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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.

This paper explores the synthesis of fictional and documentary techniques in Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales seen through the prism of Dostoevsky’s nineteenth‐century novel The House of the Dead. It argues that it was Dostoevsky’s oscillation between fiction and reportage, rather than the subject matter of his novel, that defines the complexity of Shalamov’s relationships with the classic. After a brief discussion of various strategies of reading The House of the Dead in the Gulag, the paper concludes by outlining Dostoevsky’s role in the literary polemics between Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn, two writers who went far beyond the confines of the memoir genre, albeit in opposite directions and along different paths.

This article explores the role of Lithuania in Joseph Brodsky's life and works before and after his exile from Russia in 1972. As a former Soviet republic, Lithuania represented an intermediary space for Brodsky both culturally and geographically, contributing to his realization that it was a 'rehearsal' for his actual emigration. However, Brodsky's notion of Lithuania changes when, after 1972, instead of representing a simulacrum of the 'abroad,' the poet sees Lithuania as a 'home' from afar. Emigration, in Brodsky's case, thus became a realization of the myth of exile implicit in his earlier texts about Lithuania.

Among the clandestine manuscripts emancipated by Solzhenitsyn in 1962, including those conceived much earlier, was Akhmatova’s Requiem. Although it was not her first publication in tamizdat,¹ Akhmatova was the last living poet of the Silver Age, while the vast majority of representatives of bygone Russian culture either found themselves in exile or were annihilated in some way by the regime at home. After the execution of her first husband, Nikolai Gumilev, in 1921 and the repeated arrests of her son and her third husband, Nikolai Punin, Akhmatova’s fate seemed sealed. But despite other ordeals, including Zhdanov’s campaign against her and

Named by Akhmatova as her Requiem’s “sister” and singled out as the most important work on Stalinism next to that poem and Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich,¹ Chukovskaia’s Sofia Petrovna is the only known work of fiction that deals with the Great Terror not in hindsight but simultaneously with the events described. “To this day,” Chukovskaia wrote in 1974, “I know of no volume of prose about 1937 written in this country and at that time.”² Unlike Requiem, however, Sofia Petrovna survived the years of Terror, the siege of Leningrad, postwar repressions, and Stalin himself, not just in the memory of the

Tamizdat did not end in 1966, when the Soviet critic Andrei Sinyavsky and the translator Yuly Daniel were put on trial for publishing their fiction abroad under the pen names Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak. On the contrary, as a literary practice and political institution of the late-Soviet era, tamizdat may have begun in earnest only then—thanks to the unprecedented political resonance of the trial worldwide, but perhaps more importantly, because of the two writers’ creative strategy, which was fulfilled as a result of the trial and finally recognized both in Russia and in the West as a literary,

The story of the first publication abroad of Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales (Kolymskie rasskazy) begins where it might be expected to end: months after the Moscow trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel on February 10-14, 1966, Shalamov’s manuscript was smuggled out of the country and serialized for the next ten years in the Russian émigré quarterly Novyi zhurnal (The New Review) in New York, following the publication of Chukovskaia’s Sofia Petrovna in the same journal’s two previous issues. This chapter traces the itinerary of the first manuscript of Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales from Moscow to New York, based on archival findings, and analyzes

The battle for salvaging the long-muffled voices of the gulag victims during the Thaw played out on domestic grounds, exposing the inherent indebtedness of tamizdat as a practice and institution to the political and cultural climate in Russia. Sparked by Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in 1956 and fueled by the de-Stalinization campaign that followed, this battle reached its peak in the wake of the Twenty-second Party Congress in October 1961, culminating in the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the progressive Soviet journal Novyi mir the following year. The official publication of this sensational text

In the early 1920s, observing the life of the Russian literary diaspora in Berlin and pondering whether he should go back or stay in exile, the renowned formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky lamented, “Poor Russian emigration! It has no heartbeat…. Our batteries were charged in Russia; here we keep going around in circles and soon we will grind to a halt. The lead battery plates will turn into nothing but sheer weight.”¹ This book revisits Shklovsky’s apprehension by situating it in another historical context: it explores the patterns of circulation, first publications, and reception abroad of contraband manuscripts from the Soviet

In an abridged translation that retains the grace and passion of the original, Klots and Ufberg present the stunning memoir of a young woman who became an actress in the Gulag. Tamara Petkevich had a relatively privileged childhood in the beautiful, impoverished Petrograd of the Soviet regime's early years, but when her father—a fervent believer in the Communist ideal—was arrested, 17-year-old Tamara was branded a \"daughter of the enemy of the people.\" She kept up a search for her father while struggling to support her mother and two sisters, finish school, and enter university. Shortly before the Russian outbreak of World War II, Petkevich was forced to quit school and, against her better judgment, she married an exiled man whom she had met in the lines at the information bureau of the NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs). Her mother and one sister perished in the Nazi siege of Leningrad, and Petkevich was herself arrested. With cinematic detail, Petkevich relates her attempts to defend herself against absurd charges of having a connection to the Leningrad terrorist center, counter-revolutionary propaganda, and anti-Semitism that resulted in a sentence of seven years' hard labor in the Gulag. While Petkevich became a professional actress in her own right years after her release from the Gulag, she learned her craft on the stages of the camps scattered across the northern Komi Republic. The existence of prisoner theaters and troupes of political prisoners such as the one Petkevich joined is a little-known fact of Gulag life. Petkevich's depiction not only provides a unique firsthand account of this world within a world but also testifies to the power of art to literally save lives. As Petkevich moves from one form of hardship to another she retains her desire to live and her ability to love. More than a firsthand record of atrocities committed in Stalinist Russia, Memoir of a Gulag Actress is an invaluable source of information on the daily life and culture of the Soviet Union at the time. Russian literature about the Gulag remains vastly underepresented in the United States, and Petkevich's unforgettable memoir will go a long way toward filling this gap. Supplemented with photographs from the author's personal archive, Petkevich's story will be of great interest to general readers, while providing an important resource for historians, political scientists, and students of Russian culture and history.