In this episode, Bogdan Horbal, Curator of the NYPL's Slavic and East European Collections, and Yasha Klots, Assistant Professor of Russian Literature at Hunter College, CUNY, discussed tamizdat, the contraband Russian literature published outside of the Soviet Union. Professor Klots' Tamizdat Project is a virtual environment that traces the history of circulation, first publications, and reception of tamizdat literature by making a rich variety of relevant sources available to the international academic community and students worldwide.

Episode Recording and Transcript

Work/Cited Episode 9: Contraband Russian Literature from The New York Public Library on Vimeo.

A transcript of this event is available here.

Related Resources

• Bauman, Zygmunt. Retrotopia. Cambridge: Polity, 2017. 

• Bergman, Jay. “Soviet Dissidents on the Russian Intelligentsia, 1956-1985: The Search for a Usable Past,” The Russian Review 51, no. 1 (January 1992), 16-35. 

• Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Tr. by Randal Johnson. Cambridge: Polity, 2016. 

• Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. 

• Chukovskaia, Lidia. Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi. 3 vols. Moskva: Soglasie, 1997. 

• Cummings, Richard H. Cold War Radio: The Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950-1989. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2009. 

• Darnton, Robert. Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature. New York: Norton, 2015. 

• Engerman, David C. Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 

• Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of Prison. Tr. by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979. 

• Holmgren, Beth. Women’s Works in Stalin’s Time: On Lidia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelshtam. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. 

• Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Tr. by Timothy Bahti, with an introduction by Paul de Man. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. 

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

• Kind-Kovács, Friederike and Labov, Jessie (eds.). Samizdat, Tamizdat, and Beyond. Transnational Media During and After Socialism. New York - Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013. 

• Komaromi, Ann. Uncensored. Samizdat Novels and the Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Dissidence. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. 

• Kozlov, Denis. The Readers of Novyi Mir: Coming to Terms with the Stalinist Past. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. 

• Loseff, Lev. Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life. Tr. by Jane Ann Miller. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. 

• Mancosu, Paolo. Zhivago’s Secret Journey: from Typescript to Book. Stanford, Calf.: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 2016. 

• Nathans, Benjamin. “Talking Fish: On Soviet Dissident Memoirs,” The Journal of Modern History 87 (September 2015), 579-614. 

• Orlov, Vladimir. Aleksandr Ginzburg: russkii roman. Moskva: Russkii put’, 2017. 

• Oushakine, Serguei. “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat,” Public Culture 13, no. 2 (Spring 2001), 191- 214. 

• Paperno, Irina. Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. 

• Pinkham, Sophie. “Zdesizdat and Discursive Rebellion: The Metropol Affair,” Ulbandus Review 17 (2016), 127-145. 

• Pospielovsky, Dimitry. “From Gosizdat to Samizdat and Tamizdat,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 20, no. 1 (March 1978), 44-62. 

• Proffer, Carl R. The Widows of Russia and Other Writings. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1987. 

• Proffer Teasley, Ellendea. Brodsky Among Us. A Memoir. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017. 

• Reisch, Alfred A. Hot Books in the Cold War: the CIA-Funded Secret Western Book Distribution Program behind the Iron Curtain. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2013. 

• Richmond, Yale. Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. 

• Scammell, Michael. Solzhenitsyn. A Biography. London: Paladin, 1984.

• Todorov, Tzvetan. Genres in Discourse. Tr. by Catherine Potter. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 

• Toker, Leona. Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000.

About the Work/Cited Series

Work/Cited is a program series that showcases the latest scholarship supported by the rich collections of The New York Public Library with a behind-the-scenes look at how the finished product was inspired, researched, and created. Catch up on previous episodes on the NYPL blog, where videos and links to related resources are posted shortly after each program. Sign up for NYPL's Research Newsletter or view the events calendar to hear about future programs as they are announced.