In this book, Yasha Klots provides a fascinating account of the origins of Russian tamizdat as a cultural practice during the Cold War. The book follows the story of four (plus one) authors and explores how non-conformist Russian literature that made its way through the Iron Curtain was produced by their authors in the Soviet Union, how the manuscripts were published in the West and how they were received by the Russian émigré communities abroad. Although the phenomenon of tamizdat (“published over there”), the authors and their works discussed in the book have attracted significant scholarly attention in the past1, Klots manages to offer new insights and provide a fresh interpretation of the early history of tamizdat in an engaging narrative that brings together the fields of cultural history, cultural studies and literary analysis. The originality of the book lies in its balanced approach, and its aim to study the journey of the respective literary works in the Soviet context in conjunction with the bumpy road to their publication on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The book thus brings together two distinct cultural environments (the “two Russias”) in one narrative while challenging the traditional dichotomy of underground versus state-supported culture at the same time. It also shows that despite the rigid political boundaries and the politicisation of culture on both sides of the Iron Curtain, the reception of individual works has been often complex and far from being straightforward.

The four authors and their works that are discussed in the book (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, Anna Akhmatova’s “Requiem”, Lydia Chukovskaia’s “Sofia Petrovna” and “Going Under” and Varlam Shalamov’s “Kolyma Tales”) were chosen to highlight the problematic aspects of the Thaw, with an emphasis on the limits of permissible (literary) criticism in the Khrushchev-era, and to demonstrate the uneven, and often politically motivated responses of Russian émigrés to the publication of critical literature in tamizdat. Although “Ivan Denisovich” might seem out of place as the novel was published in gosizdat (state publication) in the Soviet Union, Klots does a good job at using the story and the novel to outline the murky boundaries between what was deemed legitimate criticism by the Soviet state at the time, and what was rejected by the censors. Klots convincingly argues that the success of the short story in the Soviet Union had to do with Solzhenitsyn’s skilful use of certain components of the socialist realist toolset – the social background of the protagonist, the life-affirming narrative, the emphasis on manual labour in the hero’s survival, etc. – in its depiction of one of the most traumatic symbols of Stalinist terror: the Gulag. The chapter also discusses the remarkable impact of “Ivan Denisovich” on the Russian emigration and shows how Solzhenitsyn’s work became a benchmark for judging subsequent critical literature on the Stalinist past both in the Soviet Union and abroad.

The chapters discussing Akhmatova, Chukovskaia and Shalamov explore why their works portraying aspects of the Stalinist terror could not be published in the Soviet Union, even during Khrushchev’s campaign of de-Stalinisation. Klots points out that in the case of Akhmatova and Chukovskaia the intellectual background of the protagonists (in “Requiem”), the pessimistic overtone of the plot/imagery, or disregard for the redemptive features of physical labour rendered their work unpublishable. In the case of Shalamov, his fragmented narrative, his brutally realistic depictions of the Gulag experience, and the absence of reflections on the relationship between suffering and the endurance of character prevented his work from being published in the Soviet Union. But the fact that these works were censored in the Soviet Union did not automatically result in a more favourable reception abroad. As the book demonstrates, the journey of these manuscripts from the Soviet Union to publishing houses in the West was far from being smooth and the reception of the texts by editors and reviewers controversial. The problematic reaction of Russian émigré intellectuals to “forbidden” literature from the Soviet Union often provoked the author’s disappointment after their work was published. Frustrations were mostly related to questionable editorial practices – implemented without the authors’ permission – that involved the rewriting or the deletion of sentences, giving new titles to published works (as in the case of “Sofia Petrovna”), or as in the case of “Kolyma Tales”, the decision to publish the novel as a series of stories over several years. The writers were also concerned with what they considered the misrepresentation of their texts, but also by the potential repercussions they could face in the Soviet Union for the publication of their manuscripts abroad.

Klots argues that conflicts between the authors and the publishers grew out of mutual suspicion, and a general misperception of the Soviet social and cultural context by the Russian emigration that had little or no direct experience with life in the Soviet Union. The dominance of Cold War priorities explains why content played a more significant role in the reception of critical Soviet literature in the West than the aesthetic qualities of individual works, but also why the Gulag emerged as the key theme that ensured the perception of such manuscripts as “authentic”. While conflicts between Soviet authors and Western publishers were often left unresolved, the epilogue of the book argues that Andrei Sinyavsky’s tamizdat works – published under the pseudonym Abram Tertz – and his trial in 1966 marked the beginning of a new phase in the history of tamizdat. On the one hand, the works of Tertz challenged traditional assumptions about the relationship between location, author and text, one the other hand, the arrival in the West of a new wave of Russian émigrés in the wake of the Sinyavsky trial, resulted in a more diverse intellectual scene, which had a more complex understanding of cultural life in the Soviet Union.

Ultimately, the book manages to achieve the goals set out in the introduction and presents an engaging and perceptively argued narrative about the production, the journey and the reception of critical Russian literature in two distinct environments. It contributes to scholarly discussions about tamizdat by highlighting the conflicts between author and publisher and by demonstrating the significant impact of publishers on the reception of individual works abroad. Nevertheless, the return journey of unauthorised publications deserved a more extensive analysis in the book. The immediate reaction of Soviet authorities is presented at length in the various chapters, but a brief reflection on the publication and reception of the works discussed in the book during the period of perestroika could have potentially resulted in some additional findings about the memory of Stalinism and intellectual dissent in late-Soviet culture. In addition, the argument would have benefited from a more thorough attempt to contextualise the story of early Russian tamizdat more broadly, by highlighting international parallels and comparing unofficial publications from other countries in the Soviet bloc to the cases analysed in the narrative.

Note:
1 Friederike Kind-Kovács / Jessie Labov (eds.), Samizdat, tamizdat, and beyond. Transnational Media during and after Socialism, New York 2013; Friederike Kind-Kovács, Written Here. Published There. How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain, Budapest 2014; Jan C. Behrends / Thomas Lindenberger (eds.), Underground Publishing and the Public Sphere. Transnational Perspectives, Vienna 2014.