Soviet Samizdat

Soviet Samizdat traces the emergence and development of samizdat, one of the most significant and distinctive phenomena of the late Soviet era, as an uncensored system for making and sharing texts. Based on extensive research of the underground journals, bulletins, art folios and other periodicals produced in the Soviet Union from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, Ann Komaromi analyzes the role of samizdat in fostering new forms of imagined community among Soviet citizens.

Dissidence has been dismissed as an elite phenomenon or as insignificant because it had little demonstrable impact on the Soviet regime. Komaromi challenges these views and demonstrates that the kind of imagination about self and community made possible by samizdat could be a powerful social force. She explains why participants in samizdat culture so often sought to divide "political" from "cultural" samizdat. Her study provides a controversial umbrella definition for all forms of samizdat in terms of truth-telling, arguing that the act is experienced as transformative by Soviet authors and readers. This argument will challenge scholars in the field to respond to contentions that go against the grain of both anthropological and postmodern accounts.

Komaromi's combination of literary analysis, historical research, and sociological theory makes sense of the phenomenon of samizdat for readers today. Soviet Samizdat shows that samizdat was not simply a tool of opposition to a defunct regime. Instead, samizdat fostered informal communities of knowledge that foreshadowed a similar phenomenon of alternative perspectives challenging the authority of institutions around the world today.

Ann Komaromi is Associate Professor at the Centre for Comparative Literature and Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Uncensored and editor of We Are Jews Again.

Komaromi presents a multifaceted, thought- provoking exploration of samizdat as it evolved throughout the Soviet Union up to the more open period of Glasnost when samizdat was no longer necessary.

The scope of research Komaromi has undertaken is formidable, and her book certainly marks a milestone in the study of Soviet samizdat.

Ann Komaromi's beautifully written book on the socialist phenomenon of samizdat is such a fortunate marriage of theory and evidence. It is brimming with interesting thoughts on how to understand the role of samizdat, while leaving no doubt about the breadth of the author's empirical knowledge, accumulated over many years of engagement with the topic and the materials of samizdat.

Komaromi's work offers a significant contribution to this field, through the first broad overview and analysis of Soviet samizdat journals[.] A deep, nuanced, and innovative reflection on the role of samizdat periodicals and the dissident publics around them in late Soviet society. A must-read for historians and literary and cultural scholars specializing in the late Soviet era[.]

Polly Jones, University of Oxford, author of Revolution Rekindled:

This is a major addition to the scholarship on samizdat, both empirically and theoretically. Komaromi considerably enhances our understanding of the diversity of samizdat, while also providing suggestive conceptualizations of its networks. This book provides the most important intervention in the debate about samizdat for several years.