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.
DECEMBER 10, MONDAY
10:00 – 10:30
Opening Remarks
Yasha Klots (Hunter College, CUNY)
Polina Barskova (Hampshire College)
10:30 – 12:15
Panel I: Authors and Manuscripts Abroad
Chair: Yasha Klots (Hunter College)
Olga Matich (University of California, Berkeley)
“Tamizdat: The Spatial Turn, Textual Embodiment, Individual Stories"
Ronald Meyer (Columbia University)
“Vasilii Aksenov and Ardis Publishers: From The Steel Bird to The Burn”
Polina Barskova (Hampshire College)
“The Strange Case of the Siege Notes in the Diplomatic Pouch”
Discussant: Elizabeth K. Beaujour (Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center)
12:15 – 13:30
Lunch Break
13:30 – 15:15
Panel II: From Gosizdat to Tamizdat
Chair: Katerina Clark (Yale University)
Rossen Djagalov (New York University)
“Progress Publishers: A Different Kind of Tamizdat”
Olga Voronina (Bard College)
“Crocodile on Piccadilly: Kornei Chukovsky in Tamizdat”
Yasha Klots (Hunter College, CUNY)
"Socialist Realism on the Other Shore: Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Denisovich at Home and Abroad"
Discussant: Polina Barskova (Hampshire College)
15:15 – 16:00
Coffee Break
16:00 – 17:00
Launch of the Tamizdat Project Website
Presentation by Yasha Klots (Hunter College) and Discussion
17:00 – 18:00
Opening of the Tamizdat Book Exhibition (Cooperman Library, 3rd Floor, Hunter East)
Curated by Alla Roylance (New York University) and Yasha Klots (Hunter College)
18:30 – 20:00
Keynote Lecture I
Ellendea Proffer Teasley (Ardis Publishers)
“How Censorship Leads to Samizdat: Ardis Publishers”
DECEMBER 11, TUESDAY
10:00 – 12:00
Panel III: Tamizdat Practices and Institutions
Chair: Nadya Peterson (Hunter College, CUNY)
Philip Gleissner (The Ohio State University)
“The Syntax of Émigré Culture: Maria Rozanova’s Publishing House ‘Sintaksis’”
Erina Megowan (College of the Holy Cross)
“Ardis Publishers and the Dissident Movement: A Historical Perspective”
Ann Komaromi (University of Toronto)
"Kosher Tamizdat: The Israeli Series Evreiskii samizdat and 'Biblioteka-Aliya'”
Ilja Kukuj (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
“Konstantin Kuzminsky’s The Blue Lagoon Anthology at the Junction of Samizdat and Tamizdat”
Discussant: Benjamin Nathans (University of Pennsylvania)
12:00 – 12:30
Coffee Break
12:30 – 14:15
Panel IV: Tamizdat from Eastern and Central Europe
Chair: Ronald Meyer (Columbia University)
Jessie Labov (Central European University, Budapest)
“Transatlantic Central Europe: Where Do Texts Lead Us When They Emerge from the Underground?”
Siobhan Doucette (Xavier University in Cincinnati, OH)
“Poland as a Location for Tamizdat”
Irena Grudzinska Gross (Polish Academy of Sciences)
"Poland in Paris"
Discussant: Roman Utkin (Wesleyan University)
14:15 - 15:30
Lunch Break
15:30 – 17:00
Panel V: Looking Back on Tamizdat (Firsthand Reflections)
Chair: Yasha Klots (Hunter College, CUNY)
Robin Feuer Miller (Brandeis University)
“Double Diaries and Layered Memories: Moscow, 1963”
Michael Scammell (Columbia University)
“Index on Censorship and the Publication of Tamizdat in the 1970s”
Pavel Litvinov
“Political and Human Rights Tamizdat”
17:00 – 18:00
Roundtable Discussion
“Gosizdat, Samizdat, Tamizdat and (Anti-)Soviet Culture”
Moderated by Yasha Klots (Hunter College) and Polina Barskova (Hampshire College)
18:30 – 20:00
Keynote Lecture II
Irina Prokhorova (New Literary Observer, Editor-in-Chief, Moscow)
“Tamizdat, Samizdat and the Traditional Literary Canon: Revising the History of 20th-Century Russian Literature”
DEAN ANDREW POLSKY (Hunter College), POLINA BARSKOVA (Hampshire College) & YASHA KLOTS (Hunter College)
Opening Remarks
OLGA MATICH (University of California, Berkeley)
Tamizdat: The Spatial Turn, Textual Embodiment, My Personal Stories
The spatial turn in social and humanities theory of the 1970s and 1980s, spearheaded by Michel Foucault, Henri Lefevre, and Michel de Certeau, reversed the traditional privileging of time over space. In discussing tamizdat, I will focus on illegal boundary crossing defined as the spatial relationship between here (Soviet Union) and there (beyond Soviet borders) that involved in-between movement in both directions. Foucault’s concern with surveillance and his spatial metaphor of panopticism also became important. The relationship may also be described as one between gosizdat and tamizdat, the latter initiating its authors’ in-betweenness. The talk will consider Andrey Sinyavsky’s metaphor of Abram Tertz as textual embodiment: Tertz became Sinyavsky’s textual body that crossed the panoptic Soviet border into unbounded space. My primary authors will be Sinyavsky/Tertz and Vasily Aksyonov, including Metropol’ as a collective project, that represented very different instantiations of tamizdat.
Olga Matich is professor emerita of Russian literature and culture at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle (2005); Russian version (2008); editor and author of Part I of Petersburg/Petersburg: Novel and City 1900 – 1921 (2010); Записки русской американки: Семейные хроники и случайные встречи (2016). Tamizdat was widely discussed at the largest conference on The Third Wave: Russian Literature in Emigration organized by Matich (1981, volume 1984); more recent article on third wave tamizdat literature and boundary crossing appeared in diaspora issue of Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (2014). Most recent publications: article on Baroque and Neo-baroque (modernist) visual culture in the Fin de Siècle Issue of same journal (2018); “Foreword” to Maguire & Malmstad English translation of Petersburg (2018).
RONALD MEYER (Columbia University)
Vasilii Aksenov and Ardis Publishers: From The Steel Bird to The Burn
In the 1970s Ardis Publishers added three well-known Soviet writers to their roster of Russian-language authors: Andrei Bitov, Fazil Iskander and Vasilii Aksenov. All three, successful members of the Writers Union, were unable to publish their major work, uncensored, in the Soviet Union. Bitov’s Pushkinskii dom came out with Ardis in 1978, followed by Iskander’s Sandro iz Chegem in 1979. Aksenov, the most successful of the three, also faced difficulties publishing what he believed to be his best work: Stal'naia ptitsa appeared in the first issue of Ardis’s journal Glagol (1977); Zolotaia nasha zhelezka and Ozhog, both came out with Ardis in 1980, the year after the publication of Metropol’. The Aksenov-Ardis correspondence, housed at the University of Michigan, sheds light not only on the publication of Aksyonov, in both Russian and English, but also on a great many figures in the Soviet Union, including the Metropole authors, for whom Aksyonov represented a channel to the West.
Ronald Meyer held the position of Senior Editor at Ardis Publishers from 1981 to 1991, when he moved to New York City. He teaches the seminar in Russian literary translation at Columbia University. His translations include Anna Akhmatova's My Half-Century: Collected Prose (Ardis, 1992, 3d edition, 2013), for which he was awarded a Wheatland Foundation Translation Grant; Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler & Other Stories (Penguin, 2010); and Numbers, a dystopian play by Oleg Sentsov, the translation of which was commissioned by PEN America. He is a member of PEN America's Translation Committee, and served on the jury for the 2016 PEN Translation Prize. In his short reminiscence Cold War Dress Code: Remembering Inna Lisnyanskaya, written for PEN’s 2015 Banned Books Week, Meyer recalls the circumstances of publishing the poet’s two books abroad in Paris and Ann Arbor.
POLINA BARSKOVA (Hampshire College)
The Strange Case of the Siege Notes in Diplomatic Pouch
For some time, I’ve been fascinated by Harrison E. Salisbury’s book 900 Days (1969) published during the Cold War by an author who was not a frequent visitor to the site of his research (though Salisbury was in Leningrad in 1944, right after the end of the Siege). This study of the urban disaster impressed me by the richness of sources. Yet how did the author manage to collect this vast, cacophonous and exciting chorus of witnesses over the Iron Curtain? One finding in the Salisbury papers sheds light on this question – and tells us a story of the unlikely collaboration between a Leningrad scholar and the American journalist.
Polina Barskova was born in Leningrad. She received a BA from Saint Petersburg State University and an MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She is associate professor of Russian literature at Hampshire College and author of eight books of poetry in Russian and three in English translation. She is also the author of Living Pictures, which received the 2015 Andrey Bely Prize, and the editor of Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Press, 2016). Barskova is one of the world's leading experts on the literature and culture of the Siege. Her monograph Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster was published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2017.
ELIZABETH K. BEAUJOUR (Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center)
Discussion of Panel I: Authors and Manuscripts Abroad
Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour is the author of The Invisible Land: The Artistic Imagination of Iurii Olesha (1979) and Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the "First" Emigration (1989). She has also contributed chapters to numerous edited volumes and published articles on the relationship between architecture and Russian literature and bilingual Russian writers, especially Nabokov. She has worked on the interaction of French and Russian literatures, Russian women writers, and writers who have worked in more than one language. Beaujour is on the faculty of the Doctoral Program in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. Over the years, she has served Hunter College in many ways, having been Acting Provost and Chair of the Academic Senate as well as the long-term chair of the interdisciplinary Thomas Hunter Honors Program.
KATERINA CLARK (Yale University)
Katerina Clark, a native of Australia, is a professor of Comparative Literature and of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale. Her research lies in Russian, European and Eurasian film, literature and performing arts, art, architecture and literary theory, cultural interactions, world literature; art and ideology. Her present book project, tentatively titled Eurasia without Borders?: Leftist Internationalists and Their Cultural Interactions, 1917–1943, looks at the interactions during the inter-war years of European culture producers with counterparts in Asia, principally in Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, Northern India, China, Japan and Mongolia. She is the author of The Soviet Novel: History As Ritual (1981), Mikhail Bakhtin (with Michael Holquist) (1984), Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (1995), Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917-1953 (With Evgeny Dobrenko, 2007), Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941 (2011), as well as numerous articles. Most of her books have undergone several editions and been translated into Russian, Chinese and other languages.
ROSSEN DJAGALOV (New York University)
“Progress Publishers: A Different Kind of Tamizdat”
The biggest publisher of Russian literature for distribution abroad during the Cold War era was not YMCA-Press or Ardis, Posev or Izdatel'stvo imeni Chekhova. Significant though they were, these presses were dwarfed by the Moscow-based Progress Publishers, which at its peak in the 1980s published over 2,000 titles a year in dozens of languages and print runs simply unavailable to the Russian emigre press. Especially in African and Asian countries, it was by far the most significant source of Russian and Soviet literature, from the nineteenth century classics to Aitmatov, Rasputin, and Iskander. Using Progress’s archives and interviews with its translators, editors, and consultants, this paper will offer a brief history of the publishing house.
It is of course difficult to generalize about the quality and impact of Progress’s translations in different national contexts. Its practice — particularly common under late Stalinism — of relying on Russian speakers without native knowledge of the target language may have made it the major site for Soviet translation theory and practice of the second half of the twentieth century but was destined for numerous letters of complaint by foreign readers. Sometimes foreigners living in Moscow, with little experience in translation but in need of employment, were parachuted onto the publishing house, also fueling a flood of unhappy readers’ letters to be found in its archive. At the same time, it occasionally employed well-known foreign writers, who in addition to their facility with language, brought to their translations and to Progress itself much cultural capital. Despite such a somewhat checkered record, it was the main heir of Gorky’s earlier vision of a World Literature publishing house and as such can help us think about the Soviet intervention into the workings of world literature.
Rossen Djagalov is an Assistant Professor of Russian at New York University. His interests lie in socialist culture globally and, more specifically, in the linkages between cultural producers and audiences in the USSR and abroad. His forthcoming manuscript, Premature Postcolonialists: Soviet-Third-World Literary and Cinematic Encounters in the Age of Three Worlds reconstructs the Soviet genealogy of postcolonial literature, film, and ultimately, theory. His second book project, The People’s Republic of Letters: Towards a Media History of Twentieth-Century Socialist Internationalism, examines the relationship between the political left and the different media (proletarian novel, singer-songwriter performance, political documentary film) that at different times played a major role in connecting its publics globally. Before coming to NYU, he taught at Koc University in Istanbul, was a postdoctoral fellow at the Penn Humanities Forum and a tutor at Harvard's History and Literature program. He is a member of the editorial collective of LeftEast.
OLGA VORONINA (Bard College)
Crocodile on Piccadilly: Kornei Chukovsky in Tamizdat
After spending a transformative year in London in his youth, making another visit to Great Britain with a delegation of Russian correspondents during WWI, and returning shortly in 1962 to receive the Oxford honorary degree, Kornei Chukovsky remained in Russia for the rest of his life. Confined to Soviet literary realities and firmly established in its institutions, this prolific critic, translator, and children’s author was one the most talented enthusiasts among those who brought Anglophone poetry and prose to the Russian soil. Famous for his contribution to children’s literature in particular, Chukovsky managed to transplant British nursery rhymes, stories, folk and Victorian tropes into the whimsical new world of his own poetry for young readers. But did his works for children ever venture abroad, blending back into the culture that had initially inspired him?
This paper explores Chukovsky’s lifetime publications in British and American tamizdat as a linguistically vibrant and ideologically charged phenomenon. Focusing on three translations in particular, Babette Deutsch’s Crocodile (Philadelphia, 1931; London, 1932) and Richard Coe’s Crocodile and Doctor Concocter (London, 1964 and 1967), it demonstrates how deeply strategies of poetic adaptation employed by Deutsch and Coe were ingrained in international politics and paradigms of rejection and appropriation of the exotic literary “other” of their day.
Another analytical angle of the paper is its emphasis on Chukovsky’s position as a mouthpiece of the Soviet government’s propagandistic efforts directed at British and American audiences during WWII. His pamphlets “Children and War” (International Literature, October 1, 1942), “War Children” (The Horn Book Magazine, January 1, 1944), and several translations into English published in the 1940-50s by “Mezdunarodnaya Kniga” in Moscow initially served as a cultural tool for inciting public support for the allies’ war effort. In the beginning of the Cold War, they were also used to mitigate the American and British response to Soviet expansionist politics in Eastern Europe.
Olga Voronina received her undergraduate and master's degrees from the Herzen University in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her research topics include the art and biography of Vladimir Nabokov, poetics of translation, Soviet and Post-Soviet literary institutions, ideological paradigms of political, media, and literary discourses of the Cold War, relationship between rhetoric of power and the language of literature in totalitarian societies, Soviet and post-Soviet children’s literature. As a translator and editor (with Brian Boyd), she published Letters to Vera (Penguin, 2014; Knopf, 2015). She is Associate Professor of Russian at Bard College, where she has worked since 2010.
YASHA KLOTS (Hunter College, CUNY)
Socialist Realism on the Other Shore: Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Denisovich at Home and Abroad
The groundbreaking publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in Moscow in 1962 both “emancipated” many literary works on the subject of Stalinism and, at the same time, precluded them from appearing in print at home. Rejected by Soviet editors, most of them began circulating in samizdat and eventually found their way to the West, where they were first published, whether with or without their authors’ knowledge or consent. This paper examines the political, social and literary reasons for the unprecedented success of Ivan Denisovich vis-à-vis those for the shared failure of Solzhenitsyn’s peers to see their works published in Russia around the same time. It explores the patterns of Solzhenitsyn’s enactment of some of the socialist realist conventions in Ivan Denisovich, as well as its quasi-conformity to Soviet mythology on the whole, and analyzes the reception of Ivan Denisovich abroad in the context of the “horizons of expectations” and aesthetic profile of tamizdat in the early 1960s.
Yasha Klots received his Ph.D. in Russian literature from Yale, where he worked with Tomas Venclova as his dissertation advisor. Before joining Hunter in 2016, he taught at GA Tech, Williams College and Yale. In 2014-2016, he was a Humboldt Foundation Fellow at the Research Center for East European Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany. His research interests include émigré literature and print culture, bilingualism and translation, Gulag narratives, and cityscapes. He is the author of articles on Varlam Shalamov, Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky, Lev Loseff, Vladimir Nabokov, Marina Tsvetaeva, Ivan Bunin, Nina Berberova, as well as Russian children's poetry and New York City in Russian literature. In 2010, he published Joseph Brodsky in Lithuania (St. Petersburg: Perlov Design Center; in Russian), and co-translated, with Ross Ufberg, Tamara Petkevich’s Memoir of a Gulag Actress (DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP). His most recent book is Poets in New York: On City, Language, Diaspora (Moscow: NLO, 2016; in Russian), which includes his introduction and annotated interviews with 16 Russian and East European poets. He is currently working on a book Tamizdat, the Cold War and Contraband Russian Literature (1960-1970s) devoted to the circulation, reception and first publications of literary manuscripts from the Soviet Union in the West.
POLINA BARSKOVA (Hampshire College)
Discussion of Panel II: From Gosizdat to Tamizdat
YASHA KLOTS (Hunter College)
Launch of the Tamizdat Project Website
ALLA ROYLANCE (New York University) and YASHA KLOTS (Hunter College)
Opening of the Tamizdat Book Exhibit
Alla Roylance, graduate of St. Petersburg (Leningrad) University and Pratt Institute, is the Russian and Slavic Studies librarian at NYU. Prior to that, she worked at the Brooklyn Public Library where she curated the Russian literary and film series.
ELLENDEA PROFFER TEASLEY (Ardis Publishers)
“How Censorship Leads to Samizdat: Ardis Publishers”
Ellendea Proffer Teasley is the co-founder, with Carl Proffer (1938-1984), of the legendary Ardis Publishers and Russian Literature Triquarterly in Ann Arbor, MI, where many canonical works of twentieth-century Russian literature first saw the light of day (or were reprinted when they could no longer be published in Soviet Russia). Her own books include Mikhail Bulgakov: Life & Work (1984), A Pictorial Biography of Vladimir Nabokov (1991), and most recently the memoir Brodsky Among Us (2017; Russian edition - 2015). She is a MacArthur Fellow.
NADYA PETERSON (Hunter College)
Nadya Peterson is a specialist on contemporary Russian prose, women's literature and Chekhov. She is the author of Subversive Imaginations: Fantastic Prose and the End of Soviet Literature, 1970s-1990s, and of a number of articles on various aspects of Russian studies, including "The Private 'I' in the Works of Nina Berberova" (2001), "Dirty Women: Cultural Connotations of Cleanliness in Stalinist Russia" (1996), "Games Women Play: the Erotic Prose of Valeriia Narbikova" (1993), and “The Child in Chekhov" (2014). She is a published translator and editor, most recently of Russian Love Stories (2009) and The Witching Hour and Other Plays by Nina Sadur (2014). Her areas of interests also include Russian culture, history, and Russian education. Peterson is on the faculty of the Doctoral Program in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and has served as the Head of the Russian and Slavic Studies Program at Hunter since 2010.
PHILIP GLEISSNER (The Ohio State University)
The Syntax of Émigré Culture: Maria Rozanova’s Publishing House ‘Sintaksis’
In 1978, the home of Maria Rozanova and Andrei Sinyavsky in the Parisian suburb of Fontenay-aux-Roses turned into a hub of tamizdat publishing. For more than a decade, it came to accommodate the small publishing enterprise Sintaksis. Run by Rozanova, Sintaksis put out a magazine of literary criticism and political polemics as well as a number of books, featuring content both by émigré writers and from the Soviet Union.
In this paper, I am interested in the function that the publishing house had in the organization of the third wave emigration as an intellectual community. I will discuss its publications from a variety of angles: the texts as events in émigré literary history and the books as material objects. Finally, I will address Rozanova’s editorial practice. For this purpose, my paper will draw from her archival correspondence with numerous luminaries of the late Soviet emigration.
I argue that in the 1980s tamizdat publishing was more than an outlet for literary production. Like the syntax of a language, Sintaksis provided a structure for the arrangement of the constituents of an intellectual community in exile. Under the conditions of relative freedom in emigration, this structure perpetuated the late socialist intelligentsia’s tactics of intellectual life between official and clandestine culture in the Soviet Union. As such, the editorial work of Sintaksis remained deeply rooted in the practices of Soviet culture.
Philip Gleissner is an assistant professor in Slavic and East European Cultures and Languages at The Ohio State University. He specializes in the cultures and literatures of socialist Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on print media in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and the GDR. He is particularly interested in the migration of media: mechanisms that facilitate the circulation of texts within and beyond Eastern Europe. His current book project is titled Through Thick and Thin: The Social Life of Journals under Late Socialism. It shows how under the umbrella of state socialism a fragmented literary culture was organized by literary magazines. The book traces how these periodicals moderated multidirectional networks that connected the cultures of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the West in a dynamic manner. Gleissner’s research relies on digital humanities methodology as a tool for the critical exploration of culture. His ongoing digital project Soviet Journals Reconnected [http://www.soviet-journals.org/] explores Soviet magazines through their data. A volume of correspondence between Russian émigré intellectuals and German publishers in the 1920s, co-edited with Michael Wachtel, is forthcoming in 2019.
ERINA MEGOWAN (College of the Holy Cross)
Ardis Publishers and the Dissident Movement: A Historical Perspective
This paper takes as its case study the history of Ardis Publishers, founded in 1971 with the explicit goal of returning to the Soviet Union many of the 20th century Russian classics unavailable there, based on both printed, published sources and interviews with those who both assisted in selecting and translating or read books Ardis had published in Russia. The paper considers the motivations behind Ardis’ prolific work publishing dozens of titles in Russian and ensuring at some of these books made it into the Soviet Union; and the underlying reasons for the publishing house’s success and status as one of the major tamizdat publishers and its close association with the Third Wave émigré community. Last, the paper analyzes the significance of Ardis’ work in the intellectual and social context of the Brezhnev era.
The paper looks closely at the infrastructure Ardis relied upon in order to operate. This will reveal in particular the importance of the network of various personal ties formed with both Americans (diplomats, journalists and academics) and Russians that enabled Ardis to operate, influenced its selection of books for translation and facilitated the illicit distribution of its books within the Soviet Union. Likewise, the paper will evaluate the impact of receiving and reading Ardis’ tamizdat publications on the Moscow intelligentsia of the 1970s, and the importance of Ardis publications as a source of intellectual inspiration for the generation that became the backbone of the dissident movement. This in turn points to the way that the consumption of literature served to further deepen the dissatisfaction of a particular circle of people with the Soviet intellectual environment of the 1970s, adding significant momentum to the dissident movement.
Erina Megowan is current Visiting Assistant Professor of European History at College of the Holy Cross. She received her PhD from Georgetown University in 2016, where her dissertation analyzed the evacuation of Soviet writers, theater and opera companies, film studios and art museums to the Urals, Siberia and Central Asia during World War II. She is currently working on a book manuscript examining the role of the Soviet creative intelligentsia and Soviet cultural institutions in waging and sustaining the burden of total war.
ANN KOMAROMI (University of Toronto)
Kosher Tamizdat: The Israeli Series Evreiskii samizdat and 'Biblioteka-Aliya'
This paper treats tamizdat in two senses. First, it will invoke the primary sense of tamizdat as the publication outside the USSR of uncensored material produced by authors in the Soviet Union by looking at the publication of journals and other materials produced by Jewish authors in the Soviet Union within the Evreiskii samizdat series in Jerusalem. What happened to the fourth issue of Tarbut (Culture)? Secondly, it will consider tamizdat in the sense of materials published abroad that are intended for clandestine circulation among readers in the Soviet Union, such as the books of the “Biblioteka-Aliya” series in Israel. How does this bifurcated notion of “tamizdat” highlight both cooperation and possible non-alignment between the means and motives of author-publishers within the Soviet Union, and those facilitating tamizdat publication in foreign countries?
Ann Komaromi is Associate Professor and Acting Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her research has focused particularly on late Soviet culture and the culture and public communities of dissidence. Publications include a Database of Soviet Samizdat Periodicals, found within the Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat (University of Toronto Libraries, 2015; samizdatcollections.library.utoronto.ca). Her books include the monograph Uncensored: Samizdat Novels and the Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Samizdat (Northwestern UP, 2017), and her edition of Yuli Kosharovsky, We Are Jews Again: Jewish Activism in the Soviet Union (Syracuse UP, 2017). Current projects include a study of unofficial Jewish life in Leningrad in the 1980s, and a comparative study of the use of "waste" in artistic works and museum exhibits in the post-War era.
ILJA KUKUJ (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
Konstantin Kuzminsky’s The Blue Lagoon Anthology at the Junction of Samizdat and Tamizdat
The paper explores the anthology of unofficial literature of the Soviet period edited by Konstantin Kuzminsky in the context of Russian literature published in the West in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the anthology’s orientation to the reader left behind in the Soviet Union. Kuzminsky emigrated from the USSR in 1975 with the intention to continue his kulturträger mission that he had effectively carried out in various forms in Leningrad in the 1960s and early 1970s. For his multi-volume anthology, he chose the form that was closest to the poetics and communicative patterns of Leningrad’s “second culture.” Based on archival materials, the present paper follows the development of Kuzminsky’s project from its very beginning and attempts to reconstruct his motives for choosing that particular format, which today helps us better understand the phenomena of samizdat and tamizdat.
Ilja Kukuj is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Slavic Philology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. He received his first degree in Russian language and literature from the Herzen State Pedagogical University in St. Petersburg (1992), and an M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Slavic and Comparative Studies from Bielefeld University, Germany, in 2000 and 2009. Kukuj is a specialist on Russian futurism and avant-garde. He has prepared for publication a two-volume edition of Leonid Aronzon’s collected works (with Petr Kazarnovsky and Vladimir Erl’), the prose and poetry of Anri Volokhonsky, and the writings of Pavel Zaltsman.
BENJAMIN NATHANS (University of Pennsylvania)
Discussion of Panel III: Tamizdat Practices and Institutions
Benjamin Nathans teaches and writes on Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, modern European Jewish history, and the history of human rights. He edited A Research Guide to Materials on the History of Russian Jewry (19th and Early 20th Centuries) in Selected Archives of the Former Soviet Union (Moscow, 1994) and is the author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter With Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, 2002), which won the Koret Prize in Jewish History, the Vucinich Prize in Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, the Lincoln Prize in Russian History and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in History. Beyond the Pale has been translated into Russian (2007) and Hebrew (2013). Nathans has published articles on Habermas and the public sphere in eighteenth-century France, Russian-Jewish historiography, the state of the field of Russian and East European studies in Germany and the United States, Soviet dissident memoirs, and many other topics. From 2008 to 2012 he worked as a consultant for Ralph Appelbaum Associates, a leading museum design firm, and chaired an international committee of scholars that helped design the content for the Museum of Jewish History in Moscow, which opened in November 2012. Nathans' current research explores the history of dissent in the USSR from Stalin's death to the collapse of communism. It traces the paths by which Soviet dissidents found their way to the doctrine of inalienable rights—the world's first universal ideology—and employed rights doctrine in an attempt to place limits on the sovereignty of the Soviet state. Even as rights have become the dominant moral language of our time, this project seeks to de-familiarize and de-naturalize them by studying them in the unlikely setting of "mature socialism." It aims, in other words, to give human rights a history.
JESSIE LABOV (Central European University, Budapest)
Transatlantic Central Europe: Where Do Texts Lead Us When They Emerge from the Underground?
This presentation would extend a study of the journal Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central Europe (1982-1994) into a digital humanities project, mapping the trajectories of the texts published in this journal over the course of the 1980s. The question which triggers such an interest is not so much about the journal itself, but how samizdat together with hybrid materials becomes tamizdat, and how the geographic and institutional paths it takes affects the way we read it. Cross Currents was published in English, and many texts in it were written first with an academic and/or diasporic audience in mind. However, an equal number were translations or adaptations of texts published in the region, which reflects specific decisions of the editorship on which voices from “inside” should be heard outside. The largest claim that this presentation will propose is that a focus on the transformative path of a tamizdat text from one context to another will show how its meaning cannot be confined to the native/national nor to the diasporic, but in fact is constituted by its movement between them.
Jessie Labov works at Central European University, where she is a Resident Fellow in the Center for Media, Data and Society, a member of the Digital Humanities Initiative , and the Project Coordinator of the Text Analysis Across Disciplines Initiative. Before coming to Budapest she was Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University. Recent publishing projects include a co-edited volume with Friederike Kind-Kovacs, Samizdat, Tamizdat and Beyond: Transnational Media During and After Socialism (Berghahn 2013), and a monograph entitled Transatlantic Central Europe: Contesting Geography and Redefining Culture Beyond the Nation (forthcoming, CEU Press 2018). In addition to writing on Polish film, Yugoslav popular culture, and Central European Jewish identity, she has also worked on a variety of digital humanities projects concerned with issues of canon formation, text mining, and visualizing the receptive pathways of literary journals.
SIOBHAN DOUCETTE (Xavier University in Cincinnati, OH)
Poland as a Location for Tamizdat
This paper will first provide a brief overview of the Polish independent press and then explore Poland as a location for the publication of tamizdat; focusing in particular on Russian-language works. While the study of tamizdat generally concentrates on the publication of works from the Soviet bloc in the West, this paper will demonstrate that the Polish independent press, as it flourished, provided a forum for writers from across the communist bloc who could not publish in state publishing houses. This paper will also demonstrate that Polish independent publishers produced works by a number of emigres and thus complicates conventions about tamizdat moving from East to West across the Iron Curtain. The research for this paper was carried out primarily at Archiwum KARTA in Warsaw which houses the largest collection of Polish independent publications.
Siobhan Doucette completed her Ph.D. in History at Georgetown University in 2013. Her first book, Books are Weapons: The Polish Opposition Press and the Overthrow of Communism was published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2017. Dr. Doucette’s research interests include civil resistance, censorship, and remembrance. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, OH.
IRENA GRUDZINSKA GROSS (Polish Academy of Sciences)
Poland in Paris
The best Polish emigré writings have been produced in Paris. This nineteenth-century tradition continued in the last century thanks to the circle of Kultura; in the later part of the century, three new publications appeared: Aneks, Kontakt and Zeszyty Literackie. Each of these periodicals concentrated on Poland. Aneks (founded by the 1968 emigration) and Kontakt (founded by Solidarity exiles) closed in 1990, when their political usefulness ended. Zeszyty Literackie will close now with its 144 issue. I will talk about this „Parisian” tamizdat’s political and literary traditions.
Irena Grudzinska Gross was involved in student movement and emigrated from her native Poland after the unrest of 1968. She resumed her studies in Italy and received her PhD from Columbia University in 1982. She taught courses in East European literature and history at several universities and is now Fellow at the Guggenheim Foundation. Her books include “Golden Harvest” (with Jan T. Gross), 2012; “Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets," 2009; and “The Scar of Revolution: Tocqueville, Custine and the Romantic Imagination,” 1995.
ROMAN UTKIN (Wesleyan University)
Discussion of Panel IV: Tamizdat from Eastern and Central Europe
Roman Utkin is assistant professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University. His current book project, tentatively titled Russian Berlin: Culture of a Modernist Diaspora, examines the patterns of migration and cultural flows between Eastern and Central Europe and shows how refugees from Soviet Russia formed a unique diasporic community in Weimar Berlin.
ROBIN FEUER MILLER (Brandeis University)
Double Diaries and Layered Memories: Moscow, 1963
Much of my scholarly career has been devoted to writing about Dostoevsky. One of my first articles was entitled “The Morality of Confession Reconsidered.” Even as a young person I was intrigued by the underground man’s allusion to Heine’s comment that true autobiographies are almost impossible, “that a man will most certainly tell a lot of lies about himself. In his view, Rousseau told a lot of lies about himself in his Confessions, and told them deliberately, out of vanity… I, however, am writing for myself.” Some years later I found myself writing at length about Dostoevsky’s semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical work, “The Peasant Marei,” which Robert Louis Jackson (in what is the finest essay I know on this story) described as a “three-tiered memory” — where, as one might expect, the different tiers or layers of the palimpsest, are not in perfect harmony with each other. Equally compelling is the narrator-chronicler’s claim in The Brothers Karamazov in reference to Alyosha’s memory of his mother: “Such memories may persist, as everyone knows… even from two years old, but scarcely standing out through a whole lifetime like spots of light out of darkness, like a corner torn out of a huge picture, which was all faded and disappeared except that fragment.”
Thus can a diary kept over the course of four months while I was a teenager in Moscow, a later recollection, and a still later memory of both collide with each other. This enterprise is made even more opaque when I compare my father’s diary, and later his written recollections, with my own over the identical period of time. Such is the murky framework, then, for my remarks today — remarks which I am hesitant to deliver — but, when I acknowledge the degree to which they reflect, in a substantive way, my more “theoretical” interests in confessions, diaries, memoirs, memories, fictions and lies, I am emboldened to deliver anyway. Plus, now that I am decades older than my parents were in 1963, I somehow owe it to them, Kathryn and Lewis Feuer — the two adults at the center of the story I have to tell, to venture forth over half a century later, whereas in 1963 I was just a feckless kid who was not even that interested in what was going on under my proverbial nose.
Robin Feuer Miller is Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities and Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University, as well as an Affiliated Member of the Department of English. Her particular interest is in the novel, especially the novels of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Dickens. Her books include Dostoevsky and The Idiot: Author, Narrator and Reader (Harvard University Press, 1981), Dostoevsky's Unfinished Journey (Yale University Press, 2007), and The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel (second edition, 2008, Yale University Press), as well as several edited or co-edited volumes, including Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace (with Donna Tussing Orwin), by Kathryn B. Feuer (Cornell University Press, 1996) and The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel (with Malcolm V. Jones), (Cambridge University Press, 1998). She was a 2013-2014 Guggenheim Fellow and Visiting Fellow at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford, where she began work on her current project, "Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the Small of This World." She is also at work on an archival project tentatively entitled, "Love in a Time of Upheaval: Kazuko's Letters from Japan."
MICHAEL SCAMMELL
Index on Censorship and the Publication of Tamizdat in the 1970s
The London-based human rights magazine, Index on Censorship, was founded by me in 1972 in response to an appeal from two Russian dissidents, Pavel Litvinov and Larissa Bogoraz, for western intellectuals to pay more attention to the suppression of culture in Russia and the communist bloc and help censored individuals have their work and activities recognized in free countries. They added that such assistance would be effective only if similar help and support were extended to writers and artists suffering under right-wing governments too and Index fulfilled that condition to the hilt. In its very first issue containing stories and poems by Solzhenitsyn and Gorbanevskaya, and Andrei Amalrik's last plea at his trial, we also published work from or about the former Yugoslavia, Greece, Portugal, Bangladesh, and Britain, along with a compendium of news about censorship from around the world. Later Index helped Polish dissidents connected with the Solidarity movement publish and distribute a tamizdat journal, Zapis, helped Czech and Hungarian dissidents publish similar journals, and published the English version of the Russian journal, Chronicle of Current Events on behalf of Amnesty International, all while continuing to maintain a global outlook. These activities were helped by my own experience as a translator and specialist on Russian literature and policy, but for the ten years I was editor, we maintained this global perspective and it continues to this day under the current editorial board.
Michael Scammell was born in England in 1935, and has a BA degree in Slavonic Studies from Nottingham University and a PhD in Slavic Literatures from Columbia University. In the early sixties he taught Russian language and literature at Hunter College and worked as a freelance translator from Russian, first in the U.S. and then in England. His translations from that period include Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, Childhood, Boyhood and Youth by Tolstoy, and Cities and Years by Fedin. It was during this time that he was introduced to Vladimir Nabokov and collaborated with him on the translation into English of two of his novels, The Gift and The Defense. Having become interested in the plight of the Russian dissidents, he translated My Testimony by Anatoly Marchenko and To Build a Castle, My Life as a Dissenter by Vladimir Bukovsky, as well as some shorter works by Solzhenitsyn. He also translated short stories and poetry from Russian, Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian. In 1971, he founded the London-based magazine, Index on Censorship, which he continued to edit until 1980, and from 1976-1989 chaired International PEN’s Writers in Prison committee. In 1987 he became Chair of the Russian Literature Department and Director of the Soviet and East European Studies Program at Cornell, and in 1994 moved to Columbia to teach Nonfiction Writing and Translation at the School of the Arts. He was President of the American PEN Center from 1996-1999 and is a Vice President of International PEN. Scammell’s most recent book is the authorized biography of Arthur Koestler, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth Century Skeptic, published in December 2009 by Random House, and in the UK as Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual. Before that he wrote Solzhenitsyn, A Biography (1984). Both books won prizes in the USA and the UK.
PAVEL LITVINOV
Political and Human Rights Tamizdat
The talk will address publications of the most significant documents of the Soviet dissident and human rights movement in the West from the late 1960s onward. Tracing the history of political tamizdat, it will dwell in particular on the publications of Khronika Press. From its inception in the early 1970s, Khronika Press published the seminal samizdat bulletin The Chronicle of Current Events, as well as other political and non-fiction texts from the Soviet Union.
Pavel Litvinov, the grandson of Stalin’s foreign minister Maxim Litvinov and the English writer Ivy Low, was born to a family of Soviet elite. He became a dissident and human rights activist in the 1960s, in the wake of the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel (aka. Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak), who were sentenced to hard labor for publishing their “slanderous” works in tamizdat. His human rights activity culminated in the widely circulated “Appeal to World Public Opinion” (with Larisa Bogoraz), the first known address of Soviet dissidents to the West. On August 25, 1968, he was among those who walked out onto the Red Square to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that took place several days earlier. During these years Litvinov compiled samizdat collections of documents on the trials of Vladimir Bukovsky and others, and soon after Aleksandr Ginzburg, Yuri Galanskov, Aleksei Dobrovolsky and Vera Lashkova (published in tamizdat by Amsterdam-based Alexander Herzen Foundation). After four years of prison and internal exile, in 1974 Litvinov emigrated to the U.S., where he became the main representative and publisher of the important samizdat bulletin The Chronicle of Current Events. The Chronicle was published in New York by Khronika Press, founded and led by Valery Chalidze with Ed Kline and Pavel Litvinov. Litvinov taught physics and mathematics at Hackley School in Tarrytown, NY. He is on the board of directors of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation.
Roundtable Discussion: “Gosizdat, Samizdat, Tamizdat and (Anti-)Soviet Culture”
Moderated by Yasha Klots (Hunter College) and Polina Barskova (Hampshire College)
IRINA PROKHOROVA (New Literary Observer, Editor-in-Chief, Moscow)
Tamizdat, Samizdat and the Traditional Literary Canon: Revising the History of 20th-Century Russian Literature
Despite the tremendous accumulation of new knowledge in the recent decades about the non-conformist, underground culture, we still follow the traditional lines concerning the trends, genres, personalities and general development of Russian literature of the past century. Are we ready to write the "other" literary history, drastically reevaluating the dramatic interrelations of official censured texts with the emigre and tamizdat/samizdat literature? Is it possible to present an alternative literary canon based on different criteria? Can we altogether apply the word 'tradition' in the sense of uninterrupted cultural succession in relation to the Soviet period?
Irina Prokhorova is a cultural historian, literary critic, editor and publisher, as well as a social and political activist. In 1992 she founded the New Literary Observer publishing house, which at present comprises three scholarly periodicals and 100 books per year on literary criticism, philosophy, history, cultural & interdisciplinary studies, contemporary prose and poetry. She is a host of three live radio and TV programs on cutting-edge social and political issues. Irina Prokhorova is also the co-founder of the Mikhail Prokhorov Charitable Fund, which supports and promotes new Russian culture worldwide. She is the recipient of The Liberty Prize for contributions to Russian-American culture (2003), the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France, 2005), Andrei Bely Literary Prize (2006), the Legion of Honor Award (France, 2012).