Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society

Soviet Samizdat is a comprehensive study of samizdat, an uncensored system for making and sharing texts in the Soviet Union from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s. It explores the role of samizdat in fostering new forms of imagined community among Soviet citizens and challenges the dismissal of dissidence as an elite phenomenon. Komaromi argues that samizdat's act of truth-telling was experienced as transformative by Soviet authors and readers and provides a controversial umbrella definition for all forms of samizdat. Her combination of literary analysis, historical research, and sociological theory makes sense of the phenomenon for readers today and suggests that samizdat was not simply a tool of opposition to a defunct regime but also fostered informal communities of knowledge that foreshadowed a similar phenomenon of alternative perspectives challenging the authority of institutions around the world today.

Format: Hardback
Length: 318 pages
Publication date: 15 May 2022
Publisher: Cornell University Press

Soviet Samizdat is a groundbreaking study that explores the emergence and development of samizdat, a unique and significant phenomenon of the late Soviet era. Through extensive research of underground journals, bulletins, art folios, and other periodicals produced in the Soviet Union from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, Ann Komaromi examines the role of samizdat in fostering new forms of imagined community among Soviet citizens. Dissidence has often been dismissed as an elite phenomenon or as insignificant due to its limited impact on the Soviet regime. However, Komaromi challenges these views and demonstrates that the imagination about self and community made possible by samizdat can be a powerful social force. She explains why participants in samizdat culture 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 but rather fostered informal communities of knowledge that foreshadowed a similar phenomenon of alternative perspectives challenging the authority of institutions around the world today.

Weight: 644g
Dimension: 159 x 242 x 30 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781501763595