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.
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.
Based on pioneering research in a dozen archives in multiple countries, Klots's own readings of tamizdat literature are subtler and more interesting than those of the Russian emigres he studies. (Times Literary Supplement) Klots provides a nuanced exploration of the relationship of Soviet writers to their works on life in Stalin's Russia and to the process of getting their cherished manuscripts before the audience they sought at home. (History: Reviews of New Books) Klots not only offers a comprehensive survey of tamizdat during the 1960s and 1970s but also complicates several Cold War-era presumptions. Essential. (Choice) Yasha Klots provides a fascinating account of the origins of Russian tamizdat as a cultural practice during the Cold War. (H-Soz-Kult) Klots is an excellent literary scholar, and his discussion yields new insights into texts that are among the best-researched of twentieth century Russian literature... This is a fantastically informative volume that covers a variety of disciplinary angles and will be of interest to scholars and students as well as to committed lay readers of texts from behind the Iron Curtain. (Slavic Review)
