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Abram Tertz. Pkhentz. Translated by Ainsley Morse, with Kevin Reese. Cover design by Aleksandr Moskovsky and Eva Tamm. New York: Tamizdat Project, 2024. 

ISBN: 979-8-9916623-0-7; printed at G&H Soho, U.S.A.

This iconic Thaw-era tale of loneliness and alienation relates the miseries of a mid-level Soviet accountant—pseudonym Andrei Sushinsky—who is actually an outer-space alien. A classic misunderstood hero, he struggles daily to keep himself alive (his cactus-like body requires abundant water and has been debilitated by years of concealment) and to avoid the constant threat of exposure. Repulsed by the gross physiology and petty concerns of his Soviet neighbors and fellow-citizens, Sushinsky dreams of reuniting with his lost planet and treasures the faint traces of it that remain: scraps of his long-lost language (hence the title word PKHENTZ, a barely remembered sacred name) and his own extravagantly nonhuman body. Meanwhile, years of life among humans and concerted efforts to assimilate have worn Sushinsky down and caused him to question his sense of reality and existence overall.

Written in 1957, the story was first published in the West in the wake of the infamous Moscow show trial of 1966, when two Soviet authors, Andrei Sinyavsky (aka. Abram Tertz) and Yuly Daniel (aka. Nikolai Arzhak) were sentenced, respectively, to seven and five years of hard labor for publishing their “slanderous” works abroad. While ostensibly addressing the experience of living with various covert identities in the mid-century Soviet Union (Jewish, dissident, political prisoner), the story’s subsequent wanderings broaden its purview to include refugee, émigré and queer experience. This inaugural publication presents the story for the first time as a freestanding edition and in a new English translation. 

Tamizdat Project is a public scholarship and charity initiative devoted to the study of banned books from the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War (“tamizdat” means, literally, “published over there,” i.e., abroad). Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the project has also been dedicated to supporting undergraduate students displaced by war or repressions in their home countries who now need to continue their education elsewhere, particularly in the U.S.

As a nonprofit and academic project, we rely on contributions from volunteers. While you do not have to be a student or academic to participate, we welcome applications from refugee and immigrant students looking for an affiliation with a project like ours. If you are interested in banned books, archival research, translation, and literature in general – and especially if what we do matches your personal or professional goals – please join our team! Whether remotely or in-person, Tamizdat Project volunteers work with archives and library holdings, transcribe relevant sources in manuscript or print form, prepare them for publication on our website, translate, annotate and tag them, design merchandise, make posts on social media, digitize books and periodicals, etc., depending on their interests and qualifications. Knowledge of foreign languages is not required but welcomed, especially Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Czech and other languages of Eastern Europe, as well as German, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and Hebrew.   

In this call for volunteers, we are also looking particularly for

• A web developer and designer
• Graphic designer
• Social media manager
• Event manager
• Public outreach manager
• Videographer and video editor
• Photographer
• Proofreader and copyeditor (English and Russian)
• Assistant librarian
• Translators

Participating in Tamizdat Project may count as an internship, pending approval of your home university. All volunteers are credited as contributors to the project and invited to participate in Tamizdat Project seminars, workshops, and other events. To meet our team of past and current volunteers, click here!

To join Tamizdat Project, please fill out the application below and send it to us by email at tamizdatproject@gmail.com

We are looking forward to meeting you! Thank you!

Tamizdat Project Team 

QUESTIONNAIRE

Tamizdat Project Inc. is a public scholarship and charity initiative devoted to the study of banned books from the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War (“tamizdat” means, literally, “published over there,” that is, abroad). Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the project has also been dedicated to supporting undergraduate students displaced by war or repressions in their home countries who now need to continue their education elsewhere, particularly in the U.S. If you are one of them, we’d love to hear from you! Please fill out this questionnaire and email it to us at tamizdatproject@gmail.com before May 31, 2023. Our preference is to support students admitted to public colleges and universities in the U.S., e.g. CUNY, but if you have been admitted to a private school, your application will also be considered. We will also consider applications from those who have already applied but are still waiting on their admissions letter from an American college or university: please let us know as soon as possible whether you have been admitted, since we can only support students enrolled in an undergraduate academic program. We hope to support 20 applications in the amount of up to $2,000 each. The applications will be reviewed by members of the Tamizdat Project Team, and we will be in touch with you in June. Thank you! 

Eligibility

• Must be admitted as an incoming freshman or transfer student to an undergraduate program at a college or university in the U.S.
• Must have previously studied at a university or high school in Ukraine, Belarus, or Russia 

Application for undergraduate students from Ukraine displaced by Russia's full-scale invasion can be found HERE. Application for undergraduate students from Belarus and Russia displaced by repressions for their antiwar stance are HERE. 

Please feel free to circulate the questionnaires below and let potential applicants know about our initiative! We are looking forward to hearing from you, and thank you for your time! 

Tamizdat Project Team 

Tamizdat Project Inc. is a not-for-profit organization with a 501(c)3 tax-exempt status: donations and gifts are tax-deductible to the extent allowable by the IRS. "Manuscripts Don't Burn" donation campaign. Venmo: @Tamizdat-Project. PayPal: tamizdatproject@gmail.com. Zelle tamizdatproject@gmail.com

January 29, 2023

Tamizdat Project Inc. is launching a two-month campaign “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” to support undergraduate students forced to leave their home countries either due to Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine or persecution in Belarus and Russia itself for their anti-war stance.

• On January 30, 2023, we are opening two online charity book auctions and a donation campaign to help these students pursue their academic careers in a safe environment. We are inviting the public to join our Rare Books Auction, which features a variety of first editions of “contraband” literature from behind the Iron Curtain and books by émigré authors, a Signed and Inscribed Books Auction with nearly 300 titles inscribed or signed for our cause by over 100 contemporary writers and scholars, and a “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” online fundraiser.

• Since February 24, 2022, many initiatives have been launched across American campuses to support scholars at risk. Very few,however, have been set up for students, who have not yet established themselves in academia but have also been forced to leave home and need to continue their education elsewhere. Tamizdat Project Inc. has taken the initiative to help the next generation of scholars when they most need it.

• The proceeds will be distributed to undergraduate students to help them pay for tuition and living expenses while studying in the U.S. (e.g., we will pay their dormitory bills or offer stipends for participating in Tamizdat Project). We will work with the colleges and universities that have admitted them to make this goal a reality. A breakdown of how the funds will be distributed will be provided at a later date.

Our campaign brings together prominent writers and academics in the diaspora to help today’s refugees, much as we wish no such effort was ever necessary. We are joined by Nobel Prize Laureate Svetlana Alexievich, director of Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Serhii Plokhy, émigré writer and critic Alexander Genis, rap singer Noize MC, to name but a few.

• “On the last day of 2022, as we all were getting ready to celebrate the arrival of the new year the Russian missile attack hit Kyiv, causing serious damage to the buildings and properties of the Kyiv University. … It had become the worst year for the higher education since the end of World War II. Any assistance we can provide for students of Ukraine will be greatly appreciated by the students in the universities under fire and the students-refugees in Ukraine and abroad.” -- Serhii Plokhy, professor of Ukrainian history, Harvard University

• “I am glad to take part in this project. After all, the auction that Tamizdat Project has put together is not just about rare books that make any library more precious and interesting. It is also part of the living history of free literature and thought, uninterrupted even today. These books, as dissidents used to say, are relics of the struggle ‘for our freedom and yours.’ They unite authors and readers, turning even those unfamiliar with each other into allies.” -- Alexander Genis, author. 

Tamizdat Project Inc. is a not-for-profit public scholarship and charity initiative devoted to the study of banned books from the formerSoviet Union and the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War (“tamizdat” means literally “published over there,” that is, abroad). Today,these books remind us that freedom and education know no boundaries. We are a not-for-profit 501(c)3 organization with a tax-exempt status: donations and gifts are deductible to the extent allowable by the IRS.

https://www.reechunter.com/tamizdat-conference.html

Contraband manuscripts from the Soviet Union, published abroad with or without their authors’ knowledge or consent, served as a powerful weapon on the literary fronts of the Cold War. Comprised of texts rejected or never submitted for publication at home but smuggled through various channels and printed elsewhere, tamizdat contributed to the formation of the twentieth-century Russian literary canon. Suffice it to say that the majority of representative works of this canon (with a few important exceptions, such as Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) were first published abroad long before they first saw the light of day in Russia, already after Perestroika. Mediating the relationships of many authors in Russia with the literary establishment, on the one hand, and with the nonconformist underground, on the other, the prospect of having their works printed abroad, not to mention the consequences of such a transgression, affected these authors’ choices and ideological positions vis-à-vis both fields.

The conference seeks to define tamizdat as an integral phenomenon of post-Stalinist culture and situate it in the context of its more familiar and better researched domestic counterparts, samizdat (unofficial self-publishing) and gosizdat (state publishing). In an effort to explore the patterns of circulation of manuscripts behind the Iron Curtain and their migration through it, scholars from around the world will revisit the traditional notion of Soviet culture as a dichotomy between the official and underground fields and look at it instead as a transnationally dynamic three-dimensional model, with tamizdat at its base. The papers will explore tamizdat from a theoretical, comparative or historical perspective, or trace the itineraries of individual manuscripts and the stories of their first publications and reception abroad. Of particular interest are works by authors who were still alive at the time their writings appeared in tamizdat. While the conference focuses primarily on manuscripts written and published in Russian, it also deals with non-Russian literatures of Eastern Europe, as well as with the translation and adaptation of literary manuscripts from behind the Iron Curtain into foreign languages.