Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society by Ann Komaromi (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society by Ann Komaromi Irina Shevelenko (bio) Ann Komaromi, Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022). 297 pp., ill. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-1-501-76359-5. Ann Komaromi's long-term research on Soviet samizdat – a practice of uncensored "self-publishing," primarily via the creation and dissemination of typewritten copies – has resulted in several remarkable achievements, including the online platform "Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat" (https://samizdatcollections.library.utoronto.ca/), where one can find a collection of digitized samizdat periodicals and a wealth of bibliographic and contextual information on samizdat. Komaromi's first book, Uncensored: Samizdat Novels and the Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Dissidence (2015), focused primarily on major literary works by Vasily Aksenov, Andrei Bitov, and Venedikt Erofeev that once circulated in samizdat. Its final chapter, "Samizdat and the Extra-Gutenberg Condition," reiterated her perspective on "the samizdat textual object" in Pierre Bourdieu's terms – as the embodiment of a particular type of symbolic capital whose value derived, among other things, from the autonomy that object maintained in relation to official Soviet cultural [End Page 307] institutions and their attendant ideological and aesthetic constraints. In Komaromi's new book, which does not hide its ties with her earlier study, we are presented with a different approach to samizdat. The new perspective is a welcome change for this reader, who feels that over the past several decades, the Bourdieusian analytical apparatus has become a kind of passkey that confers a sameness on all the rooms it opens. In Soviet Samizdat, Komaromi significantly broadens the scope of her material; it no longer comprises just literary samizdat or its singular exemplars but, rather, includes a vast and variegated range of "publications" produced by poets and religious groups, national minorities and feminists, rights activists and Marxist dissenters. The diversity of this material dictates a novel approach proposed by the scholar – to treat samizdat "as an alternative textual culture that facilitated the formation of new public communities in the Soviet Union after Stalin" (P. 3). This reshaping of the subject seamlessly removes the rigid opposition of official and unofficial (samizdat) culture: the actors of samizdat and their readers obviously partook in both. Komaromi's primary research question has to do with the sense of purpose that informed the activities of samizdat communities and how these communities transformed the social fabric of the post-Stalin USSR over a few decades. In each of the four chapters of her study, Komaromi introduces a range of such samizdat communities, pointing out the complexity of the samizdat map, which resists description through a singular narrative. The chronological starting point of the book is Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech," delivered in February 1956 at the closed session of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR. Komaromi argues that, among other things, this speech opened the possibility to articulate the plurality of historical narratives of the Soviet past. This, in turn, stimulated the formation of new versions of social imaginary in the present, new ways for people to "connect their individual sense of self to their society and to shared norms and values" (P. 21). In chapter 1, "Samizdat and the Historical Subject," Komaromi presents several examples of what this process entailed: from Revol't Pimenov's Information leaflets (1956–1957) to Aleksandr Ginzburg's Syntax almanacs (Sintaksis, 1959–1960) to thematic collections Memory (Pamiat', 1975–1981), to two Crimean Tatar periodicals, Information (1965–1985) and Effort (K″asevet, 1984–1994), to such subcultural venues as the rock-music journal The Ear (Ukho, 1982–1983). This array of examples emphasizes the geographic diversity and the [End Page 308] plurality of communities that found samizdat a necessary instrument, allowing them to create "networks within which people could imagine themselves differently" (P. 47). One of the ways to conceptualize the sense of mission that samizdat authors and readers shared, Komaromi suggests, is through the lens of the "Hegelian historicism" metaphor – as a means to "help their society resume its role in world history": "While literary writers and readers sought to reconnect with world culture, the rights activists connected these efforts with...