Tamizdat , livre ebook

330

pages

English

Ebooks

2023

Écrit par
Yakov Klots Yasha

Publié par
Cornell University Press

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330

pages

English

Ebooks

2023

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Cornell University Press

Date de parution

15 mai 2023

EAN13

9781501768989

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

23 Mo

Tamizdat offers a new perspective on the history of the Cold War by exploring the story of the contraband manuscripts sent from the USSR to the West. A word that means publishing "over there," tamizdat manuscripts were rejected, censored, or never submitted for publication in the Soviet Union and were smuggled through various channels and printed outside the country, with or without their authors'' knowledge. Yasha Klots demonstrates how tamizdat contributed to the formation of the twentieth-century Russian literary canon: the majority of contemporary Russian classics first appeared abroad long before they saw publication in Russia.

Examining narratives of Stalinism and the Gulag, Klots focuses on contraband manuscripts in the 1960s and 70s, from Khrushchev''s Thaw to Stagnation under Brezhnev. Klots revisits the traditional notion of late Soviet culture as a binary opposition between the underground and official state publishing. He shows that even as tamizdat represented an alternative field of cultural production in opposition to the Soviet regime and the dogma of Socialist Realism, it was not devoid of its own hierarchy, ideological agenda, and even censorship.

Tamizdat is a cultural history of Russian literature outside the Iron Curtain. The Russian literary diaspora was the indispensable ecosystem for these works. Yet in the post-Stalin years, they also served as a powerful weapon on the cultural fronts of the Cold War, laying bare the geographical, stylistic, and ideological rifts between two disparate yet inextricably intertwined fields of Russian literature, one at home, the other abroad.

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Publié par

Cornell University Press

Date de parution

15 mai 2023

EAN13

9781501768989

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

23 Mo

TAMIZDAT

A volume in the NIU Series in

Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Edited by Christine D. Worobec

For a list o books in the series, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

TAMIZDAT

CONT RABAND RUSSI AN L I T E RAT URE I N T HE COL D WAR E RA

Ya s h a K lots

NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Open access edition unded by the National Endowment or the Humanities.

The text o this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. To use this book, or parts o this book, in any way not covered by the license, please contact Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

First published 2023 by Cornell University Press

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Klots, Yasha, author. Title: Tamizdat : contraband Russian literature in the Cold War era / Yasha Klots. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint o Cornell University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical reerences and index. Identiiers: LCCN 2022036248 (print) | LCCN 2022036249 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501768958 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501768965 (epub) | ISBN 9781501768989 (pd ) Subjects: LCSH: Russian literature—Foreign countries—20th century—History and criticism. | Prohibited books—Soviet Union. | Underground literature—Soviet Union—History and criticism. | Russian literature—Publishing—Foreign countries— History—20th century. Classiication: LCC PG3515 K576 2023 (print) | LCC PG3515 (ebook) | DDC 891.709/004—dc23/ eng/20221121 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022036248 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ 2022036249

ISBN 978-1-5017-8145-2 (pbk.)

Co nte nts

Acknowledgments vii Note on Transliteration and Translation xi

Introduction: Tamizdat as a Literary Practice and Political Institution 1. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’sOne Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovichat Home and Abroad 2. Anna Akhmatova’sRequiemand the Thaw: A View rom Abroad 3. Lydia Chukovskaia’sSofia PetrovnaandGoing Under: Fictionalizing Stalin’s Purges 4. Varlam Shalamov’sKolyma Tales: The Gulag in Search o a Genre Epilogue: The Tamizdat Project o Abram Tertz

Notes 203 Bibliography 277 Index 303

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186

A c k n o w l e d g m e nt s

In his speech “In Memory o Carl Proer” (1984), Joseph Brodsky noted, “Normally, when one reads a book, one seldom thinks o its publisher: one is grateul to its author. The speci-ics o Russian history, however, made a publisher no less an important igure than a writer; made this distinction shrink considerably—the 1 way distinctions do in adversity.” It is these publishers o “contraband” Russian literature abroad to whom I owe my inspiration—without al-ways agreeing, however, with their ideological agendas and editorial practices—or this book. The idea o writing a book on this topic emerged in 2012, when I taught a seminar, “Russian Literature behind Bars,” at Williams Col-lege. I am indebted to Lysander Jae, a student in my class, who no-ticed the odd discrepancies between two English translations o VarlamShalamov’s short story “The Snake Charmer,” one by John Glad done 2 in 1980, the other by Robert Chandler more recently. Lysander’s paper sent me on an exciting journey through archives and libraries around the world that promised to shed some light on the wondrous and previ-ously undocumented adventures o Russian literature smuggled out o the Soviet Union or publication abroad. The irst archive I visited was in Amherst, Massachusetts: the ormer director o the Amherst Center or Russian Culture, Stanley Rabinowitz, made my explorations there possible and ruitul, accompanied by many meaningul conversations abouttamizdatand its subjects. In Amherst I have also had the chance to discuss tamizdat with William and Jane Taubman, Catherine Ciepiela, Viktoria Schweitzer, Polina Barskova, and other colleagues rom the Five Colleges. Between 2014 and 2016 my project was supported by a research el-lowship rom the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which enabled me to work with the archives at the Center or East European Studies (Forschungsstelle Osteuropa) in Bremen, Germany. I thank its director,

vii

viiiACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sussanne Schattenberg, or hosting me and Maria Klassen, the archi-vist, or her generous help with my research. My stay in Bremen would not be nearly as memorable, and this book would not be the same, without the eye-opening conversations I had with Gabriel Superin, as well as with Tatiana Dviniatina, Nikolai Mitrokhin, Manuela Putz, and Felix Herrmann. I am grateul to Lazar Fleishman or introducing me to the Bremen archives and its sta back in 2011. In 2015, as a Hum-boldt ellow, I was able to work with other archives elsewhere in Eu-rope, particularly the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine (BDIC) in Nanterre and the Instytut Literacki (Kultura Paryska) in Maison Laitte outside Paris. I am deeply indebted to Claire Niemko (Nanterre) and Anna Bernhardt (Maison Laitte) or accom-modating me in my archival pursuits. Central to my research on tamizdat and the Russian emigration more broadly have been the archival collections at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale and at the Hoover Institution at Stan-ord, both o which have awarded me visiting ellowships. I thank Alli-son Van Rhee and Edwin Schroeder, ormer director o the Beinecke, or making it a place I ind mysel ever drawn to, and Carol A. Leadenham or her permission to publish my indings rom the invaluable Gleb Struve Collection at Stanord. I am also grateul to Tanya Chebotarev rom the Bakhmete Archive at Columbia University; Anna Gavrilova and Sergei Soloviev or amiliarizing me with some sources rom the Russian State Archive o Literature and Art (RGALI); and Pavel Tribun-sky rom the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Dom Russkogo Zarubezh’ia in Moscow or his help and collaboration. While many o its ideas and preliminary research took shape earlier and elsewhere, this book was written ater I joined Hunter College o the City University o New York in 2016. It was here that my project met the greatest enthusiasm and support, including two PSC-CUNY Enhanced Research Awards and several other grants and ellowships. Most importantly, it is my students and colleagues at Hunter and the CUNY Graduate Center I have to thank. All chapters o this book were read and thoroughly discussed at the Hunter Faculty Writing Seminar, spearheaded by Robert Cowan and Andrew Polsky, dean o the School o Arts and Sciences; it was at Hunter that in December 2018 I was able to organize an international conerence and book exhibition, “Tamiz-dat: Publishing Russian Literature in the Cold War,” cosponsored by the Harriman Institute o Columbia University and the Department

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

o Russian and Slavic Studies o NYU. I thank Polina Barskova, the conerence co-organizer, and Alla Roylance, the book exhibition cocu-rator, or all their thoughts and energy. I thank, too, the conerence guests and participants: Olga Matich, Ronald Meyer, Elizabeth Beau-jour, Nadya Peterson, Katerina Clark, Rossen Djagalov, Olga Voronina, Philip Gleissner, Erina Megowan, Ann Komaromi, Ilja Kukuj, Benjamin Nathans, Roman Utkin, Jessie Labov, Siobhan Doucette, Irena Grudz-inska Gross, Robin Feuer Miller, Michael Scammell, Pavel Litvinov, 3 Irina Prokhorova, and Ellendea Proer Teasley. Three years later, an edited volume based on the tamizdat conerence at Hunter was pub-4 lished, thanks to Ilja Kukuj’s heroic eorts. It was also at Hunter that Tamizdat Project, a digital extension o this book, was conceived and 5 grew into a public scholarship initiative. I thank the New York Public Library and Bogdan Horbal, curator or the Slavic and East European Collections, or his support o Tamizdat Project and my work on this book by providing access to valuable databases, as well as or his own perspective on tamizdat as a librarian. As the director o Tamizdat Proj-ect, I thank all its numerous volunteers, as well as the National Endow-ment or the Humanities or its summer stipend (2020), which allowed me to promote the project and tamizdat as a topic among students worldwide. From December 2020 to August 2021, I was honored to hold the James Billington Fellowship rom the Kennan Institute o the Wilson Center, which allowed me time o rom teaching and made it possible to inish the book that spring. I have presented parts o my project at multiple conerences, guest lectures, and other venues, to whose organizers, ellow panelists, and audiences I am orever indebted: Boris Belenkin, Paolo Fasoli, Edwin Frank, Tomas Glanc, Yelena Kalinsky, Peter Kauman, Ann Komaromi, Ilya Kukulin, Bettina Lerner, Mark Lipovetsky, Misha Melnichenko, Elena Mikhailik, Elena Ostrovskaya, Nina Popova, Tatiana Pozdnia-kova, Mathew Rojansky, Irina Sandomiskaja, Klavdia Smola, Alex Spe-ktor, Leona Toker, Zara Torlone, Birutė Vagrienė, Matvei Yankelevich, Elena Zemskova, and countless others. This book would not have been possible without hours, days, and years o conversations with Tomas Venclova, who taught me the lie o books when I was his graduate student at Yale and who has remained an inexhaustible source o knowledge and inspiration thereater. Finally, this book would never have been written without the love and encouragement o my riends Polina Barskova, Anna Bespiatykh

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