The Culture of Samizdat: Literature and Underground Networks in the Late Soviet Union

Description

Winner of the 2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles Samizdat, the production and circulation of texts outside official channels, was an integral part of life in the final decades of the Soviet Union. But as Josephine von Zitzewitz explains, while much is known about the texts themselves, little is available on the complex communities and cultures that existed around them due to their necessarily secretive, and sometimes dissident, nature. By analysing the behaviours of different actors involved in Samizdat - readers, typists, librarians and the editors of periodicals in 1970s Leningrad, The Culture of Samizdat fills this lacuna in Soviet history scholarship. Crucially, as well as providing new insight into Samizdat texts, the book makes use of oral and written testimonies to examine the role of Samizdat activists and employs an interdisciplinary theoretical approach drawing on both the sociology of reading and book history. In doing so, von Zitzewitz uncovers the importance of 'middlemen' for Samizdat culture. Diligently researched and engagingly written, this book will be of great value to scholars of Soviet cultural history and Russian literary studies alike.

Josephine von Zitzewitz is Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow in Russian Literature at UiT - The Arctic University of Norway in Tromso, Norway. She is the author of Poetry and the Leningrad Religious-Philosophical Seminar, 1976 - 1980 (2016).

The Culture of Samizdat is the book that every student and scholar of modern Russian culture must have in her or his library. Josephine von Zitzewitz has written a concise, energetic and highly informative survey of the late Soviet literary underground. Based on the author's original interviews with actual participants of the samizdat movement (with a special attention paid to such underappreciated heroes as typists), the book blends the analysis of various aspects of samizdat production and dissemination with deep insights into the functioning of nonconformist literary groups and circles that samizdat cemented. * Mark Lipovetsky, Professor of Russian, Columbia University, USA * Based on numerous interviews and memoirs and focusing on the various people and institutions which were charged with the difficult task of disseminating samizdat, this is the first monograph to vividly describe and analyze samizdat as a complex and integral part of Soviet life. As such, The Culture of Samizdat is absolutely indispensable for all scholars of late Soviet society. * Ilya Kukulin, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia * An indispensable addition to the canon of literature about Soviet literary life and production ... this book is beautifully written and can be read with pleasure and ease. * H-Soz-Kult *