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Author: Ann Komaromi
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150176361X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
Soviet Samizdat traces the emergence and development of samizdat, one of the most significant and distinctive phenomena of the late Soviet era, as an uncensored system for making and sharing texts. Based on extensive research of the underground journals, bulletins, art folios and other periodicals produced in the Soviet Union from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, Ann Komaromi analyzes the role of samizdat in fostering new forms of imagined community among Soviet citizens. Dissidence has been dismissed as an elite phenomenon or as insignificant because it had little demonstrable impact on the Soviet regime. Komaromi challenges these views and demonstrates that the kind of imagination about self and community made possible by samizdat could be a powerful social force. She explains why participants in samizdat culture so often sought to divide "political" from "cultural" samizdat. Her study provides a controversial umbrella definition for all forms of samizdat in terms of truth-telling, arguing that the act is experienced as transformative by Soviet authors and readers. This argument will challenge scholars in the field to respond to contentions that go against the grain of both anthropological and postmodern accounts. Komaromi's combination of literary analysis, historical research, and sociological theory makes sense of the phenomenon of samizdat for readers today. Soviet Samizdat shows that samizdat was not simply a tool of opposition to a defunct regime. Instead, samizdat fostered informal communities of knowledge that foreshadowed a similar phenomenon of alternative perspectives challenging the authority of institutions around the world today.
Author: Ann Komaromi
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501763601
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311
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Book Description
Soviet Samizdat traces the emergence and development of samizdat, one of the most significant and distinctive phenomena of the late Soviet era, as an uncensored system for making and sharing texts. Based on extensive research of the underground journals, bulletins, art folios and other periodicals produced in the Soviet Union from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, Ann Komaromi analyzes the role of samizdat in fostering new forms of imagined community among Soviet citizens. Dissidence has been dismissed as an elite phenomenon or as insignificant because it had little demonstrable impact on the Soviet regime. Komaromi challenges these views and demonstrates that the kind of imagination about self and community made possible by samizdat could be a powerful social force. She explains why participants in samizdat culture so often sought to divide "political" from "cultural" samizdat. Her study provides a controversial umbrella definition for all forms of samizdat in terms of truth-telling, arguing that the act is experienced as transformative by Soviet authors and readers. This argument will challenge scholars in the field to respond to contentions that go against the grain of both anthropological and postmodern accounts. Komaromi's combination of literary analysis, historical research, and sociological theory makes sense of the phenomenon of samizdat for readers today. Soviet Samizdat shows that samizdat was not simply a tool of opposition to a defunct regime. Instead, samizdat fostered informal communities of knowledge that foreshadowed a similar phenomenon of alternative perspectives challenging the authority of institutions around the world today.
Author: John E. Bowlt
Publisher: Willis, Locker & Owens Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
Author: Friederike Kind-Kovács
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857455869
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
In many ways what is identified today as “cultural globalization” in Eastern Europe has its roots in the Cold War phenomena of samizdat (“do-it-yourself” underground publishing) and tamizdat (publishing abroad). This volume offers a new understanding of how information flowed between East and West during the Cold War, as well as the much broader circulation of cultural products instigated and sustained by these practices. By expanding the definitions of samizdat and tamizdat from explicitly political print publications to include other forms and genres, this volume investigates the wider cultural sphere of alternative and semi-official texts, broadcast media, reproductions of visual art and music, and, in the post-1989 period, new media. The underground circulation of uncensored texts in the Cold War era serves as a useful foundation for comparison when looking at current examples of censorship, independent media, and the use of new media in countries like China, Iran, and the former Yugoslavia.
Author: Ann Komaromi
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810131242
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
Literature that was self-published and informally circulated in the former Soviet Union in order to evade censorship, in addition to prosecution of its authors, came to be known as samizdat. Vasilii Aksenov, Andrei Bitov, and Venedikt Erofeev were among its most acclaimed practitioners. In her innovative study, Ann Komaromi uses their work to argue for a far more sophisticated understanding of the phenomenon of samizdat, showing how the material circumstances of its creation and dissemination exercised a profound influence on the very idea of dissidence. When a text comes to life as samizdat, it necessarily reconfigures the relationship between author and reader. Using archival research to fully illustrate samizdat’s social and historical context, Komaromi arrives at a more nuanced theoretical position that breaks down the opposition between the autonomous work of art and direct political engagement. The similarities between samizdat and digital culture give her formulation of dissident subjectivity particular contemporary relevance.
Author: Peter Reddaway
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815737742
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 374
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Book Description
The nearly forgotten story of Soviet dissidents It has been nearly three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union—enough time for the role that the courageous dissidents ultimately contributed to the communist system's collapse to have been largely forgotten, especially in the West. This book brings to life, for contemporary readers, the often underground work of the men and women who opposed the regime and authored dissident texts, known as samizdat, that exposed the tyrannies and weaknesses of the Soviet state both inside and outside the country. Peter Reddaway spent decades studying the Soviet Union and got to know these dissidents and their work, publicizing their writings in the West and helping some of them to escape the Soviet Union and settle abroad. In this memoir he captures the human costs of the repression that marked the Soviet state, focusing in particular on Pavel Litvinov, Larisa Bogoraz, General Petro Grigorenko, Anatoly Marchenko, Alexander Podrabinek, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, and Andrei Sinyavsky. His book describes their courage but also puts their work in the context of the power struggles in the Kremlin, where politicians competed with and even succeeded in ousting one another. Reddaway's book takes readers beyond Moscow, describing politics and dissident work in other major Russian cities as well as in the outlying republics.
Author: D. Zisserman-Brodsky
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403973628
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
The 'nationality question' was long central to Soviet thought and policy, and the failure to provide a convincing answer played a major role in the break-up of the Soviet Union into ethnically or nationally defined states. Zisserman-Brodsky explores various explanations of nationalism and its resurgence through a close and unprecedented examination of dissident writings of diverse ethnic groups in the former Soviet Union, thereby bridging macro-theory with micro-politics. Dissident ethnic networks were a crucial independent institution in the Soviet Union, and a basis of civil society. Voicing the discontent and resentment of the periphery at the policies of the centre or metropole, the dissident writings, known as samizdat highlighted anger at deprivations imposed in the political, cultural, social and economic spheres. Ethnic dissident writings drew on values both internal to the Soviet system and international as sources of legitimation; they met a divided reaction among Russians, with some privileging the unity of the Soviet Union and others sympathetic to the rhetoric of national rights. This focus on national, rather than individual, rights helps explain developments since the fall of the Soviet Union, including the prevalence of authoritarian governments in newly independent states of the former Soviet Union.
Author: Tomáš Glanc
Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
ISBN: 8024640333
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245
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Book Description
This anthology of texts by Czech literary scientists presents the phenomenon of the samizdat and its historical transformation. The chapters primarily focus on the definition of the samizdat itself as well as the extensive controversy over the concept of unofficial literature. The scholars also pay attention to the origin, development and characteristics of the various samizdat editions; individual chapters are devoted to underground production and censorship. One chapter deals with the relationship between domestic samizdat production and exile literature. In the final chapters of the publication, samizdat is covered also in the international context, in particular in the Polish and Russian contexts. This book, Samizdat Past and Present, is a representative publication presenting the diverse forms of samizdat and has the potential to become a basic guide on the issue.
Author: Josephine von Zitzewitz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350142646
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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Book 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.
Author: Ludmila Ulitskaya
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374709718
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 581
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Book Description
“The Big Green Tent, for all its grand ambition, manages an intimacy that can leave a reader reeling . . . a masterpiece.” ―Colin Dwyer, NPR With epic breadth and intimate detail, Ludmila Ulitskaya’s remarkable novel tells the story of three school friends who meet in Moscow in the 1950s and go on to embody the heroism, folly, compromise, and hope of the Soviet dissident experience. These three boys—an orphaned poet; a gifted pianist; and a budding photographer with a talent for collecting secrets—struggle to reach adulthood in a society where their heroes have been censored and exiled. Rich with love stories, intrigue, and a cast of dissenters and spies, The Big Green Tent offers a panoramic survey of life after Stalin and a dramatic investigation into the prospects for individual integrity in a society defined by the KGB. Each of the central characters seeks to transcend an oppressive regime through art, literature, and activism. And each of them ends up face-to-face with a secret police that is highly skilled at fomenting paranoia, division, and self-betrayal. Ludmila Ulitskaya’s novel is a revelation of life in dark times. “As grand, solid and impressively all-encompassing as the title implies . . . Ulitskaya's readers will find it hard not to imagine themselves in her characters' place, to ponder what choices we'd make in similar situations.” ―Lara Vapnyar, The New York Times Book Review “A gripping tale.” ―Leonid Bershidsky, The Atlantic “Compelling, addictive reading.” ―Masha Gessen, The New Yorker “[Ulitskaya] writes page-turners that just happen to be monumentally important.” ―Boris Kachka, New York magazine “Worthy of shelving alongside Doctor Zhivago: memorable and moving.” ―Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Author: Rebecca Reich
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1609092333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. State of Madness examines the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol'pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between those narratives and their life stories. The state, they suggested in their own psychiatrically themed texts, had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. In their unsanctioned poetry and prose, the writers Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, and Venedikt Erofeev similarly engaged with psychiatric discourse to probe where creativity ended and insanity began. Together, these dissenters cast themselves as psychiatrists to a sick society. By challenging psychiatry's right to declare them or what they wrote insane, dissenters exposed as a self-serving fiction the state's renewed claims to rationality and modernity in the post-Stalin years. They were, as they observed, like the child who breaks the spell of collective delusion in Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." In a society where normality means insisting that the naked monarch is clothed, it is the truth-teller who is pathologized. Situating literature's encounter with psychiatry at the center of a wider struggle over authority and power, this bold interdisciplinary study will appeal to literary specialists; historians of culture, science, and medicine; and scholars and students of the Soviet Union and its legacy for Russia today.
