In this article Ann Komaromi examines Soviet samizdat based on recendy available materials and fresh critical approaches. Komaromi juxtaposes traditional mythologizing narratives about samizdat and the exposure of such mythology within samizdat and post-samizdat culture. Drawing on recent publications and archival investigations, Komaromi surveys the history of samizdat, its use, reception and resonance. The material form of the samizdat text proves key to understanding samizdat as the lifeblood of a community of Soviet dissenters. That material form, viewed critically through a lens shaped by poststructural concepts, provokes the sense of play between ideal signified and compromised signifier as samizdat's subversive essence. This samizdat text supports both anti-authoritarian playfulness and serious reflection on the threats to the author and the project of culture. Soviet and post-Soviet writers find in the samizdat text an ambivalent marker of their specifically Soviet identity beyond geographical and temporal boundaries of the Soviet empire.
In this article Ann Komaromi proposes a new critical look at the history of Soviet dissidence by way of samizdat and the idea of a private-public sphere. Samizdat is defined in a less familiar way, as a particular mode of existence of the text, rather than in terms of political opposition or a social agenda. This allows for a broader view of dissidence that includes familiar phenomena like the civil rights or democratic movement, along with relatively little known national, cultural, musical, artistic, poetic, and philosophical groups. The multiple perspectives of Soviet dissidence correspond to a decentered view of a mixed private-public sphere that resembles Nancy Fraser's modification of Jürgen Habermas's classic public sphere. This model of a private-public sphere provokes new questions about unofficial institutions and structures, the dialectic between private and public impulses in Soviet samizdat, and the relationship of dissidents to foreign individuals and organizations. The empirical basis for this analysis is a survey of Soviet samizdat periodicals from 1956 to 1986.
This article proposes to treat samizdat in terms of a textual culture opposed to modern print culture. The choice to cast samizdat as an "extra-Gutenberg" phenomenon represents a way of extending the observation that samizdat can no longer simply be defined as the mouthpiece of dissident opposition. Beyond binary oppositions of truth vs. falsehood, and dissidents vs. state, on which previous perceptions of samizdat have depended, we might now see the essential quality of samizdat to be its exemplification of epistemic instability, inasmuch as samizdat texts are not automatically invested with authority. From this perspective, new questions about the production, distribution, and reproduction of samizdat texts with varying types of content turn on a central issue: how was the trustworthiness or value of such texts established? This article explores these issues through personal testimony about the production and circulation of samizdat in the USSR and in the West. Juxtaposing the theory of gift giving with new critical approaches to book history, textual culture, and bibliography, the article aims to highlight the interest of personal testimony and material texts in a critical analysis of samizdat history. Finally, as a striking example of an epistemically unstable textual culture, samizdat represents not merely opposition to a defunct political system: it also exemplifies issues relevant to a global Internet culture today.Gene Sosin, who worked for many years at Radio Liberty, wrote about the copy of the second edition of the Bol'shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopedia (Big Soviet Encyclopedia [1949-58]) that he purchased for the Radio's New York office. Sosin called this Soviet encyclopedia "a treasure trove of Soviet disinformation and distortion." Specifically, Sosin (1999: 7) recalled the fact that volume 5 of the encyclopedia (published in 1950) originally contained
This article proposes a new interdisciplinary model for investigating unofficial culture and dissident social activity in the post-Stalin period. Although binary oppositions like art versus politics and unofficial versus official are recognized today to be ideologically implicated and critically outmoded, Ann Komaromi argues that they have a certain usefulness when reconceived as structural components of an autonomous unofficial field. This critical model is developed with polemical reference to Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the field of culture. The late Soviet opposition between art and politics is explored through Andrei Siniavskii's struggle with editors over the 1965 edition of Boris Pasternak's poetry and via the organization of the famous 5 December 1965 “Meeting of Openness” coordinated by Aleksandr Esenin-Vol'pin. The critical model proposed emphasizes the material history of conceptions of autonomy fundamental to the field, profiling dynamic binaries and permeable boundaries as sites of critical interest.
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