenia’, Available online: http://igrunov.ru/cv/vchk-cv-chosenpubl/vchk-cv-chosenpubl-ego.html (accessed 1 October 2019).
30 Igrunov, ‘Odesskaia biblioteka samizdata’.
31 Antologiia samizdata. Available online: http://antology.igrunov.ru/ (accessed 15 May 2020).
32 As asserted by Elena Strukova, a leading expert on the library, in ‘Delo ob odesskoi biblioteke samizdata’, 51.
33 On the structure of the library, including the names of the main keepers and distributors, see Viacheslav Igrunov, ‘Primernaia struktura biblioteki samizdata v Odesse’. Available online: http://igrunov.ru/cv/odessa/dissident_od/samizdat/library-structure.html; Petr Butov’s three-part memoir about the dissidents in Odessa, ‘Vospominaniia ob Odesskikh dissidentakh’, parts 1 and 2. Available online: http://igrunov.ru/cv/odessa/dissident_od/samizdat/1109017845.html; Boris Khersonskii, ‘Beseda s Borisom Khersonskim 1. iuniia 2002 g. Odessa’, interview with E.S. Shvarts. Available online: http://www.igrunov.ru/cv/vchk-cv-side/vchk-cv-side-stories-herson.html; Khersonskii’s memoir ‘Pamiati semidesiatykh’, Vestnik, 2 November 2008. Available online: https://magazines.gorky.media/interpoezia/2008/2/pamyati-semidesyatyh.html; Bella Ezerskaia’s memoir ‘Kak eto bylo v Odesse’, Vestnik, no. 11 (348) (2004). Available online: http://www.vestnik.com/issues/2004/0526/win/ezersky.htm. I am grateful to Elena Strukova for pointing me to Ezerskaia’s text. (All sources accessed 14 September 2019.)
34 As specified by Makarov, ‘Ot lichnoi kollektsii samizdata k obshchestvennoi biblioteke’, 30.
35 The overview in question is Strukova’s ‘Delo ob odesskoi biblioteke samizdata’. The criminal case files she accessed are held in the archive of the Sluzhby Bezpeky Ukrayiny (SBU; Security Service of Ukraine) for the Odessa region (‘Delo ob odesskoi biblioteke samizdata’, 51 n. 6). Also see her paper ‘Odesskaia biblioteka samizdata Igrunova-Butova i “Masterskaia khudozhestvennykh promyslov” Avraama Shifrina’, given at the Chteniia pamiati A.B. Roginskogo, Moscow, 30 March 2019. See International Memorial, ‘Chteniia pamiati Arseniia Roginskogo: Den’ vtoroy’, YouTube, 30 March 2019. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwnRcfDkWbk (accessed 17 September 2019).
36 Strukova, ‘Delo ob odesskoi biblioteke samizdata’, 57–8.
37 Ibid., 50.
38 Avrutskii, unpublished memoir, quoted in Makarov, ‘Ot lichnoi kollektsii samizdata k obshchestvennoi biblioteke’, 33–4.
39 Quoted in Makarov, ‘Ot lichnoi kollektsii samizdata k obshchestvennoi biblioteke’, 33.
40 Avrutskii, unpublished memoir.
41 Aleksei Makarov, ‘Zhurnal domashnei biblioteki: Kak bylo ustroeno virtual’noe sobranie zapreshchennykh knig’, Arzamas. Available online: https://arzamas.academy/materials/1155 (accessed 13 June 2018). This article forms part of a thematic section entitled ‘The Anti-Soviet Museum’.
42 Makarov, ‘Ot lichnoi kollektsii samizdata k obshchestvennoi biblioteke’, 34.
43 Igrunov (#21, b.1948), in reply to survey Question 23/23.1.
44 Igrunov, ‘O biblioteke Samizdata’.
45 Igrunov, ‘Beseda o “Khronike tekushchikh sobytii”’.
46 Igrunov, ‘Odesskaia biblioteka samizdata’. The difficulties of obtaining literature after multiple arrests among his sources in the 1970s are also described in Igrunov, ‘O biblioteke Samizdata’.
47 Makarov ‘Ot lichnoi kollektsii samizdata k obshchestvennoi biblioteke’, 33.
48 Avrutskii, unpublished memoir.
49 Makarov ‘Ot lichnoi kollektsii samizdata k obshchestvennoi biblioteke’, 33; Igrunov, ‘Beseda o “Khronike tekushchikh sobytii”’.
50 Igrunov, ‘Odesskaia biblioteka samizdata’.
51 Avrutskii, unpublished memoir.
52 As seen on Makarov, ‘Zhurnal domashnei biblioteki’; also described in Makarov, ‘Ot lichnoi kollektsii samizdata k obshchestvennoi biblioteke’, 32, 34.
53 Igrunov, ‘Beseda o “Khronike tekushchikh sobytii”’.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
56 Makarov, ‘Ot lichnoi kollektsii samizdata k obshchestvennoi biblioteke’, 35.
57 Ibid., 34.
58 Igrunov, ‘Beseda o “Khronike tekushchikh sobytii”’.
59 Poet Lev Losev provides a first-hand account of the workings of the illegal book market, including the behaviour of book sellers and the trajectory by which books reached the market. Losev, ‘Samizdat i samogon’, esp. 139–41. More recently, this market is portrayed Aleksei German Jr’s feature film Dovlatov (2018).
60 Irina Roskina, letter to Gennadii Kuzovkin, July 2017. Unfortunately, Roskina could not remember when exactly she bought Mandelshtam’s memoirs.
61 Avrutskii, unpublished memoir.
62 Igrunov, ‘Odesskaia biblioteka samizdata’.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 Igrunov, ‘Beseda o “Khronike tekushchikh sobytii”’.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid.
70 Igrunov, ‘Odesskaia biblioteka samizdata’.
71 Investigation file, cited according to Strukova, ‘Delo ob odesskoi biblioteke samizdata’, 55.
72 Butov offers a detailed account of his involvement with the library, including the years after Igrunov’s arrest when he was responsible, in part 3 of his ‘Vospominaniia ob Odesskikh dissidentakh’. On his time as main librarian, see http://igrunov.ru/cv/odessa/dissident_od/samizdat/1110809385.html (accessed 4 April 2019).
73 Igrunov, ‘Odesskaia biblioteka samizdata’.
74 Strukova lists some of the confiscated titles in ‘Delo ob odesskoi biblioteke samizdata’, 56, drawing on Butov’s case file from the archive of the SBU for Odessa region, Delo-24444.
75 Igrunov, ‘Odesskaia biblioteka samizdata’.
76 Meilakh, ‘Kak zhizn’ pobedila smert’’.
77 Igrunov, ‘Beseda o “Khronike tekushchikh sobytii”’.
78 Avrutskii, unpublished memoir.
79 See the personal entry on Sergei Mazlov in Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 268.
80 For a reprint of all issues, see A. Vershik, V. Dolinin, E. Maslova and B. Maslov (eds), ‘Summa’ – za svobodnuiu mysl’ (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo zhurnala ‘Zvezda’, 2002), 40.
81 Vershik et al., ‘Summa’ za zvobodnuiu mysl’. Additional sources on Summa are: A. Vershik, ‘Potaennyi daidzhest epokhi zastoia’, Zvezda, no. 11 (1991); ‘Nauka i totalitarizm’, Zvezda, no. 8 (1998); Sergei Levin, ‘“Summa” s pozitsii “slagaemogo”’, in Samizdat: Po materialam konferentsii ‘30 let nezavisimoi pechati; 1950–80 gody’ (St Petersburg: NITs ‘Memorial’, 1993), 115–19.
82 Vershik, ‘“Summa” – za svobodnuiu mysl’’, 6.
83 Ibid.; emphasis in the original.
84 Anatolii Vershik, interview with the author, 31 July 2015.
85 For example the review of the new Leningrad journal Obshchina (1979) and several of its publications in Summa, no. 1, republished in Vershik et al., ‘Summa’ za zvobodnuiu mysl’, 73–5.
86 Inside cover of the first issue, in Vershik et al., ‘Summa’ za zvobodnuiu mysl’.
87 See Martin and Sveshnikov, ‘Between Scholarship and Dissidence’, 1018.
88 Vershik, ‘“Summa” – za svobodnuiu mysl’’, 7.
89 Levin, ‘“Summa” s pozitsii “slagaemogo”’, 118. Levin is referring to Vershik, ‘Potaennyi daidzhest epokhi zastoia’.
90 Vershik, interview.
91 Vershik, ‘“Summa” – za svobodnuiu mysl’’, 7.
92 Ibid., 8.
93 For Kopelev’s opinion on Maslov, see Kopelev and Orlova, My zhili v Moskve, 417–21. Kopelev’s contributions to Summa are listed in Dolinin, ‘Summa v kontekste samizdata’, 28.
94 Vershik, interview, also Vershik, ‘“Summa” – za svobodnuiu mysl’’, 9.
95 Vershik, ‘“Summa” – za svobodnuiu mysl’’, 17–9; Dolinin, ‘Summa v kontekste samizdata’, 29.
96 Vershik, ‘“Summa” – za svobodnuiu mysl’’, 19–20.
97 Dolinin, ‘Summa v kontekste samizdata’, 29.
98 Vershik, interview.
99 On the seminar, called ‘Seminar po obshchei teorii sistem’ and running from 1968–1982, see Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 450–51, and Dolinin, ‘Summa v kontekste samizdata’. The names of people involved are given on p. 27.
100 Vershik, ‘“Summa” – za svobodnuiu mysl’’, 8.
101 Ibid., 9. The book to which he is referring is John Barron, KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents (New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1974).
102 Vershik, interview.
103 Ibid.
Chapter 5
1 A particularly salient example is the neo-avant-garde journal Transponans. Copies are now accessible online, see Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat, ‘Zhurnal teorii i praktiki “Transponans”: Kommentirovannoe elektronnoe izdanie / Pod red. I. Kukuia – A Work in Progress’. Available online: https://samizdatcollections.library.utoronto.ca/islandora/object/samizdat%3Atransponans (accessed 7 September 2018).
2 A volume exclusively featuring contributions by those involved in Leningrad journals is Viacheslav Dolinin and Boris Ivanov (eds), Samizdat: Po materialam konferentsii ‘30 let nezavisimoi pechati; 1950–80 gody’; S.-Peterburg, 25–27 aprelia 1992 (St Petersburg: NITs ‘Memorial’, 1993). Multiple other sources will be referenced over the course of this chapter and the next.
3 ‘Map of Soviet Samizdat Periodicals’. Available online: https://utoronto.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=2eeb4a7c24254ffe96008429a3d1c6b8 (accessed 4 May 2019).
4 The sources available reflect this perception of Leningrad samizdat as a unified phenomenon. The main reference work is called Samizdat Leningrada (eds. Severiukhin et al). Another volume of research that draws on an understanding of Leningrad samizdat, specifically the literary scene, as integrated, is Stanislav Savitskii, Andegraund: Istoriia i mify leningradskoi neofitsial’noi literatury (Мoscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2002).
5 Kolker, ‘Ostrova blazhennykh’.
6 Three respondents mention ‘leningradskie zhurnaly’ (the Leningrad journals), one calls them ‘piterskie zhurnaly’ (Petersburg journals), in reply to Question 35: ‘Did you read samizdat periodicals?’
7 Kolker, ‘Ostrova blazhennykh’. Sergei Stratanovskii confirms this when he points out that ‘there [in Moscow] were more official journals, which meant that there were more people who felt sympathy for writers’ (Stratanovskii, interview with the author, 14 August 2015).
8 Natalia Rubinshtein, private conversation on the topic of Leningrad in the 1960s.
9 Alongside the already mentioned 1993 conference volume Samizdat and Savitskii’s study the following works deserve mention and are discussed in more detail in Chapter 6: the encyclopaedia Samizdat Leningrada features entries on individuals, publications and groups; also Ivanov and Roginskii, Istoriia leningradskoi nepodtsenzurnoi literatury; Dolinin and Severiukhin, Preodolenie nemoty; Iuliia Valieva (ed.), Litsa peterburgskoi poezii 1950–1990-е. Avtobiografii. Avtorskoe chtenie + 5 CD (St Petersburg: Samizdat, 2011); Boris Ivanov (ed.), Peterburgskaia poeziia v litsakh. (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2011); Jean-Philippe Jaccard (ed.), Vtoraia kul’tura: Neofitsial’naia poeziia Leningrada v 1970-e–1980-e gody (St Petersburg: Rostok, 2013).
10 Martin and Sveshnikov, ‘Between Scholarship and Dissidence’, 1010.
11 Samizdat Leningrada lists all the main groups. Iuliia Valieva (ed.), Sumerki ‘Saigona’ (St Petersburg: Samizdat, 2009), contains interviews in which many smaller circles are described. Boris Likhtenfel’d reminisces about the groups in which he participated in ‘Dlia menia proshloe sushchestvennee nastoiashchego: o leningradskoi “vtoroi kul’ture” i ee geroiakh’, Colta, 12 November 2018. Available online: https://www.colta.ru/articles/literature/19696-dlya-menya-proshloe-suschestvennee-nastoyaschego (accessed 19 January 2019). On the literary-artistic salon hosted by Konstantin Kuzminskii in the late 1960s, see Yurii Novikov, ‘Stroitel’ vavilonskoi bashni (K portretu K. Kuz’minskogo)’, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 31 (1998): 328–33. On the Religious-Philosophical Seminar, closely linked to the journal 37, see von Zitzewitz, Poetry and the Leningrad Religious-Philosophical Seminar 1976–1980, ch. 1.
12 For a first-hand account, see Alexander Mironov, ‘Malaia Sadovaia: 1960–е. Beseda с Iuliei Valievoi’, in Iuliia Valieva (ed.), Sumerki ‘Saigona’ (St Petersburg: Samizdat, 2009), 32–5.
13 The history of the two cafes is extensively documented in Valieva, Sumerki ‘Saigona’.
14 Samizdat Leningrada lists these almanacs in the section on publications. The 1993 volume Samizdat features the stories of several editors of these almanacs, in particular Eduard Shneiderman and Vladimir Erl.
15 Stratanovskii, interview.
16 For information on the Lepta affair, see Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 419. The documentation relating to the Lepta case, including the table of contents, the protocols of the editorial committee meetings and the correspondence with Sovetskii pisatel’ are published in Kuzminskii and Kovalev, The Blue Lagoon Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry, vol. 5B.
17 For a chronological account of the development of Leningrad samizdat, see Boris Ivanov, ‘Evoliutsiia literaturnykh v piatidesiatye-vos’midesiatye gody’, in Boris Ivanov and Boris Roginskii (eds), Istoriia leningradskoi nepodtsenzurnoi literatury (St Petersburg: DEAN, 2000), 17–8; and ‘Etapy razvitiia neofitsial’noi literatury 1953–1991’, in Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 9–51.
18 Tatiana Goricheva, ‘Mne nadoeli podval’nost i elitarnost’ “Vtoroi kul’tury”’, interview with Raisa Orlova, 1985. Available online, in an abbreviated form: http://gefter.ru/archive/17640 (accessed 3 March 2018); Tatiana Goricheva, interview with the author, 4 July 2015; Boris Ostanin, interview with the author, 20 August 2015.
19 Many different accounts confirm this: B. Konstriktor [B. Aksel’rod], ‘Dyshala noch’ vostorgom samizdatа’, Labirint/Ekstsentr 1 (1991): 35–50; Boris Ivanov, ‘V bytnost’ Peterburga Leningradom: О leningradskom samizdatе’, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 14 (1995): 188–99, 192; ‘Po tu storonu ofitsial’nosti’, and Viktor Krivulin, ‘“37”, Severnaia pochta’, in Viacheslav Dolinin and Boris Ivanov (eds), Samizdat: Po materialam konferentsii ‘30 let nezavisimoi pechati; 1950–80 gody’ (St Petersburg: NITs ‘Memorial’, 1993), 74–81 and 82–9 respectively.
20 Krivulin, ‘“37”, Severnaia pochta’, 77.
21 The Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen has a good - although not full - set; individual copies are in the archive of the Research and Information Centre Memorial in St Petersburg and the Keston Center at Baylor University, Texas. No. 13 is missing from all these collections and might be held in a private archive difficult to access by researchers. For an almost full set of 37, without no. 13, see Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat, ‘37 [Tridtsat’ Sem’, Thirty-Seven]’. Available online: https://samizdatcollections.library.utoronto.ca/islandora/object/samizdat%3A37 (accessed 16 May 2020). It offers full-text search of all materials of the journal.
22 Examples of poets who published in this form include Viktor Krivulin (nos. 1, 14), Viacheslav Kuprianov (no. 3), Elena Shvarts (no. 6), Alexander Mironov (no. 19), Ol’ga Sedakova (no. 10), Lev Rubinshtein (no. 15) and Vsevolod Nekrasov (no. 17).
23 Goricheva, ‘Mne nadoeli podval’nost’; also see her autobiography, Talking about God Is Dangerous: My Experiences in the East and in the West (London: SCM, 1986).
24 Tatiana Goricheva, ‘Zadachi khristianskogo prosveshcheniia: Vystuplenie na vstrechi redaktsii, avtorov i chitatelei dvukh svobodnykh religioznykh zhurnalov; “Obshchina” (Moskva) i zhurnala khristianskoi kul’tury “37” (Leningrad); Leningrad, 22 fevral’ia 1979’, in Khristianskii Seminar, Vol. 39 (Frankfurt: Posev, 1981), 34–41, 40.
25 The Religious-Philosophical Seminar was one of many unofficial study groups in 1970s Leningrad. For basic information, see Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningradа, 445–47. For a detailed survey and interpretation, see von Zitzewitz, Poetry and the Leningrad Religious-Philosophical Seminar 1976–1980, ch. 1.
26 Confirmed by Viktor Krivulin: ‘the journal “37” emerged as a natural continuation of the religious-philosophical and literary seminars with their atmosphere of discussion’ (Krivulin, ‘“37”, Severnaia pochta’, 77).
27 Goricheva confirmed to me that these exchanges were written explicitly for publication in the journal (Goricheva, interview).
28 Reader no. 7, responding to a questionnaire about reading experience distributed with no. 16, published in no. 17. Almost all respondents complained that part of the journal was conceptually inaccessible to them.
29 Goricheva, interview.
30 Goricheva, ‘Mne nadoeli podval’nost’.
31 Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 153. 37 no. 20 was dedicated to Goricheva and contained a short text and photographs taken on the eve of her departure.
32 Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 458.
33 Krivulin, ‘“37”, Severnaia pochta’, 89–90.
34 To give only a few examples, Chasy no. 1 included Goricheva’s translation of one of Karl Jaspers’s lectures from the series Der philosophische Glaube: Fünf Vorlesungen (Munich/Zurich, 1948); Chasy no. 2 featured a text by Merleau-Ponty on the phenomenology of language; Chasy no. 3 featured Albert Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus.
35 For example: B.I. [Boris Ivanov], ‘Na seminare’, Chasy, no. 12 (1978); Anonymous, ‘Na seminare “Religiia i kul’tura”’, Chasy, no. 15 (1978).
36 For example, Chasy no. 9, which includes the first translation of several stories by Jorge Luis Borges, originally published in 37 no 11. Confirmed by Boris Ostanin, interview with the author, 20 August 2015. Chasy also published an issue consisting of materials from Obvodnyi kanal and another after Mitin zhurnal.
37 Ostanin, interview. A full set of Chasy can be found in the digital archive of the Andrei Belyi Centre, ‘Arkhiv zhurnala “Chasy”’, last updated 28 February 2014. Available online: http://samizdat.wiki/%D0%90%D1%80%D1%85%D0%B8%D0%B2_%D0%B6%D1%83%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B0_%C2%AB%D0%A7%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%8B%C2%BB (accessed 16 May 2020).
38 Ostanin is citing Boris Ivanov almost verbatim, cf. Boris Ivanov, Istoriia Kluba-81 (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Ivana Limbakha, 2015), 36.
39 Kolker, ‘Ostrova blazhennykh’; emphasis in the original.
40 This phenomenon is analysed in Schmidt, ‘Postprintium?’, 227.
41 Goricheva, ‘Mne nadoeli podval’nost’.
42 Two writers who remember being encouraged to submit to Chasy are Andrei Ar’ev, who published a prose piece in Chasy no. 1, and the poet Boris Likhtenfel’d. Andrei Ar’ev, interview with the author, 16 July 2015; Boris Likhtenfel’d, interview with the author, 25 July 2015.
43 Boris Ostanin, interview.
44 See Natalia Shkaeva, ‘“Bez redaktsii starykh Bolshevikov andegraunda” ili chto takoe Chasy’, Cogita, 12 October 2011. Available online: http://www.cogita.ru/news/sobytiya-i-anonsy-2009-2011/abbez-redakcii-staryh-bolshevikov-andegraundabb-ili-chto-takoe-abchasybb (accessed 8 January 2019).
45 Ostanin, interview. Ivanov himself formulated that Chasy had the explicit task to provide structure for the unofficial cultural process (Ivanov, Istoriia Kluba-81, 32, 36).
46 Ostanin, interview.
47 Andrei Belyi Prize, ‘O premii’. Available online: http://belyprize.ru/index.php?id=3 (accessed 7 October 2019). Ostanin, who serves as the director of the prize-giving committee, is now the director of the Andrei Belyi Centre, a well-known venue for literary events in contemporary St Petersburg.
48 For conference reports and papers, see 37 no. 19 (1979) and Chasy nos. 21, 22 (1979), 23, 24 (1980). See also V. Nechaev, ‘Nravstvennoe znachenie neofitsial’noi kul’tury v Rossii: Materialy konferentsii v muzee sovremennoi zhivopisi’, Poiski 1 (1979): 303–14; and Ivanov, Istoriia Kluba-81, 20–1.
49 About the second, inter-city conference being secret, see Dolinin and Severiukhin, Preodolenie nemoty, 88.
50 Sergei Stratanovskii, interview with the author, 14 August 2015.
51 Krivulin, ‘“37”, Severnaia pochta’, 75.
52 Sergei Dediulin, ‘“Tam byl gorod.” “Severnaia pochta”: iz vozpominanii o real’nom sotrudnichestve redaktsii s poetami i kritikami’, in Jean-Philippe Jaccard (ed.), Vtoraia kul’tura: Neofitsial’naia poeziia Leningrada v 1970-e–1980-e gody (St Petersburg: Rostok, 2013), 84–113. See pp. 100–03 for a perceptive if polemical assessment of both journals’ shortcomings.
53 Stratanovskii, interview.
54 One of the first theoretical discussions of conceptualism, Boris Groys’s now iconic ‘Moskovskii romanticheskii kontseptualizm’, was first published in 37 no. 15 (1978).
55 Kirill Butyrin, ‘U istokov Obvodnogo kanala’, in Viacheslav Dolinin and Boris Ivanov (eds), Samizdat: Po materialam konferentsii ‘30 let nezavisimoi pechati; 1950–80 gody’; S.-Peterburg, 25–27 aprelia 1992 (St Petersburg: NITs ‘Memorial’, 1993), 124–29, 126–27.
56 Ibid., 128.
57 Kolker, ‘Ostrova blazhennykh’.
58 Evgenii Gollerbakh, ‘Table of contents for the journal Obvodnyi kanal’, unpublished. Shared with me by Sergei Stratanovskii.
59 Stratanovskii, interview.
60 Ibid.
61 Kolker, ‘Ostrova blazhennykh’.
62 Butyrin, cited in Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 435.
63 Gollerbakh, ‘Table of Contents’.
64 The first ten issues of Obvodnyi kanal are held in the archive of the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen, see Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat, ‘Obvodnyi kanal’. Available online: https://samizdatcollections.library.utoronto.ca/islandora/object/samizdat%3Aobvodnyikanal (accessed 4 June 2019).
65 Sergei Dediulin, ‘Severnaia pochta: Zhurnal stikhov i kritiki’, Bibliograf vypusk 2 (Paris: Russkii institut v Parizhe, 2001).A complete set of Severnaia pochta is held in the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen. See Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat, ‘Severnaia pochta’. Available online: https://samizdatcollections.library.utoronto.ca/islandora/object/samizdat%3Asevernaiapochta (accessed 4 June 2019).
66 Dediulin, ‘“Tam byl gorod.”’. His collaboration with Krivulin is detailed onpp. 103–04.
67 First published in Severnaia pochta 1/2 (1979) under the pseudonym A. Kalomirov. The article is based on a paper given at one of the conferences on the significance of unofficial culture in 1979. See Viktor Krivulin, ‘Dvadtsat’ let noveishei russkoi poezii’, Mikhail Gendelev. Available online: http://gendelev.org/kontekst/leningrad/439-viktor-krivulin-dvadtsat-let-novejshej-russkoj-poezii.html (accessed 4 March 2019).
68 Compare Chapter 6. Examples that make extensive use of material prepared by the critics of the 1970s and 1980s include Aleksandr Zhitenev, Poeziia neomodernizma (St Petersburg: Inapress, 2012); and Josephine von Zitzewitz, ‘Self-Canonisation as a Way into the Canon: the Case of the Leningrad Underground’, Australian and East European Studies 31 (2017): 197–228.
69 Compare Chapter 3. Dediulin describes in detail how his flat was searched and his personal archive confiscated, how the KGB saw how many samizdat works he was producing and must have concluded that the biggest part of the collection was elsewhere. See Marco Sabbatini, ‘K istorii sozdanii “Severnoi pochty”; O Viktore Krivuline; Interv’iu s Sergeem Dediulinym’ (Paris: Assotsiatsiia ‘Russkii institut v Parizhe’, 2004), 5.
70 Ivanov, Istoriia Kluba-81, 29, 37; see also Yurii Kolker, ‘Leningradskii Klub 81’, Dvadtsat’ Dva 39 (1984). Available online: http://yuri-kolker.com/articles/Club-81.htm (accessed 4 March 2019).
71 Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 450.
72 For details on Transponans, see Ilya Kukui, ‘Laboratoriia avangarda: Zhurnal Transponans’, Russian Literature 59, nos. 2–4 (2006), 225–59. A full set of the journal can be seen online, see Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat, ‘Zhurnal teorii i praktiki “Transponans”’.
73 That Transponans belongs to the Leningrad tradition is confirmed by its inclusion into the encyclopaedia, Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 456.
74 Information on the journals can be found in Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 404–06 and 425–26.
75 Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 414. Issues of Krasnyi Shchedrinets can be found in the archive of the Research and Information Centre Memorial in St Petersburg.
76 Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 455–56. The volume O.N. Ansberg and A.D. Margolis (eds), Obshchestvennaia zhizn’ Leningrada v gody perestroiki: Sbornik materialov (St Petersburg: Serebriannyi vek, 2009) documents the unique spirit of the Perestroika years and is particularly valuable in this context for the many first person accounts describing the many new semi-official journals that sprang up during that period.
77 Email from Dmitrii Volchek to the author, 27 August 2015.
78 Ibid.
79 Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 429.
90 Volchek, email. Valentina Parisi’s volume features an entire chapter on the ideal versus the real reader: ‘Lettore ideale e lettore reale’, see Parisi, Il lettore eccedente, 81–106.
81 Olga Abramovich, telephone interview with the author, 27 August 2015.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid.
84 Volchek, email.
85 See Kolonna Publications, ‘Magazine’. Available online: http://kolonna.mitin.com/?page=magazine (accessed 16 May 2020).
86 Krivulin, ‘“37”, Severnaia pochta’, 81.
87 Il’ia Kukui, Predislovie; “Sokhranit’ nit’ poeticheskogo avangarda”: zhurnal teorii i praktiki “Transponans”’, Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat, October 2015. Available online: https://samizdatcollections.library.utoronto.ca/content/%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B5 (accessed 7 September 2018).
88 Ry Nikonova [Anna Tarshis], ‘Anketnaia ikra Obvodnogo kanala’, Transponans, no. 34 (1986).
89 A similar questionnaire had been distributed on the occasion of the anniversary of Alexander Blok in 1980 by Dialog and was reprinted in Severnaia pochta no. 8. For a discussion on the phenomenon of such questionnaires, see Josephine von Zitzewitz, ‘Reader Questionnaires in Samizdat Journals: Who owns Alexander Blok?’, in Juliane Furst and Josie McLellan (eds), Dropping out of Socialism (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016), 107–27.
90 Liudmila Alekseeva explicitly lists religiosity as one of three categories of dissent in Istoriia inakomysliia v SSSR; another scholar who uses the term ‘Orthodox dissent’ is Jane Ellis, The Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History, Keston Book No. 22 (London: Croom Helm, 1986).
91 Materials on issues affecting the neophyte Christians in contemporary society were regularly published in 37. They include ‘Christianity and Ethics’ in no. 6, ‘Christianity and Humanism’ in nos. 7 and 8, and ‘Contemporary Christianity’ in no. 9. Milutin Janjic dedicated his PhD thesis to the question of theology in 37, published as Leningrad’s Religious-philosophical Seminar: A Place of Encounter Between Text and Mission (Berkeley, CA: Graduate Theological Union, 2015).
92 Two scholars who offer valuable insight into the resurgence of Russian nationalism in the late Soviet Union are Yitzhak Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State 1953–1991 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Nikolai Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia: Dvizhenie russkikh natsionalistov v SSSR; 1953–1985 (Мoscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003).
93 The persecution of Veche is detailed by Leonid Borodin, one of the journal’s editors, in his memoir Bez vybora (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2003), 184. Borodin explicitly identified Moskovskii sbornik as a continuation of Veche (ibid.).
94 For details, see Khristianskii Seminar, vol. 39 (Frankfurt: Posev, 1981). In their manifesto the seminar members voice their ‘thirst for a living Christian communication of love’, ‘the vital need to strengthen the Orthodox worldview’ and proclaim the first aim of their group to be ‘service of the cause of Russia’s Spiritual Renaissance’ (Khristianskii Seminar, 5–6). The Christian Seminar’s journal, called Obshchina (Community), was short-lived; leaders managed to produce nineteen copies of a single issue before they were arrested in 1979 and sentenced to long terms in a labour camp, illustrating the heightened risk of persecution run by samizdat activists whose interests might be deemed political. See also the reminiscences of Alexander Ogorodnikov, the Seminar’s founder: ‘Monolog o seminare – fragment kruglogo stola’, Okhapkinskie chteniia Almanakh No 2, edited by Tat’iana Koval’kova (St Petersburg: Russkaia kul’tura, 2018), 29–35.
95 Goricheva, ‘Mne nadoeli podval’nost’.
96 Butyrin, ‘U istokov Obvodnogo kanala’, 127.
97 Savitskii, Andegraund, 29. The chapter is entitled ‘Ugon samoleta s dukhovnymi tseliami’.
98 Goricheva, ‘Mne nadoeli podval’nost’.
99 Goricheva, interview.
100 Goricheva, ‘Mne nadoeli podval’nost’.
101 Ibid.
102 Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 457.
103 See Liudmila Polikovskaia, ‘Zhurnal “37”’, Antologiia samizdata. Available online: http://antology.igrunov.ru/after_75/periodicals/37/ (accessed 16 May 2020); the entry corresponds to Krivulin’s words in Krivulin, ‘“37”, Severnaia pochta’, 76.
104 Goricheva, ‘Mne nadoeli podval’nost’.
105 Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 458; Ostanin, interview.
106 The émigré journal Posev regularly published new information about the Religious-Philosophical Seminar (see no. 3 [1977], no. 9 [1979], no. 3 [1980]); Vestnik RKhD printed disjointed excerpts from 37 (see no. 118 [1976], no. 121 [1977], no. 123 [1977]).
107 Krivulin, ‘“37”, Severnaia pochta’, 76.
108 Archive of the Research Centre for East European Studies. Fond No. 75 (Boris Groys Collection).
109 Goricheva, interview.
110 Galina Drozdetskaia, interview with the author, 10 July 2015.
111 Ostanin, interview.
112 Ibid.
113 Kirill Kozyrev, interview with the author, 7 July 2015. Kozyrev also replied to the samizdat reader survey and remembers his reason for typing and circulating samizdat as ‘My close acquaintance and friendship with the editors of the journals Chasy, “37”, Obvodnyi kanal and others’ (in reply to Question 17/17.1: ‘Which samizdat activity were you involved in? You can tick several options. Please give details about your answer.’).
114 Ostanin, interview.
115 Natalia Volokhonskaia, interview with the author, 12 July 2015.
116 Ostanin, interview.
117 Kozyrev, interview.
118 Ostanin, interview.
119 Including that of the Andrei Belyi Centre, ‘Zhurnal “Chasy”, last updated 25 June 2013. Available online: http://arch.susla.ru/index.php/%D0%96%D1%83%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BB_%C2%AB%D0%A7%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%8B%C2%BB,_%D0%A2%D0%BE%D0%BC_%E2%84%961 (accessed 16 May 2020).
120 Irina Tsurkova, interview with the author, 13 August 2015. On Perspektiva and the persecution of its makers, see ‘Delo “levoi oppozitsii” 3 (1979, 4–1)’, Vesti iz SSSR, no. 4 (16 February 1979). Available online: https://vesti-iz-sssr.com/2016/11/20/delo-levoi-oppositsii-1979-4-1/ (accessed 14 June 2019); Alexander Skobov, ‘“Perspektiva” – zhurnal novykh levykh’, in Viacheslav Dolinin and Boris Ivanov (eds), Samizdat: Po materialam konferentsii ‘30 let nezavisimoi pechati; 1950–80 gody’ (St Petersburg: NITs ‘Memorial’, 1993), 105–14.
121 Kozyrev, interview. His comments apply specifically to Chasy.
122 Previously, Dediulin had made annotated ‘literary supplements’ of the classics for a samizdat journal entitled LOB, which he had produced with his university circle of friends, as well as an anthology on Akhmatova. See Sabbatini, ‘K istorii sozdanii “Severnoi pochty”’, 3–4.
123 Krivulin, ‘“37”, Severnaia pochta’, 80.
124 Kolker, ‘Ostrova blazhennykh’.
125 Dediulin, ‘“Tam byl gorod.”’, 107.
126 Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 450.
127 Kozyrev, interview.
128 Krivulin, ‘“37”, Severnaia pochta’, 75.
129 Ibid., 77.
130 Ibid., 80.
131 For example, see A. Kalomirov [Viktor Krivulin], ‘Problema sovremennoi russkoi poezii. Stat’ia 1; Iosif Brodsky; Mesto’, 37, no. 9 (1977): 204–14; also see Lev Losev (ed.), Poetika Brodskogo: Sbornik statei (Tenafly, NJ: Hermitage, 1986), 219–29. I owe this point to Anna Borovskaya, who raised them on the panel ‘In Search of a Light in the Darkness: Cultural Restoration in the Works of Natalya Gorbanevskaia and Victor Krivulin’ at the ASEEES Convention in Boston, December 2018. Borovskaya also pointed out that Krivulin claimed to only ever having translated Czesław Miłosz, in an interview with Tatiana Kosinova (see Kosinova, Polski mit: Polska w oczach sowieckich dysydentów [Krakow: Instytut Książki-Nowaja Polsza, 2012], 120). Mikhail Sheinker, a close friend of Krivulin, affirmed that Krivulin translated with the help of literal versions done by his friends who were fluent in the respective language. (Mikhail Sheinker, interview with the author, 26 August 2015).
132 Viktor Krivulin, ‘Fragment poemy’, 37, no. 9 (1977): 26.
133 Viktor Krivulin, ‘Pol’sha kak background’, Novaya Pol'sha 10 (2011). Available online: http://novpol.org/ru/S16PIuMPi-/POLShA-KAK-BACKGROUND (accessed 10 January 2019).
134 The stories in question are ‘Vavilonskaia biblioteka’ (‘La Biblioteca de Babel’, 1941), ‘Sad s razdvaivaiushchimisia dorozhkami’ (‘El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan’, 1941), ‘P’er Menar – avtor Don Kikhota’ (‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’, 1939).
135 Goricheva, interview. On the subject of theological literature, Goricheva remarked: ‘We had nothing at all. Tourists would sometimes bring a random book, sometimes Ratzinger, sometimes Rahner, sometimes Balthasar’.
136 I have investigated the Publichka’s records on selected Western thinkers and theologians mentioned or published in samizdat journals (Martin Heidegger, Mircea Eliade, Edmund Husserl, Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Buber, Roland Barthes, Emile Durkheim, Erich Fromm, Jacques Maritain, Dominique Grisoni, George Orwell, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Jung, Max Scheler). Unlike the electronic catalogue, the disused card index retains a record of the date of acquisition. The records show that foreign-language editions (including English translations of German thinkers) that appeared after 1953 were mostly acquired within five years of the publication date, although it is impossible to conclude on the basis of this data that their works were collected systematically. During the 1960s, the Publichka acquired a particularly large number of foreign-language works in philosophy and theology. Thus Goricheva is correct when she replied to my question about foreign-language editions in the library ‘Everything was in the Publichka, but few people would read it’ (Goricheva, interview).
137 To give only a few examples, Chasy no. 1 included Goricheva’s translation of one of Karl Jaspers’s lectures from the series Der philosophische Glaube.
138 Ostanin, interview. The Book of the Dead, Chasy, no. 17; Beckett, Breath, Chasy, no. 10, trilogy of Beckett (Molloy – Melone dies – The Unnameable) as a literary supplement in 1979; Robbe-Grillet, Chasy, no. 59; Bonhoeffer, ‘Letters from Prison’, Chasy, no. 5; Barth, Christian Ethics, Chasy, no. 7; Tillich, The Courage to Be, chapters in Chasy, no. 4, The Protestant Era, chapters in Chasy, nos. 7, 51, 53, 55, 57, 60, 71, 72. A list of all translations published in Chasy can be found in the index to the journal, see Andrei Belyi Centre, ‘Index of Authors’.
139 Dolinin and Severiukhin, Preodolenie nemoty, 96. Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, provides a list of translated authors on pp. 443–44.
140 Stratanovskii, interview.
141 Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 431.
142 Krivulin, ‘“37”, Severnaia pochta’, 75.
143 Boris Likhtenfel’d, interview with the author, 25 August 2015.
144 Stratanovskii, interview.
145 Butyrin, ‘U istokov Obvodnogo kanala’, 126.
Chapter 6
1 Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), further developed by David Barton and Karin Tusting in Beyond Communities of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
2 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1979. See also his Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge Polity Press, 1991), 30 ff.
3 Wenger, Beyond Communities of Practice, 2.
4 Ibid.
5 For a table with details on the persecution of each editor, see Wikipedia, ‘Khronika tekushchikh sobytii’, last updated 30 April 2020. Available online: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A5%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0_%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%83%D1%89%D0%B8%D1%85_%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%8B%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%B9 (accessed 17 May 2020).
6 See Chapter 5, n. 93.
7 See Chapter 5, n. 94.
8 Sergei Oushakine, ‘The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat’, Public Culture 13, no. 2 (2001): 191–214, 207–08. For a complication of a view which positions dissenters in the same semantic field as official discourse, see Benjamin Nathans and Kevin M.F. Platt, ‘Socialist in Form, Indeterminate in Content: The Ins and Outs of Late Soviet Culture’, Ab Imperio, no. 2 (2011): 301–24, 316–17.
9 The fundamental openness of many groups in the 1970s, which did not employ conspiracy measures precisely because they did not engage in any activities that could be labelled ‘dissident’, chimes with the assessment of historian and sociologist Nikolai Mitrokhin. He distinguishes between ‘underground’ groups (podpol’nye), that is, circles of like-minded people that were accessible only to the initiated and abounded until the end of the 1960s, and the ‘unofficial’ cultural and political groups (neofitsial’nye) that replaced them after 1968, which existed openly and were tolerated by the security services. See Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia, 183.
10 The quotation is from Sergei Stratanovskii’s obituary of Oleg Okhapkin, see Dmitrii Volchek, ‘Tol’ko stikhi. Pamiati Olega Okhapkina’, Svoboda, 10 October 2008. Available online: http://www.svoboda.org/content/article/468261.html (accessed 23 October 2019).
11 Boris Ostanin and Alexander Kobak, ‘Molniia i raduga. Puti kul’tury 60–89-kh godov’, in Molniia i raduga: literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i 1980-kh godov (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo imeni N.I. Novikova, 2003), 9–38, 33.
12 Ostanin defines these terms, see ibid., 14–16.
13 Kolker, ‘Ostrova blazhennykh’; emphasis in the original. ‘Discrediting the Soviet social or political order’ was the crime punishable under Article 90 of the Soviet Criminal Code.
14 As told to Marco Sabbatini in ‘K istorii sozdanii “Severnoi pochty”’, 3.
15 The term belongs to Friederike Kind-Kovacs, Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014), 426.
16 Natalia Chernykh, ‘Kontsert dlia geniia pervonachal’noi nishchety’. Available online: http://nattch.narod.ru/nbmironov.html (accessed 15 May 2020).
17 Popularized by and attributed to Stalin, who used it in 1932 at a meeting with Soviet writers. In fact he was quoting the novelist Yurii Olesha. See ‘Inzhenery chelovecheskikh dush’.
18 See Chapter 1, n. 52.
19 Elena Rusakova, interview with the author, 9 August 2015. Poet Elena Pudovkina has written a short memoir on her teachers in Derzanie and literary youth clubs in general: Elena Pudovkina, ‘Klub “Derzanie”’, Pchela nos. 26–7 (2000).
20 Svetlana Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 120.
21 In their theoretical and critical writings many underground writers made conscious use of this stance. Relevant examples, published in samizdat, are Boris Ivanov, ‘Kul’turnoe dvizhenie kak tselostnoe iavlenie’, 37, no. 19 (1979); ‘K materialam 2-oi konferentsii kul’turnogo dvizheniia’, Chasy, no. 24 (1980): 256–78; and A. Kalomirov [Viktor Krivulin], ‘Dvadtsat’ let noveishei russkoi poezii’. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the same people developed this direction of research: Viktor Krivulin, ‘U istochnikov nezavisimoi kul’tury’, Zvezda, no. 1 (1990): 184–88; ‘Peterburgskaia spiritual’naia lirika vchera i segodnia’, in Boris Ivanov and Boris Roginskii (eds), Istoriia leningradskoi nepodtsenzurnoi literatury (St Petersburg: DEAN, 2000), 99–110; Ivanov, ‘Evoliutsiia literaturnykh dvizhenii v piatidesiatye-vos’midesiatye gody’.
22 The term ‘leningradskaia shkola’ is found, for example, in Savitskii, Andegraund, 20; and Vladimir Kreid, ‘Stratanovskii i leningradskaia poeticheskaia shkola’, Novyi zhurnal 155 (1984): 103–14.
23 Krivulin, ‘U istochnikov nezavisimoi kul’tury’, 185. For a statement to the contrary, see Lev Losev, On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature (Munich: Otto Sagner, 1984). Losev, although himself a poet and member of the literary underground, who emigrated in 1976, maintained that censorship could be beneficial to art because it forces a writer to refine his means of expression.
24 There is no room in this study to trace these rediscoveries and developments with the help of concrete examples. For a linguistically informed study on the poetics of the underground, see Liudmila Zubova, Sovremennaia russkaia poeziia v kontekste istorii iazyka (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obzorenie, 2000). Stanislav Savitskii observes that the Leningrad underground poets’ orientation towards literary heritage afforded them the role of conservative philologists trying to define and ‘recreate lost historical reality’ (Savitskii, Andegraund, 119). I write about the significance of religious imagery in their work in von Zitzewitz, Poetry and the Leningrad Religious-Philosophical Seminar 1976–1980.
25 Stanislav Savitskii discusses these terms in his Andegraund, 43. At the time, those involved seem to have preferred ‘unofficial culture’. Compare: Tat’iana Goricheva, ‘O neofitsial’noi kul’ture i tserkvi’, Posev 9 (1979): 45–7; ‘Ekzistentsial’no-religioznoe znachenie neofitsial’noi kul’tury’, 37, no. 19 (1979); Tatiana Goricheva, Evgenii Pazukhin and Vladimir Poresh, ‘Diskussiia o zhurnale “37” i obshchikh zadachakh neofitsial’noi kul’tury’, 37, no. 18 (1979); Nechaev, ‘Nravstvennoe znachenie neofitsial’noi kul’tury v Rossii’.
26 Anna Katsman (Krivulina), ‘Kofe s limonom – vkus vremeni’, in Iuliia Valieva (ed.), Sumerki ‘Saigona’ (St Petersburg: Samizdat, 2009), 261–64, 261.
27 Dragomoshchenko, Arkadii and Nikolai Beliak, ‘My govorim ne o meste, a o sud’be pokolenia. Beseda s Tat’ianoi Koval’kovoi’, in Iuliia Valieva (ed.), Sumerki ‘Saigona’ (St Petersburg: Samizdat, 2009), 146–48, 147.
28 Kirill Kozyrev, interview with the author, 7 July 2015. The two Palaces of Culture Kozyrev mentioned hosted the first officially permitted exhibitions of unofficial artists, in December 1974 and September 1975. See Anatolii Basin and Larisa Skobkina, Gazanevshchina (St Petersburg: P.R.P., Seriia Avangard na Neve, 2004).
29 Stratanovskii, interview with the author, 14 August 2015.
30 To give an example, poet Oleg Okhapkin submitted a collection for publication to Lenizdat as late as 1978, but ultimately refused to comply with the request of his reviewers to introduce alterations. He described the editor’s suggestions as ‘they suggest I maim my poems’ (cited in Khristianskii Seminar, 92).
31 This is how Evgenii Pazukhin describes the Religious-Philosophical Seminar: ‘A significant proportion of those who attended the seminar were bohemians, i.e. the regulars of the famous cafe “Saigon”. They came to the sessions in order to “get off”. There was an almost complete turnover from session to session.’ Evgenii Pazukhin, ‘Russkaia religioznaia filosofiia v podpol’e’, in S. Gorbunova (ed.), Preobrazhenie: Khristianskii religiozno-filosofskii almanakh (St Petersburg: Zvezda, 1992), 19.
32 Butyrin, ‘U istokov Obvodnogo kanala’, 126.
33 Boris V. Dubin, ‘Kruzhkovyi steb i massovye kommunikatsii: K sotsiologii kul’turnogo perekhoda’, in Slovo – pis’mo – literatura: Ocherki po sotsiologii sovremennoi kul’tury (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001), 164.
34 ‘Stiob differed from sarcasm, cynicism, derision or any of the more familiar genres of absurd humour in that it required such a degree of overidentification with the object, person or idea at which it was directed that it was often impossible to tell whether it was a form of sincere support, subtle ridicule or a peculiar mixture of the two.’ Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 250, emphasis in the original.
35 The names of the laureates in different categories can be found online, see Andrei Belyi Prize, ‘O premii’.
36 For details, see von Zitzewitz, Poetry and the Leningrad Religious-Philosophical Seminar 1976–1980, ch. 1.
37 Polly McMichael makes a similar observation with regard to Soviet rock singer-songwriters within the rock community in Leningrad. See ‘After All, You’re a Rock and Roll Star (At Least That’s What They Say): Roksi and the Creation of the Soviet Rock Musician’, in The Slavonic and East European Review 83, no. 4 (2005): 664–84, esp. 667.
38 The reader can convince themselves of the seriousness of the undertaking by reading the talks as published in 37 no. 12 (1977), with an introduction by Shvarts, and from her talks on Fet and on Kuzmin, published in volume 3 of her Collected Works. For details on the ‘Shimpozium’, see Sarah Clovis-Bishop, ‘In Memoriam: Elena Andreevna Shvarts (17 March 1948–11 March 2010)’, Slavonica 16, no. 2 (2010): 112–30, 115–116, and Evgenii Pazukhin, ‘Antisotsium’, in Valieva, Sumerki Saigona, 163–70, 168–69.
39 Kozyrev, interview.
40 An instructive example of such a section can be seen in 37 no. 11 (1977).
41 As a single example, Chasy published works by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Viktor Krivulin, Elena Shvarts, Elena Ignatova, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Grigorii Pomerants, Sergei Stratanovskii, et al., in the form of ‘literaturnoe prilozhenie’.
42 Discussed in Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution, in particular, 50 ff. I discuss the repercussions in Leningrad unofficial culture in von Zitzewitz, ‘Reader Questionnaires in Samizdat Journals’.
43 The importance of distinguishing between informal (i.e. uncensored) publishing and platforms that publish indiscriminately has been discussed in Schmidt, ‘Postprintium?’, 228. Dmitrii Volchek, distinguishes between ‘regulated’ and ‘free-flow’ samizdat, citing journals such as his own Mitin zhurnal as examples of the first group. Dmitrii Volchek, ‘Skol’ko ostalos’ zhit’ samizdatu’, Mitin zhurnal, nos. 9/10 (1986), reproduced in Chasy, no. 68 (1987).
44 To give a few high-profile examples: Alexander Pushkin started publishing Sovremennik in 1836. The journals of the Silver Age include Valerii Briusov’s Symbolist Vesy (1906–1909), and the Acmeist Giperborei, edited by Sergei Gorodetskii and Nikolai Gumilev (1912–1913). In the early Soviet years, Vladimir Mayakovsky edited LEF (1923–1925) and Novyi LEF (1927–1929); in the post-Stalin years the poet Alexander Tvardovskii served as editor-in-chief of Novyi mir from 1950–1954 and 1958–1970.
45 A list of their critical works can be found under their biographical entries in Samizdat Leningrada.
46 Shortly before his death in 2015, Boris Ivanov published the entire history of Klub-81, including foundation documents and correspondence with official bodies: Istoriia Kluba-81. Originals of a list of members and foundation documents are held in the archive of the Research and Information Centre Memorial, St Petersburg.
47 Ivanov, Istoriia Kluba-81, 32.
48 Ibid., 34.
49 Kolker, ‘Leningradskii Klub 81’.
50 Klub-81 and Krug are described in Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 410–13 and 415–16 respectively.
51 For the Solzhenitsyn Foundation, see Chapter 1, n. 27. For the Christian Seminar, see Chapter 5, n. 94.
52 Ivanov, Istoriia Kluba-81, 28–9, 37.
53 Ibid., 46.
54 Ivanov’s memoir confirms this thesis. Eduard Shneiderman, himself a member of Klub-81, describes this process and provides a list of new tamizdat publications in ‘Klub-81 i KGB,’ Zvezda, no. 8 (2004): 209–17.
55 Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 170–71.
56 Kolker, ‘Leningradskii Klub 81’.
57 Eduard Shneiderman, ‘Chto ia izdaval, v chem ia uchastvoval’, in Viacheslav Dolinin and Boris Ivanov (eds), Samizdat: Po materialam konferentsii ‘30 let nezavisimoi pechati; 1950–80 gody’ (St Petersburg: NITs ‘Memorial’, 1993), 46–57, 55. Shneiderman was one of the editors of Ostrova and links the anthology to the emergence of Klub-81.
58 Yurii Kolker, ‘Ostrovitianki: iz Antologii Ostrova’, Strelets 10 (1987). Available online: http://yuri-kolker.com/articles/Ostrovityanki.htm (accessed 21 September 2018).
59 Shneiderman, ‘Chto ia izdaval’, 55.
60 Kuzminskii and Kovalev, The Blue Lagoon Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry.
61 See Yurii Novikov, ‘Stroitel’ vavilonskoi bashni (K portretu K. Kuz’minskogo)’, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 31 (1998): 328–33.
62 Kolker, ‘Ostrovitianki’.
63 For bibliographical information, see Severiukhin et al., Samizdat Leningrada, 438–39; and Shneiderman, ‘Chto ia izdaval’, 56.
64 Some individual writers – Shvarts, Dragomoshchenko, Stratanovskii – have achieved individual fame and are actively studied. There are now several book-length studies on the aesthetics and literary theory of the Leningrad underground, including Savitskii’s Andegraund; Marco Sabbatini, ‘Quel Che Si Metteva In Rima’: Cultura E Poesia Underground a Leningrado (Salerno: Europa Orientalis, 2008); Zhitenev, Poeziia neomodernizma; the essay collection Vtoraia kul’tura: Neofitsial’naia poeziia Leningrada v 1970-e–1980-e gody, edited by Jean-Philippe Jaccard; von Zitzewitz, Poetry and the Leningrad Religious-Philosophical Seminar 1974–1980.
65 Conferences: Vtoraia kul’tura: Neofitsial’naia poeziia Leningrada v 1970-e–1980-e gody (University of Geneva, 2011); ‘Poetika i poetologiia iazykovykh poiskov v nepodtsenzurnoi i sovremennoi poezii’ (Higher School of Economics, Moscow, organized in collaboration with the University of Trier- DFG-Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe ‘Russischsprachige Lyrik in Transition’, 2018). See Nikolai Podosokorskii, ‘Konferentsiia “Poetika i poetologiia iazykovykh poiskov v nepodtsenzurnoi i sovremennoi poezii”’, Live Journal, 25 April 2019. Available online: https://philologist.livejournal.com/10873150.html (accessed 17 May 2020).
66 Two highly frequented groups are: International Samizdat [Research] Association. Facebook community, created 22 October 2012. Available online: https://www.facebook.com/samizdat.community/; and Samizdat. Facebook group. Available online: https://www.facebook.com/groups/353375628083079/ (both accessed 16 May 2020).
67 Mark Lipovetsky, Tomáš Glanc, Maria Engström, Ilja Kukui and Klavdia Smola (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2021).
68 Stratanovskii, interview.
69 Kozyrev, interview.
70 Stratanovskii, interview.
71 A review of Chasy no. 15, reviewed in Summa in 1979, affirms: ‘In these publications the Leningrad cultural movement explained itself as a phenomenon and recognized its own issues’ (republished in Vershik et al., “Summa” – za svobodnuiu mysl’, 86). The author of this review is Sergei Maslov, whose perceptive analysis already emphasizes Chasy’s preoccupation with reflecting the situation of unofficial culture. The writer and editor Andrei Ar’ev, who has been editing the prominent literary journal Zvezda (Star) since 1990, remarked that ‘those underground [writers] which later, beginning in the late 1980s, began to appear in print, had mainly passed through Chasy’ (Andrei Ar’ev, interview with the author, 16 July 2015).
72 Definitions of canonicity are naturally contingent. Comparatively non-contentious ones include: (1) published book-length collections, (2) inclusion in anthologies not focused on the ‘underground’, (3) published translations, both single-author collections and anthologized poems, and (4) scholarly interest beyond studies focused on the social aspects of unofficial culture. The ‘big names’ of Leningrad unofficial poetry – Krivulin, Shvarts, Stratanovskii, Dragomoshchenko and a few others – fulfil every one of them.
73 And they were successful: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, the most prestigious Russian literary and academic journal today, dedicated their central section to ‘Leningrad Poetry from the 1950s–1980s’ as early as 1995 (no. 14); the editors understood ‘Leningrad Poetry’ to mean ‘unofficial poetry’, publishing material relating to the people whose names feature in this and the preceding chapter. No. 115 in 2012 dedicated a section to ‘From the Archives of Leningrad Uncensored Poetry’, in honour of Elena Shvarts and Alexander Mironov who both died in 2010.
74 Dolinin and Ivanov, Samizdat.
75 Dolinin and Severiukhin, Preodolenie nemoty. Dolinin also published a miscellaneous collection of stories and memories about his activity: Viacheslav Dolinin, Ne stol’ otdalennaia kochegarka: Rasskazy, vospominaniia (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo N.I. Novikova, 2005).
76 Compare his work pre-Perestroika: Ivanov, ‘Po tu storonu ofitsial’nosti (iz knigi “Chazy kul’tury”)’; ‘Povtorenie proidennogo’, Chasy, no. 12 (1978); ‘Tserkovnaia vera i vera v miru’, Chasy, no. 13 (1978): 157–78; ‘Kul’turnoe dvizheniie kak tselostnoe iavlenie’, 37, no. 19 (1979); ‘K materialam 2-oi konferentsii kul’turnogo dvizheniia’, Chasy, no. 24 (1980): 256–78. And these are some examples of his publications after the end of the Soviet Union: ‘Po tu storonu ofitsial’nosti’; ‘V bytnost’ Peterburga Leningradom’; ‘Evoliutsiia literaturnykh dvizhenii v piatidesiatye-vos’midesiatye gody’.
77 This phenomenon has been analysed in Jens Herlth, ‘“Chem ty dyshish’ i zhivesh’ … ”: O sootnoshenii istorii i kul’tury v tvorchestve Viktora Krivulina’, in Jean-Philippe Jaccard (ed.), Vtoraia kul’tura: Neofitsial’naia poeziia Leningrada v 1970-e–1980-e gody (St Petersburg: Rostok, 2013), 309–27, 309–11.
78 Published in Severnaia pochta 1/2 (1979), see Kalomirov [Krivulin], ‘Dvadtsat’ let noveishei russkoi poezii’.
79 Stratanovskii, interview.
80 In their introduction to the Collected Works of Leonid Aronzon, editors Petr Kazarnovskii and Ilya Kukui note that Aronzon, who died in 1970, did not get the exposure he deserved even in the literary underground precisely because the mechanisms set in motion by the journals and the groups around them were not in place during his lifetime. Kazarnovskii and Kukui, ‘Vmesto predisloviia’, 17.
81 Leonid Zhmud’s testimony refers to academic humanities rather than literature, but is nevertheless valid here as it illustrates a point that was very specific to the Soviet context: ‘In the Soviet Union of the 1970s, the situation was altogether different. Only a Party inspector or director could allow himself to criticize Ivanov, Averintsev, Lotman or Bakhtin, but certainly no decent person who was a member of the academic community. Criticism was interpreted in a Soviet vein, that is, as an element of social struggle and something that would inevitably entail organizational consequences.’ Zhmud’, ‘Studenty-istoriki mezhdu ofitsiozom i “liberal’noi”’, 208.
82 Kolker, ‘Ostrovitianki’.
83 Wenger, Communities of Practice, 58–9.
84 Wenger’s concept of reification in relation to language-based interaction is discussed in David Barton and Mary Hamilton, ‘Literacy, Reification and the Dynamics of Social Interaction’, in Beyond Communities of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 14–35. Journals score high on all four features of reification: succinctness and power to evoke meanings – a typescript journal triggers immediate associations; portability across time, physical space and context – digitization on the one hand and scholarship on the other make this possible; physical durability – the journals explicitly recorded a culture that had been oral, and many are now digitized; and focusing effect – their ability to draw attention to specific features within social reality (ibid., 27).
85 I discuss this phenomenon in von Zitzewitz, ‘Self-Canonisation as a Way into the Canon’.
86 The volume Ansberg and Margolis, Obshchestvennaia zhizn’ Leningrada v gody perestroiki: Sbornik materialov documents the mushrooming of semi-official (i.e. not linked to a Soviet institution but acting in the open) publishing houses and journals in the 1990s. For a distinction between samizdat and the ‘alternative press’ that began in 1987, see ‘Katalog periodicheskikh i prodolzhaiushchikhsia neformal’nykh izdanii na russkom iazyke v arkhive samizdata’, Materialy samizdata, no. 8 (1991): iii; Elena Strukova, Al’ternativnaia periodicheskaia pechat’ v istorii rossiiskoi mnogopartiinosti (1987–1996) (Moscow: Istoricheskaia biblioteka, 2005), 24–5.
Conclusion
1 Harrison C. White, Identity and Control: A Structural Theory of Social Action (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
2 DeNel Rehberg Sedo, ‘An Introduction to Reading Communities: Process and Formations’, in DeNel Rehberg Sedo (ed.), Reading Communities: From Salons to Cyberspace (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 5. Research into reading communities is a thriving interdisciplinary field, bringing together historians, sociologists, anthropologists and literary scholars. A search on the catalogue of the British Library yields forty-eight entries for book-length studies.
3 Boris Dubin, Klassika, posle i riadom: Sotsiologicheskie ocherki o literature i kul’ture (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010), 121–23.
4 Anatolii Vershik, interview with the author, 31 July 2015.
5 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 224.