Contraband Manuscripts in Tamizdat Periodicals of the 1960s

• In Event: Periodicals Unbound I: Communities across Borders

Abstract

The aesthetic, ideological, and generational heterogeneity of East European literary diasporas is reflected in their vast array of periodical publications, the driving vehicle of tamizdat as a literary practice and political institution of the Cold War. In keeping with the general tendency of diasporic communities to reproduce and perpetuate cultural patterns of the metropolia elsewhere in a condensed, miniature form, the age-old tradition of “thick” literary journals, too, migrated abroad as part of the cultural baggage of the Russian and East European exiles to channel a parallel course of development for clandestine literature from behind the Iron Curtain in another geography and jurisdiction. Not only tamizdat book publishing, but tamizdat periodicals, too, can be traced back to Alexander Herzen’s monthly Kolokol published in London and Geneva a century earlier. In the 1960s, however, while opposing the Soviet regime ideologically, émigré journals and newspapers, while being used as weapons on the cultural fronds of the Cold War, were not devoid of their own hierarchy and political agenda, resulting in a different kind of censorship that was especially visible when contraband manuscripts were first published in tamizdat periodicals. Using archival sources (e.g., editorial correspondence), the paper will dwell on the examples of the following tamizdat journals active in the 1960s: Novyi Zhurnal (New York), Student (London), and Grani (Frankfurt am Main).

Author

• Yasha Klots, CUNY Hunter College