An interesting NY Times piece by Sarah Chatta (archived):
Millions of banned books were smuggled into the Soviet Union in the 20th century — often in small batches, hidden in deliberately mislabeled containers, packed in food tins or tampon boxes and, in at least one case, tucked into a child’s diaper. […] Published in Russian and other languages and known as “tamizdat,” the books were part of an audacious American venture, part literature, part propaganda and part spycraft, to destabilize the authoritarian Soviet regime from within.
Over the past several years, Hunter College in Manhattan has become home to a library of these remarkable books, thousands of which were once banned in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and hundreds more that are censored in Russia today. The library is run by the nonprofit Tamizdat Project, which now possesses one of the largest special collections of contraband Russian literature in the world. The library is open to visitors upon request, and this month White Rabbit Books on the Upper West Side will open a new section of its store devoted to selling old and new contraband Russian literature curated by the project.
The Tamizdat Project is the brainchild of Yakov Klots, a soft-spoken, unassuming literary scholar who teaches at Hunter. He chose the name from a Russian word meaning “published abroad,” which, along with samizdat (“to self-publish”), was one of the two main methods of evading Soviet book censorship. The Iron Curtain, he noted, “wasn’t so iron after all,” and the books seeped through. Mr. Klots has assembled the library bit by bit, recruiting his students to build the metal IKEA bookshelves and soliciting book donations from friends and strangers, including the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Beyrle. […]
Mr. Klots grew up with contraband Russian literature in the Soviet city of Perm, near the Ural Mountains. His mother, he said, “would take a train to Moscow just to stop by an apartment of one dissident who would give her Solzhenitsyn.” Then she would stay up late into the night duplicating the borrowed book, page by page. “One of my childhood memories is my mother typing something at night and me falling asleep to the sound of the typewriter,” he said. […]
New York City is a fitting locale for the work of the Tamizdat Project. For most of the 20th century it was home to the publishers, academics, activists and philanthropists who saw the potential of contraband books during and even before the Cold War.
The first novel officially banned in the Soviet Union, “We” — a dystopian vision of totalitarianism by Yevgeny Zamyatin — was published twice in New York before it could be released at home. Mr. Zamyatin managed to send his manuscript abroad, and E.P. Dutton released it, in English, in 1924. More than 60 years later, when Soviet authorities lifted the ban, some of the country’s citizens had already read it. Mr. Zamyatin’s Russian-language original had already been printed in 1952 by Chekhov Publishing House in New York. “It was just a pure detective story, how every single book got published as tamizdat,” Mr. Klots said. […]
As the scope of Russian censorship has widened in recent years, the history of New York’s Soviet-era banned-book publishers has gained new relevance. “Even if these people are no longer around,” Mr. Klots said, they “laid the foundation for a project like the Tamizdat Project to exist and to build on their legacy.”
One of the Tamizdat Project’s most significant donations came from the family of Edward Kline, a philanthropist who led a double life in New York. Most knew him as the millionaire chief executive of the Kline Brothers department store chain, but the Soviet human rights movement knew him as a chief advocate and underwriter of its publishing work. The Tamizdat Project has started to reveal the extent of Mr. Kline’s activities. Among his many endeavors, he acquired and revived Chekhov Publishing House, releasing what became canonical 20th-century Russian literature: original works by Nadezhda Mandelstam, Lydia Chukovskaya and Joseph Brodsky.
I recommend reading the rest of it, with accounts of Kline’s activities and his modern successors; also, there are good photos.
The article mentions Alexander Godunov, who I remember for playing the heavy in Die Hard. His fight scenes look quite different if you watch them knowing he had been a star ballet dancer.
Soviet publishing practices were extremely weird. Often times, a book wasn’t banned, in fact, it was published by an official publishing place, but in extremely small run. And people who wanted to have a copy were forced to make it on a typewriter. In my childhood house there was one such book on yoga (gymnastics side of it). But I read stories about people copying poetry of Esenin, who was 100% approved by the officialdom.
In the later Soviet era, the audio equivalent of samizdat for disseminated not-officially-“published” music was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitizdat, which was a substantial technological improvement over the earlier “roentgenizdat.”
Earlier this year I finally got around to listening (40 years after its original release) to the tamizdat equivalent, viz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Wave, a selection of recordings by four Leningrad-based bands that was released on a semi-prominent-at-the-time indie/underground label in the West. It has an interesting disclaimer (perhaps intended to give the bands “plausible deniability” if the Soviet authorities were unhappy with the project) on the back cover: “The musicians do not bear any responsibility for publishing these tapes. Stingray Productions is grateful to all those people who had the courage to preserve and deliver the tapes.”
Although I suppose the difference was that the Red Wave collection was intended more to make these recordings accessible to a Western audience than to be smuggled back into the USSR?
But I read stories about people copying poetry of Esenin, who was 100% approved by the officialdom.
I remember that when I started to live in the former SU in the 90s, Esenin had somewhat of a “bad boy” image – maybe he hadn’t been banned, but he was a poet more stolid people would not admit to reading or liking. So if you wanted to avoid their opprobium, you might have preferred copying an edition to asking for it openly in a bookshop. And then, as you say yourself, not every legal book would have been widely available in all book shops.
Hans, yes. I remember it specifically as a demonstration of a completely crazy system of decision-making of official publishers who would engage in a complicated calculation of which author deserved to be published in which quantities instead of simply printing as many copies as people wanted to buy of the authors who nobody objected to. Like, I can understand that Sophiya Vlasjevna didn’t want to allow a lot of Bunin. He was an emigre and very anti-Soviet, but he wasn’t banned completely on account of being a great writer and majority of his work being entirely non-political. Obviously, I disagree, but understand. But why the hell not to print enough copies of Esenin? They taught him in schools.
I own an edition of Esenin published in 1983 in a print run of 1,000,000.
On the subject of magnitizdat, I wonder if people know the book “X-Ray Audio” by Stephen Coates (Strange Attractor Press, 2015), describing the re-use of X-ray plates for bootleg music recordings:
“Telling the story of forbidden culture, bootleg technology and human endeavour, this is the secret history of Russian X-ray records and of the people who made, bought and sold them. Many older people in Russia remember seeing and hearing mysterious vinyl flexi-discs when they were young. They had partial images of skeletons on them, could be played like gramophone records and were called ‘bones’ or ‘ribs’. They contained forbidden music. In the cold war era, the Soviet recording industry and permissible musical repertoire were ruthlessly controlled by the State. But a secret and risky subculture of bootleg recordings arose. Incredibly, bootleggers built homemade recording machines and found an extraordinary way to copy banned gramophone records – they used X-Rays clandestinely obtained from hospitals.”
@Mike C.: Yes, that’s the so-called “roentgenizdat” I referenced in my earlier comment (although for all I know that jokey name was given in hindsight and not used contemporaneously). The subsequent laxity of Soviet regulation of “normal” reel-to-reel tape recorders once they became widely available (which made things much much easier for music-sharers)* was an interesting failure of rigor/paranoia on the regime’s part.
*Without specialized gear you can duplicate an existing tape just with two “normal” units plus some cables connecting them.
From the title I expected a thread about Tamizdat since 2022:)))))
On top of Russian emigration of 2022, the guys running the country have many brilliant apolitical ideas for what to censor, more and more and more of them. Chats frequented by writers are full of moans.
Tamizdat: a Mesopotamian goddess, Berber word or both?
(with slight root changes)
Hah! Definitely Berber.
But compare
Taghribat Bani Hilal (see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirat_Bani_Hilal)
(A useful word by the way. Makes me think of Journey to the West, but with overtones of exile and alienation can also be applied to emigrants from the Oriental country of Russia)
So it could be *Tamzidah with metathesis.
@D.O., my personal nightmare of 10s: Russian learners ask questions about Берёзы, a song by Любэ. Fucking crap. I can see that the author can write better lyrics but he actually invested effort in keeping this collection of cliches as dumb and cheesy as possible.
Then they (learners) wathed the TV-series about Esenin and began to tell how much they love Bezrukov’s perfomance of Esenin poems. Bezrukov played Esenin in the series and he also sings him. I never listened to him and never watched the series (I looked at his face and realised I must stay away from this). So when they spoke about thier love, I angrily responded by links to Esenin’s own performance.
And then when somoene asked something about Любэ’s song I googled it and… saw (without surprise…) that Bezrukov recorded it too.
“у дорог прислонившись по ветру стоят” – the line from Любэ’s song that makes learners ask questions. I don’t know what it means:) Maybe, the sole glimpse of poetry in this collection of cliches – by virtue of being incomprehensible:)
@drasvi
Are they leaning into the wind? This is a good thing to do if you don’t want to be blown over. Unless you are a tree and you lean in the opposite direction.
@PP, but the word means “leaning against”.
The reflexive verb is usually said about a person touching some vertical surface with her back or shoulder (or hip or even cheek). Not necessarily standing, she can be lying as well.
The transitive verb means to lean X against Y, with emphasis on contact rather than support.
Normally done for support, but if X is your leg or, say, an object with a flat surface which you’re holding in your hand, then it means “establish and maintain contact between vertical surfaces of X and Y”, as “press against” without actually pressing.
So its semantics revolves around contact of vertical surfaces.
Support is frequently, but not always implied.
Verticalness of X is not implied (having a vertical surface is).
Deviation from vertical is not implied.
In other words, it is not “to lean”. I can imagine a dialect where it means “to lean”… but then the prefix при means “at, against” – it is this prefix that has the contact semantics here.
@drasvi
Suppose you punctuate “У дорог, прислонившись по ветру, стоят. И листву так печально кидают…”
Then the only problem would seem to be po instead of k. This could be poetic licence or short for k vetru po vetru? Maybe you have to imagine the wind blowing up from the road…
@drasvi:
Sounds like it means much the same as Kusaal dɛl “be leaning against something for support” (applies only to people: you use ti’i for “be leaning against something”, of an object.)
The primary sense of dɛl is physical, but it’s also used metaphorically for “rely on”, as in Rabshakeh’s taunt to Hezekiah:
Da kɛ ka teŋgban kanɛ ka fʋ dɛl la ma’af ye …
“Don’t let the genius loci you’re relying on deceive you that …”
(Well done to the translators for neatly conveying the contemptuousness: the original just has אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ אֲשֶׁ֥ר אַתָּ֛ה בּוֹטֵ֥חַ בֹּ֖ו “your God in whom you trust.”)
drasvi, I have no idea what Любэ is up to and the same goes for Bezrukov. And with your permission I will remain blissfully ignorant on both accounts.
The verb прислонившись lacks an explicit object and therefore most probably is used reflexively. The birch trees(?) are leaning on each other. Because they are staying “by the roads” it means that they are put there in rows and, when wind is blowing along the road’s direction, they sort of lean on each other. At least, it might appear that way. As far as I know, по ветру cannot be a complement of прислонившись, it’s just nonsense. I don’t think I ever heard по ветру in direct sense and the whole phrase is jarring. Or, as you say, maybe poetic. стоять прислонившись (be in upright position and leaning on something) is an ordinary collocation, but for reasons that I cannot quite explain this doesn’t work (at least for me) with indication of direction.