Tamizdat: Contraband Russian Literature in the Cold War Era
Tamizdat offers a new perspective on the history of the Cold War by exploring the story of the contraband manuscripts sent from the USSR to the West. A word that means publishing "over there," tamizdat manuscripts were rejected, censored, or never submitted for publication in the Soviet Union and were smuggled through various channels and printed outside the country, with or without their authors' knowledge. Yasha Klots demonstrates how tamizdat contributed to the formation of the twentieth-century Russian literary canon: the majority of contemporary Russian classics first appeared abroad long before they saw publication in Russia.

Examining narratives of Stalinism and the Gulag, Klots focuses on contraband manuscripts in the 1960s and 70s, from Khrushchev's Thaw to Stagnation under Brezhnev. Klots revisits the traditional notion of late Soviet culture as a binary opposition between the underground and official state publishing. He 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 outside the Iron Curtain. The Russian literary diaspora was the indispensable ecosystem for these works. Yet in the post-Stalin years, they 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.

Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

1141949461
Tamizdat: Contraband Russian Literature in the Cold War Era
Tamizdat offers a new perspective on the history of the Cold War by exploring the story of the contraband manuscripts sent from the USSR to the West. A word that means publishing "over there," tamizdat manuscripts were rejected, censored, or never submitted for publication in the Soviet Union and were smuggled through various channels and printed outside the country, with or without their authors' knowledge. Yasha Klots demonstrates how tamizdat contributed to the formation of the twentieth-century Russian literary canon: the majority of contemporary Russian classics first appeared abroad long before they saw publication in Russia.

Examining narratives of Stalinism and the Gulag, Klots focuses on contraband manuscripts in the 1960s and 70s, from Khrushchev's Thaw to Stagnation under Brezhnev. Klots revisits the traditional notion of late Soviet culture as a binary opposition between the underground and official state publishing. He 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 outside the Iron Curtain. The Russian literary diaspora was the indispensable ecosystem for these works. Yet in the post-Stalin years, they 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.

Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Tamizdat: Contraband Russian Literature in the Cold War Era

Tamizdat: Contraband Russian Literature in the Cold War Era

by Yasha Yakov Klots
Tamizdat: Contraband Russian Literature in the Cold War Era
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Tamizdat: Contraband Russian Literature in the Cold War Era

Tamizdat: Contraband Russian Literature in the Cold War Era

by Yasha Yakov Klots

Overview

Tamizdat offers a new perspective on the history of the Cold War by exploring the story of the contraband manuscripts sent from the USSR to the West. A word that means publishing "over there," tamizdat manuscripts were rejected, censored, or never submitted for publication in the Soviet Union and were smuggled through various channels and printed outside the country, with or without their authors' knowledge. Yasha Klots demonstrates how tamizdat contributed to the formation of the twentieth-century Russian literary canon: the majority of contemporary Russian classics first appeared abroad long before they saw publication in Russia.

Examining narratives of Stalinism and the Gulag, Klots focuses on contraband manuscripts in the 1960s and 70s, from Khrushchev's Thaw to Stagnation under Brezhnev. Klots revisits the traditional notion of late Soviet culture as a binary opposition between the underground and official state publishing. He 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 outside the Iron Curtain. The Russian literary diaspora was the indispensable ecosystem for these works. Yet in the post-Stalin years, they 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.

Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781501781452
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Publication date: 05/15/2025
Series: NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Pages: 330
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

Yasha Klots is Associate Professor of Russian Literature at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He is the author of Joseph Brodsky in Lithuania and Poets in New York, and co-translor of Tamara Petkevich's Memoir of a Gulag Actress.

What People are Saying About This

Vitaly Chernetsky

This engagingly written, thorough, and compelling analysis of a major literary and socio-political phenomenon, is destined to become a classic. No comparable monograph on tamizdat exists in any language and there is nothing similar offering a synthesizing view on the central place of Gulag narratives in tamizdat.

Leona Toker

This is a sensitive, earnest, gap-filling study of the foreign publication of literature written in the USSR and standing no chance against Soviet censorship. It clears misprisions, solves puzzles, and provides insights both into the artistic worth of the major works that were smuggled abroad and into their socio-political value.

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Related Subjects

Literature
Literary Criticism
Russian Literature
General & Miscellaneous Russian Literature - Literary Criticism
Literature
Literary Criticism
Russian Literature
General & Miscellaneous Russian Literature - Literary Criticism

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