Word: samizdat
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Speaking in Russian, Garbanevskaya said yesterday the underground publishing network in the Soviet Union--known as "samizdat"--began a movement after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953 to publish "good and free poetry," not political dissent...
...added, prose and politics entered the pages of samizdat, but the Soviet authorities cracked down after the 1962 publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," a novel that explores life in a Soviet labor camp. Despite the crackdown, samizdat became increasingly political during the '70s, Garbanevskaya said...
Furthermore, these dissidents were not a uniform group; their styles and methods, background and temperament all differed. Some collected signatures, others wrote samizdat or self-published pamphlets. For some, politics became a full time job, for others dissent began only after professional work ended. Some never went public while others like Anatoly Marchenko kept his mittens, socks and toothbrush near his door in case he was sent to prison...
Georgi Vladimov, 49, is another exceptionally talented writer who has been cut down in mid-career and who is being hounded by the KGB. One reason for the persecution is his celebrated novella, Faithful Ruslan, which has circulated all over the country in samizdat; it was published in the U.S. last year by Simon & Schuster. Ruslan tells of a concentration-camp dog, pitilessly trained to guard convicts, that becomes a stray when most of the Stalinist camps are closed down in 1956. Ruslan, and other dogs of his kind, keep a vigil at the local railway station, hoping...
Some hugely successful novels have spawned a curious mass-market samizdat that differs sharply from the writings of dissidents. The newest underground hit is At the Last Frontier, a trashy historical novel by Valentin Pikul about Grigori Rasputin, the sexy, self-styled holy man who held the Russian imperial family in thrall. Originally published in the magazine Our Contemporary, which has a circulation of 300,000, the novel caused a sensation as much for its scenes of debauchery as for its virulent antiSemitism. Unfavorable reviews, which criticized the book for its non-Marxist attitudes and hostile treatment of Jews, merely...