Word: samizdat
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sooty housing project. He looked frail, his thin face tanned but deeply furrowed. But his blue-gray eyes still sparkled. On a small table in the corner stood a typewriter. "It is the fifth in 20 years," he said. The police had confiscated the others in attempts to trace samizdat (underground press) articles critical of the regime. The harassment had brought on an ulcer complicated by other stomach ailments. After multiple surgery in 1980, Ruml was declared an invalid and retired with a monthly pension...
Silence can be imposed, however. For a decade, the Czech authorities published no new work by Seifert. His poems circulated only in the private versions known as samizdat. As he neared 80, the regime relented, and selections of his work began to appear once again. They proved immensely popular. Trying to explain that popularity, George Gibian, professor of comparative and Russian literature at Cornell, described Seifert as "the grand old man of Czech poetry, a combination of Robert Frost and E.E. Cummings...
Astonishingly, Konrád, 49, still lives and writes in Communist Hungary, where his novel passes from hand to hand in a process known by the Russian term samizdat: self-publishing. He has even been granted permission for a two-year stay in the West. Though Hungary has proved to be more forbearing of dissent than other countries in the Soviet bloc, Konrád is surprised by the degree of tolerance he has encountered at home...
...supposedly having circulated a sociological study I had coauthored. Instead, I found a community of young intellectuals who had established a kind of network of free thought. Thousands of copies of serious magazines are circulating unofficially in mimeographed form. Several hundred copies of my novel have already appeared in samizdat...
Since photocopying is still "like a fantasy of the 21st century" in the Soviet Union--although it is becoming slightly more common--it is almost impossible to print materials in large quantities and to reach the masses, she noted. However, Garbanevskaya said she hopes that samizdat materials can be reproduced in the West and that they will "return to readers in the Soviet Union" in larger quantities...