The Culture of Samizdat: Literature and Underground Networks in the Late Soviet Union

Samizdat, the production and circulation of texts outside official channels, was an integral part of life in the final decades of the Soviet Union. But as Josephine von Zitzewitz explains, while much is known about the texts themselves, little is available on the complex communities and cultures that existed around them due to their necessarily secretive, and sometimes dissident, nature.

By analysing the behaviours of different actors involved in Samizdat - readers, typists, librarians and the editors of periodicals in 1970s Leningrad, The Culture of Samizdat fills this lacuna in Soviet history scholarship. Crucially, as well as providing new insight into Samizdat texts, the book makes use of oral and written testimonies to examine the role of Samizdat activists and employs an interdisciplinary theoretical approach drawing on both the sociology of reading and book history. In doing so, von Zitzewitz uncovers the importance of 'middlemen' for Samizdat culture.

Diligently researched and engagingly written, this book will be of great value to scholars of Soviet cultural history and Russian literary studies alike.

Author: Josephine Von Zitzewitz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published: 05/19/2022
Pages: 262
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.82lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.55d
ISBN13: 9781350229310
ISBN10: 1350229318
BISAC Categories:
- History | Modern | 20th Century | General
- History | Europe | General
- History | Russia | General

About the Author
Josephine von Zitzewitz is Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow in Russian Literature at UiT - The Arctic University of Norway in Tromso, Norway. She is the author of Poetry and the Leningrad Religious-Philosophical Seminar, 1976 - 1980 (2016).