...Alexei Yurchak The Russian term samizdat originally referred to self-published literature that was forbidden by or at least unavailable in the Soviet state, circulated through unofficial channels, and represented certain views that were alternative to the official ideology of that state. Sometimes...

...J. Martin Daughtry Magnitizdat was the slyly humorous nickname for the unofficial practice of dubbing and distributing reel-to-reel audio tapes in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. In this article I reflect on magnitizdat's cultural significance through an examination of several amateur reel-to-reel...

...Ulla Savolainen Abstract This article attends to literary testimonies of the Gulag and Soviet terror by an Ingrian Finnish man called Aatami Kuortti from the perspective of cultural memory. By analyzing two testimonies by Kuortti published in Finland in 1934 and 1964, the article focuses on “memory...

...Alastair Renfrew The demise of the Soviet Union has for the past twenty-five years stood as effective “proof” of the error of utopia. This article returns to an ambivalent source of Soviet utopianism, Lenin's State and Revolution (1917), in order to show how the contradictions inherent...

... of this revolutionary estrangement on the self. Furthermore, the memoirs reenacted this unsettling estrangement by incorporating elements of official Soviet genres, such as the trial deposition, the interrogation autobiography, and the letter to the government. As Shklovsky suggests, the effects of revolutionary...

...Stiliana Milkova Iurii Trifonov (1925–1981) was a successful Soviet writer and sports journalist. He did not belong to samizdat print culture. But like other officially published Soviet literature, his works enacted an Aesopian game of hide-and-seek with the censor and the reader, whereby meaning...

...Alexander Gribanov; Masha Kowell Among the many documents released one way or another during the early 1990s, there are two that open the window into the perception of samizdat by the top Soviet authorities. The first of them was signed by Yuri Andropov, then the head of the KGB, in the last days...

... of historical forms. Rather than viewing this interest in dialectics as a tactically convenient phase in the accommodation of Formalism to the ideological requirements of the Soviet 1920s, the present article interprets Tynianov as the author of a particular “literary-historical” dialectic: it pre-dates...

... border crossings were still possible. He argued for literature's independence from politics. The dynamics of diasporic literary life and its evolving “articulations of identity” are considered in the context of Soviet literary politics. The semantic unfolding of estrangement and its “historical...

..., which were excluded from the long-term preservation policy of state archival authorities in the Soviet bloc countries. At the same time, the singularity of the historical context that had motivated the emergence and spread of samizdat also engendered the peculiar logic of its circulation. A significant...

... punishable through the misuse of a variety of laws under various pretexts. It occurred first in the Soviet Union as early as the 1920s, before the term was used, and then, labeled as such, from the 1950s onward. While samizdat publication occurred in Czechoslovakia after 1948, the word itself was used...

...Joseph Benatov Shortly after Nikita Khrushchev delivered his 1956 “secret speech” at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, the text of the report reached the United States by way of Poland and was published in the New York Times . The first secretary's denunciation of Stalinism thus...

..., and the group Synthesis, a more coherent formation that had a longer and more turbulent history. I explore the uniqueness of Bulgarian late Communist culture that, unlike its Soviet bloc counterparts, was never truly dissident in character. I seek to reveal why Bulgarian intelligentsia proved incapable...

...Peter Steiner One of the most unique phenomena of the Stalinist political culture was the political trials of leading Communist functionaries that took place in the Soviet Union and the people's democracies from the 1930s to the 1950s, usually culminating with the defendants' executions...

..., which disrupted his contribution to the development of “the science of literature” undertaken by the formalist clique in Moscow and Petrograd, Shklovsky used writing as a way of constructing the Soviet writer's experience of émigré life. To further investigate the link between language and exile...

... 2009 Alekseeva, Liudmila 2001 Istoriia inakomysliia v SSSR. Noveishii period (History of Dissent in the USSR) (Moscow: ZAO RITS “Zatsepa”). Amal'rik, Andrei 1980 Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? English trans., edited by Hilary Sternberg (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin). Boiter...

... for Poetics and Semiotics 2009 Aleinikov, Vladimir 1998 “Zvezda Samizdata” (“The Star of Samizdat”), Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 34 : 248 -66. Alekseeva, Liudmila 1984 Istoriia inakomysliia (Benson, VT: Khronika). English translation by Carol Pearce and John Glad, Soviet Dissent...

...Peter Steiner © 2009 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics 2009 This content is made freely available by the publisher. It may not be redistributed or altered. All rights reserved. Boiter, Albert 1972 “Samizdat: Primary Source Material in the Study of Current Soviet Affairs...

... imagery and language in the post-Soviet public sphere, the most infamous of which has been the 2012 case against the feminist punk collective Pussy Riot. Mav- romatti s use of religious imagery and themes (the evocation of the judgment and crucifixion of Christ), as well as the public and legal reaction...

...: Literary Cover-ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Trotsky, Lev [Leon] 1991 [1923] Literatura i revoliutsiia [Literature and revolution] (Moscow: Politizdat). Ungvári, Tamás 1979 “The Origins of the Theory of Verfremdung,” Neohelicon 7...