Author: Friederike Kind-Kovács
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857455869
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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.
Samizdat, Tamizdat, and Beyond
Author: Friederike Kind-Kovács
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857455869
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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.
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857455869
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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.
Historical Concepts Between Eastern and Western Europe
Author: Manfred Hildermeier
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845452735
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 136
Book Description
More than a decade after the breakdown of the Soviet Empire and the reunification of Europe, historiographies and historical concepts still stood very much apart. This book talks about how there were no common efforts for joint interpretations and no attempts to reach a common understanding of central notions and concepts.
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845452735
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 136
Book Description
More than a decade after the breakdown of the Soviet Empire and the reunification of Europe, historiographies and historical concepts still stood very much apart. This book talks about how there were no common efforts for joint interpretations and no attempts to reach a common understanding of central notions and concepts.
Tamizdat
Author: Yasha Klots
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501768980
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330
Book Description
Tamizdat offers a new perspective on the history of the Cold War by exploring the story of the contraband manuscripts sent from the USSR to the West. A word that means publishing "over there," tamizdat manuscripts were rejected, censored, or never submitted for publication in the Soviet Union and were smuggled through various channels and printed outside the country, with or without their authors' knowledge. Yasha Klots demonstrates how tamizdat contributed to the formation of the twentieth-century Russian literary canon: the majority of contemporary Russian classics first appeared abroad long before they saw publication in Russia. Examining narratives of Stalinism and the Gulag, Klots focuses on contraband manuscripts in the 1960s and 70s, from Khrushchev's Thaw to Stagnation under Brezhnev. Klots revisits the traditional notion of late Soviet culture as a binary opposition between the underground and official state publishing. He shows that even as tamizdat represented an alternative field of cultural production in opposition to the Soviet regime and the dogma of Socialist Realism, it was not devoid of its own hierarchy, ideological agenda, and even censorship. Tamizdat is a cultural history of Russian literature outside the Iron Curtain. The Russian literary diaspora was the indispensable ecosystem for these works. Yet in the post-Stalin years, they also served as a powerful weapon on the cultural fronts of the Cold War, laying bare the geographical, stylistic, and ideological rifts between two disparate yet inextricably intertwined fields of Russian literature, one at home, the other abroad. Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501768980
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330
Book Description
Tamizdat offers a new perspective on the history of the Cold War by exploring the story of the contraband manuscripts sent from the USSR to the West. A word that means publishing "over there," tamizdat manuscripts were rejected, censored, or never submitted for publication in the Soviet Union and were smuggled through various channels and printed outside the country, with or without their authors' knowledge. Yasha Klots demonstrates how tamizdat contributed to the formation of the twentieth-century Russian literary canon: the majority of contemporary Russian classics first appeared abroad long before they saw publication in Russia. Examining narratives of Stalinism and the Gulag, Klots focuses on contraband manuscripts in the 1960s and 70s, from Khrushchev's Thaw to Stagnation under Brezhnev. Klots revisits the traditional notion of late Soviet culture as a binary opposition between the underground and official state publishing. He shows that even as tamizdat represented an alternative field of cultural production in opposition to the Soviet regime and the dogma of Socialist Realism, it was not devoid of its own hierarchy, ideological agenda, and even censorship. Tamizdat is a cultural history of Russian literature outside the Iron Curtain. The Russian literary diaspora was the indispensable ecosystem for these works. Yet in the post-Stalin years, they also served as a powerful weapon on the cultural fronts of the Cold War, laying bare the geographical, stylistic, and ideological rifts between two disparate yet inextricably intertwined fields of Russian literature, one at home, the other abroad. Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The Culture of Samizdat
Author: Josephine von Zitzewitz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350142646
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350142646
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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.
Make It the Same
Author: Jacob Edmond
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231548672
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 393
Book Description
The world is full of copies. This proliferation includes not just the copying that occurs online and the replication enabled by globalization but the works of avant-garde writers challenging cultural and political authority. In Make It the Same, Jacob Edmond examines the turn toward repetition in poetry, using the explosion of copying to offer a deeply inventive account of modern and contemporary literature. Make It the Same explores how poetry—an art form associated with the singular, inimitable utterance—is increasingly made from other texts through sampling, appropriation, translation, remediation, performance, and other forms of repetition. Edmond tracks the rise of copy poetry across media from the tape recorder to the computer and through various cultures and languages, reading across aesthetic, linguistic, geopolitical, and technological divides. He illuminates the common form that unites a diverse range of writers from dub poets in the Caribbean to digital parodists in China, samizdat wordsmiths in Russia to Twitter-trolling provocateurs in the United States, analyzing the works of such writers as Kamau Brathwaite, Dmitri Prigov, Yang Lian, John Cayley, Caroline Bergvall, M. NourbeSe Philip, Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Christian Bök, Yi Sha, Hsia Yü, and Tan Lin. Edmond develops an alternative account of modernist and contemporary literature as defined not by innovation—as in Ezra Pound’s oft-repeated slogan “make it new”—but by a system of continuous copying. Make It the Same transforms global literary history, showing how the old hierarchies of original and derivative, center and periphery are overturned when we recognize copying as the engine of literary change.
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231548672
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 393
Book Description
The world is full of copies. This proliferation includes not just the copying that occurs online and the replication enabled by globalization but the works of avant-garde writers challenging cultural and political authority. In Make It the Same, Jacob Edmond examines the turn toward repetition in poetry, using the explosion of copying to offer a deeply inventive account of modern and contemporary literature. Make It the Same explores how poetry—an art form associated with the singular, inimitable utterance—is increasingly made from other texts through sampling, appropriation, translation, remediation, performance, and other forms of repetition. Edmond tracks the rise of copy poetry across media from the tape recorder to the computer and through various cultures and languages, reading across aesthetic, linguistic, geopolitical, and technological divides. He illuminates the common form that unites a diverse range of writers from dub poets in the Caribbean to digital parodists in China, samizdat wordsmiths in Russia to Twitter-trolling provocateurs in the United States, analyzing the works of such writers as Kamau Brathwaite, Dmitri Prigov, Yang Lian, John Cayley, Caroline Bergvall, M. NourbeSe Philip, Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Christian Bök, Yi Sha, Hsia Yü, and Tan Lin. Edmond develops an alternative account of modernist and contemporary literature as defined not by innovation—as in Ezra Pound’s oft-repeated slogan “make it new”—but by a system of continuous copying. Make It the Same transforms global literary history, showing how the old hierarchies of original and derivative, center and periphery are overturned when we recognize copying as the engine of literary change.
Written Here, Published There
Author: Friederike Kind-Kovács
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633860237
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 522
Book Description
Written Here, Published There offers a new perspective on the role of underground literature in the Cold War and challenges us to recognize gaps in the Iron Curtain. The book identifies a transnational undertaking that reinforced détente, dialogue, and cultural transfer, and thus counterbalanced the persistent belief in Europe's irreversible division. It analyzes a cultural practice that attracted extensive attention during the Cold War but has largely been ignored in recent scholarship: tamizdat, or the unauthorized migration of underground literature across the Iron Curtain. Through this cultural practice, I offer a new reading of Cold War Europe's history. Investigating the transfer of underground literature from the 'Other Europe' to Western Europe, the United States, and back illuminates the intertwined fabrics of Cold War literary cultures. Perceiving tamizdat as both a literary and a social phenomenon, the book focuses on how individuals participated in this border-crossing activity and used secretive channels to guarantee the free flow of literature.
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633860237
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 522
Book Description
Written Here, Published There offers a new perspective on the role of underground literature in the Cold War and challenges us to recognize gaps in the Iron Curtain. The book identifies a transnational undertaking that reinforced détente, dialogue, and cultural transfer, and thus counterbalanced the persistent belief in Europe's irreversible division. It analyzes a cultural practice that attracted extensive attention during the Cold War but has largely been ignored in recent scholarship: tamizdat, or the unauthorized migration of underground literature across the Iron Curtain. Through this cultural practice, I offer a new reading of Cold War Europe's history. Investigating the transfer of underground literature from the 'Other Europe' to Western Europe, the United States, and back illuminates the intertwined fabrics of Cold War literary cultures. Perceiving tamizdat as both a literary and a social phenomenon, the book focuses on how individuals participated in this border-crossing activity and used secretive channels to guarantee the free flow of literature.
Eastern Europe Unmapped
Author: Irene Kacandes
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 178533686X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
Arguably more than any other region, the area known as Eastern Europe has been defined by its location on the map. Yet its inhabitants, from statesmen to literati and from cultural-economic elites to the poorest emigrants, have consistently forged or fathomed links to distant lands, populations, and intellectual traditions. Through a series of inventive cultural and historical explorations, Eastern Europe Unmapped dispenses with scholars’ long-time preoccupation with national and regional borders, instead raising provocative questions about the area’s non-contiguous—and frequently global or extraterritorial—entanglements.
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 178533686X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
Arguably more than any other region, the area known as Eastern Europe has been defined by its location on the map. Yet its inhabitants, from statesmen to literati and from cultural-economic elites to the poorest emigrants, have consistently forged or fathomed links to distant lands, populations, and intellectual traditions. Through a series of inventive cultural and historical explorations, Eastern Europe Unmapped dispenses with scholars’ long-time preoccupation with national and regional borders, instead raising provocative questions about the area’s non-contiguous—and frequently global or extraterritorial—entanglements.
Socialist Escapes
Author: Cathleen M. Giustino
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857456709
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294
Book Description
During much of the Cold War, physical escape from countries in the Eastern Bloc was a nearly impossible act. There remained, however, possibilities for other socialist escapes, particularly time spent free from party ideology and the mundane routines of everyday life. The essays in this volume examine sites of socialist escapes, such as beaches, campgrounds, nightclubs, concerts, castles, cars, and soccer matches. The chapters explore the effectiveness of state efforts to engineer society through leisure, entertainment, and related forms of cultural programming and consumption. They lead to a deeper understanding of state–society relations in the Soviet sphere, where the state did not simply “dictate from above” and inhabitants had some opportunities to shape solidarities, identities, and meaning.
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857456709
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294
Book Description
During much of the Cold War, physical escape from countries in the Eastern Bloc was a nearly impossible act. There remained, however, possibilities for other socialist escapes, particularly time spent free from party ideology and the mundane routines of everyday life. The essays in this volume examine sites of socialist escapes, such as beaches, campgrounds, nightclubs, concerts, castles, cars, and soccer matches. The chapters explore the effectiveness of state efforts to engineer society through leisure, entertainment, and related forms of cultural programming and consumption. They lead to a deeper understanding of state–society relations in the Soviet sphere, where the state did not simply “dictate from above” and inhabitants had some opportunities to shape solidarities, identities, and meaning.
The Making of Dissidents
Author: Victoria Harms
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822991454
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394
Book Description
Before Hungary’s transition from communism to democracy, local dissidents and like-minded intellectuals, activists, and academics from the West influenced each other and inspired the fight for human rights and civil liberties in Eastern Europe. Hungarian dissidents provided Westerners with a new purpose and legitimized their public interventions in a bipolar world order. The Making of Dissidents demonstrates how Hungary’s Western friends shaped public perceptions and institutionalized their advocacy long before the peaceful revolutions of 1989. But liberalism failed to take root in Hungary, and Victoria Harms explores how many former dissidents retreated and Westerners shifted their attention elsewhere during the 1990s, paving the way for nationalism and democratic backsliding.
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822991454
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394
Book Description
Before Hungary’s transition from communism to democracy, local dissidents and like-minded intellectuals, activists, and academics from the West influenced each other and inspired the fight for human rights and civil liberties in Eastern Europe. Hungarian dissidents provided Westerners with a new purpose and legitimized their public interventions in a bipolar world order. The Making of Dissidents demonstrates how Hungary’s Western friends shaped public perceptions and institutionalized their advocacy long before the peaceful revolutions of 1989. But liberalism failed to take root in Hungary, and Victoria Harms explores how many former dissidents retreated and Westerners shifted their attention elsewhere during the 1990s, paving the way for nationalism and democratic backsliding.
Balkan Departures
Author: Wendy Bracewell
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845452544
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 182
Book Description
In writings about travel, the Balkans appear most often as a place travelled to. Western accounts of the Balkans revel in the different and the exotic, the violent and the primitive − traits that serve (according to many commentators) as a foil to self-congratulatory definitions of the West as modern, progressive and rational. However, the Balkans have also long been travelled from. The region's writers have given accounts of their travels in the West and elsewhere, saying something in the process about themselves and their place in the world. The analyses presented here, ranging from those of 16th-century Greek humanists to 19th-century Romanian reformers to 20th-century writers, socialists and 'men-of-the-world', suggest that travellers from the region have also created their own identities through their encounters with Europe. Consequently, this book challenges assumptions of Western discursive hegemony, while at the same time exploring Balkan 'Occidentalisms'.
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845452544
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 182
Book Description
In writings about travel, the Balkans appear most often as a place travelled to. Western accounts of the Balkans revel in the different and the exotic, the violent and the primitive − traits that serve (according to many commentators) as a foil to self-congratulatory definitions of the West as modern, progressive and rational. However, the Balkans have also long been travelled from. The region's writers have given accounts of their travels in the West and elsewhere, saying something in the process about themselves and their place in the world. The analyses presented here, ranging from those of 16th-century Greek humanists to 19th-century Romanian reformers to 20th-century writers, socialists and 'men-of-the-world', suggest that travellers from the region have also created their own identities through their encounters with Europe. Consequently, this book challenges assumptions of Western discursive hegemony, while at the same time exploring Balkan 'Occidentalisms'.