What is Tamizdat?

ABSTRACT

Special Note: This article is part of a series of three scholarly pieces in this issue dedicated to Tamizdat Publications at the New York Public Library (NYPL):

1. “What is Tamizdat?” by Yasha Klots

2. “Russian Tamizdat Publications at the New York Public Library: A Checklist,” by Hee-Gwone Yoo

3. “Russian Publishing Abroad: The New York Public Library Collections in the Longer View,” by Bogdan Horbal

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Tamizdat
• Russian publishing abroad
• contraband literature
• emigration
• censorship

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Far from being an exclusively Russian phenomenon, and perhaps referred to differently, tamizdat, or publishing clandestine works abroad, was part and parcel of other cultures and literary traditions from Eastern Europe, which vary, however, not only geographically but also historically and institutionally. In what follows, the Russian example is used, although the definition of “tamizdat” may probably apply, with some adjustments, to the realities of other literatures as well.

2. Typed by the author on his own typewriter, the title pages of these handmade editions were marked samsebiaizdat (“self-publishing”) to mock the standard abbreviations of “Gosizdat,” “Goslitizdat” and so on, which appeared invariably on officially sanctioned publications in the Soviet Union.

3. Dimitry Pospielovsky, “From Gosizdat to Samizdat and Tamizdat,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 20, no. 1 (1978): 44–62. By contrast to Pospielovsky’s dated approach, see Friederike Kind-Kovacs and Jessie Labov (eds.). Samizdat, Tamizdat, and Beyond: Transnational Media During and After Socialism (New York – Oxford: Berghahn, 2013), 1–23.

4. We have included a number of such publications in the checklist below, but limited ourselves to only a few representative examples by certain authors (Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Strugatsky brothers, Andrei Voznesensky, Evgeny Evtushenko, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and others).

5. Gleb Struve. Russian Literature under Lenin and Stalin, 1917–1953 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), viii; emphasis in the original.

6. Pospielovsky, 44.

7. Friederike Kind-Kovács. Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014), 9.

8. For example, in 1972, in Literaturnaia gazeta alone, letters of protest against publications in tamizdat were signed by Bulat Okudzhava and Anatoly Gladilin, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and Varlam Shalamov.

9. Anna Akhmatova. Rekviem (Munich: Tovarishchestvo zarubezhnykh pisatelei, 1963).

10. Lydia Chukovskaia. Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi. 3 vols. (Moskva: Soglasie, 1997), 3:131; diary entry for December 28, 1963.

11. Other precautions, however (in)effective, included signing the publisher’s prefaces, introductions and afterwords with a pseudonym. The publication of Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago in Italy in 1957, often considered the first tamizdat, earned him not only the Nobel Prize for literature, which he was forced to reject, but also social and professional ostracism at home. Pasternak died in 1960.

12. Zinovy Zinik. Emigratsiia kak literaturnyi priem (Moskva: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2011), 256.

13. Robert Darnton. Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature (New York: Norton, 2014), 13.

14. Darnton, 13.

15. The earliest though no longer the only example of this new “tamizdat” is the online Russian Oppositional Arts Review (ROAR) launched by Linor Goralik in Israel. ROAR does not distinguish between works written by authors in Russia and abroad, but the review itself, given its outspoken position, can be only hosted on a foreign server: https://roar-review.com/ROAR-First-Issue-9b481dcf93ce4ff696ec537cad10f3a9.