What is Tamizdat?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since the Soviet state declared its monopoly on publishing in 1929, many authors whose works became unpublishable at home were forced out from the official literary field into the underground and abroad. Comprising manuscripts rejected, censored or never submitted for publication in the former USSR but smuggled through various channels out of the country and published elsewhere with or without their authors’ knowledge or consent – and often for the purpose of being sent back as ideologically subversive material – tamizdat (literally, “published over there,” or abroad) was as emblematic of Soviet literary culture as its more familiar and better researched domestic counterparts, samizdat (“self-publishing”) and gosizdat (“state-publishing”). As a literary practice and political institution, tamizdat remained firmly engraved on Russian literature of the Soviet era until perestroika, when works that first saw the light of day abroad could finally make their homecoming.