Please join us next Thursday, June 15, for a book talk with Mark Lipovetsky, Professor of Russian Literature at Columbia University, and Yasha Klots (Hunter College), Tamizdat Project Director and author of Tamizdat: Contraband Russian Literature in the Cold War Era (Cornell University Press, 2023)!
Examining narratives of Stalinism and the Gulag, the book focuses on contraband manuscripts from the former USSR first published abroad in the 1960s and 70s, covering the period from Khrushchev's Thaw to Stagnation under Brezhnev. It revisits the traditional notion of late Soviet culture as a binary opposition between the underground and official state publishing and 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 beyond the Iron Curtain, while the Russian and East European literary diasporas were the indispensable ecosystem for these clandestine works. In the post-Stalin years, however, tamizdat 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.