Tamizdat as a Literary Practice and Political Institution

Abstract

Abstract The article seeks to define tamizdat as a literary practice and political institution of the late Soviet era. Comprising manuscripts rejected, censored, or never submitted for publication at home but smuggled through various channels out of the country and printed elsewhere, with or without their authors’ knowledge or consent, tamizdat contributed to the formation of the twentieth-century Russian literary canon. Tamizdat thus mediated the relationships of authors in Russia with the Soviet literary establishment on the one hand and with the underground on the other, while the very prospect of having their works published abroad, let alone the consequences of such a transgression, affected these authors’ choices and ideological positions in regard to both fields. The article argues, along these lines, that tamizdat was as emblematic of the literary scene after Stalin as its more familiar and better researched domestic counterparts, samizdat and gosizdat, whereby the traditional notion of late Soviet culture as a binary opposition between the official and underground fields is reinvented, instead, as a transnationally dynamic three-dimensional model.