1 The predominance of specifically political opposition in descriptions of samizdat and “unofficial” Soviet literature has been noted by, for example, Stanislav Savitskii, in his book Andegraund: Istoriia i mify leningradskoi neofilsial'noi literatury (Moscow, 2002). See, for example, the 1976 account by dissident Iurii Mal'tsevof the history of “free” Russian literature, Vol'naia russkaia literatura, 1955-1975 (Frankfurt/Main, 1976). The most authoritative and comprehensive account of the era framed samizdat in terms of oppositional political activity: Liudmila Alekseeva, Istoriia inakomysliiavSSSR: Noveishii period (Vilnius, 1992). For the English translation, see Alekseeva, , Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National,Religious, and Human Rights, trans. Pearce, Carol and Glad, John (Middletown, Conn., 1985)Google Scholar. More recent materials reflecting the diversity of Soviet underground culture include Savitskii, Andegraund, the proceedings of conferences held in St. Petersburg and Moscow in 1993 (Viacheslav Dolinin and Boris Ivanov, Samizdat: Po materialam v konferentsii “30 letnezavisimoipechati, 1950-80gody” [St. Petersburg, 1993] and E. V Shukshina and Tamara Vladimirovna Gromova, eds., Gosbezopasnost’ i literatura: Na opyte Rossii i Germanii (SSSR iGDR) [Moscow, 1994]), and the series of articles appearing in the Moscowjournal Novoe literaturnoeobozrenie, 1995, no. 14. The massive tome edited by Anatolii Strelianyi etal., Samizdatveka (Moscow, 1999), provides a broad overview of Russian samizdat materials, with interesting accompanying articles and photographs. See also the catalogue of a German exhibition on samizdat held at the University of Bremen in 2000: Wolfgang Eichwede and Ivo Bock, eds., Samizdat: Alternative Kulture in Zentral- und Osteuropa: Die 60er bis 80erjahre (Leipzig, n.d.). An idiosyncratic early source is the massive volume: Kuz'minskii, Konstantin K. and Kovalev, Grigoiii L., eds., Antologiia noveishei russkoipoezii u Goluboi Laguny/The BlueLagoon Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry, vols. 1-5 (Newtonville, Mass., 1980-1986)Google Scholar.

2 Erofeev, Viktor, in the article, “Pominki po sovetskoi literature,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 4 July 1991), 8 Google Scholar, described an “alternative” new Russian literature from the Soviet underground that was supposedly not politically engaged. In the 1990s, “postmodernism” became a leading critical discourse among Russian critics. See Epshtein, Mikhail, Genis, Aleksandr, and Vladiv-Glover, Slobodanka, Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-SovietCulture, ed. and trans. Vladiv-Glover, Slobodanka (New York, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Lipovetskii, Mark, Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos, ed. Borenstein, Eliot (Armonk, N.Y., 1999)Google Scholar. Other examples include discussion by Dark, Oleg, “Mif o proze,” Druzhba narodov, 1992, nos. 5-6: 219–32Google Scholar, and Viacheslav Kuritsyn, Russkii literaturnyi postmodernizm (Moscow, 2000). This “postmodern” critical discourse reflected a drive to reintegrate Russian culture into a larger international playing field, but it was open to charges of tendentiousness and lack of historicization. Vladislav Kulakov, for example, questioned the fashionable label “postmodern.” Why did some merit the privileged designation and not others, and on what authority did critics confer the label? See Kulakov's, discussion of Groys's, Boris article “O pol'ze teorii dlia praktiki,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 31 October 1990, 5, in Kulakov Poeziiakakfakt (Moscow, 1999), 35–41 Google Scholar.

3 The period from the late 1960s to 1987 is the period of “classic” samizdat, according to the catalog in the publication Materialy samizdata, from the Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe Archives, no. 8 (1991): iii. This period stands outfrom the larger tradition of unofficial publishing in Russia from Aleksandr Radishchev to the internet. Samizdat underground publishing, appearing after Iosif Stalin, existed under particular conditions, within a definite political environment and specific technology and media. The explosion of independent publishing in the period of glasnost and perestroika reflected a different political climate, much freer access to the means for publishing, and significandy less threat of repression.

4 Some texts, particularly foreign editions smuggled into the USSR, could be photographed and then reproduced in theoretically limitless numbers of copies, although this process required a camera and paper for development and produced bulky texts.

5 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, Nobel Lecture, trans. Reeve, F. D. (New York, 1972), 34, 69Google Scholar (emphasis in the original, in all capital letters).

6 In his history of unofficial literature, Mal'tsev said, “Underground literature fixes itself with difficulty. It is forced to accomplish heroic feats (literally heroic, because the authors, like the distributors, pay with years in the camps, or with their lives) in order to survive, and often it does not survive (how many manuscripts are buried in the ovens of the Lubianka or in the secret archives of the KGB!).” Mal'tsev, Vol'naia russkaia literatura, 5-6.

7 Dissident Kopelev was the prototype for Rubin in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel First Circle. He said, “Those accomplishing great feats for the free word offer sacrifices. lurii Galanskov died in the camp. Il'ia Gabai committed suicide, having just returned to freedom. Grigorii Pod“iapol'skii died of a heart attack.” He maintained, however, “Whatever may happen to those who help to free the word, it lives. You cannot kill it, nor lock it up.“ From Kopelev's introduction to a collection of his speeches and letters circulated in samizdat, Vera v slovo: Vystupleniia ipis'ma 1962-1976gg. (Ann Arbor, 1977), 10. Svirskii emphasized the moral significance of Frida Vigdorova's service, notably the transcription of Joseph Brodsky's trial, in light of her subsequent death: “The significance of writers such as Frida Vigdorova is enormous. It is not just a matter of what they wrote, but of their fate, the ordeals they suffered. They hurled themselves unarmed at the State. As a rule children follow their parent's deeds rather than their words, particularly if their parents have paid for nobility of spirit with death.” Svirskii, Grigorii, A History of Post-WarSoviet Writing: The Literature of Moral Opposition, trans, and ed. Dessaix, Robert and Ulman, Michael (Ann Arbor, 1981), 237–38Google Scholar. This mythologizing quote does not, curiously, appear in the Russian versions of the text published in London (1979) and Moscow (1998).

8 See A. Daniel“s “Istoriia samizdata,” in Shukshina and Gromova, eds., Gosbezopasnost', 93. Another example of the heroic discourse is to be found in Viacheslav Dolinin's view of samizdat as a powerful political movement: “Samizdat, by widening spiritual horizons and awakening civil society and healthy, constructive forces, played a huge, still not fully appreciated role in destroying the totalitarian regime, in constructing a foundation for the future democratic Russia.” “Leningradskii periodicheskii samizdat serediny 1950- 80-kh godov,” in Dolinin and Ivanov, Samizdat, 21.

9 The KGB waged a campaign of searches, seizures, and arrests centered on the Chronicle in 1973, Case No. 24, known as the “Chronicle Case.” In twenty-seven issues they could find only one incorrect fact. See Alekseeva, Istoriia inakomysliia v SSSR, 231-32, 244, 246-47.

10 See also the playful watercolors and thread binding of early Muscovite “publications“ of SMOG poetry, including Aleksandr Urusov's “Krik dalekikh murav'ev” (1965) and “CHU” (1965), in the Hoover Archives, NTS Collection, Box 1, Items 9/65, 10/65. While some examples of hand-drawn covers can be found later, like that of the Moskovskii sbornik (1975) (Moscow Memorial Society, f. 156), others used typewritten graphics or placement on the page to contribute to design. Most publications forwent such luxury, however, in order to fit as much writing onto as little paper as possible. For this article, I consulted the sizable collection of samizdat texts at the Moscow Memorial Society, the small collection at the Sakharov Museum in Moscow, and the extensive NTS archive at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Other major collections can be found at the Radio Liberty Archives, housed in Budapest, and at the University of Bremen.

11 Sergei Lar'kov in Moscow, for example, specialized in hand-binding gift editions of samizdat texts, including an edition of the Sakharovskii sbornik that was presented to Andrei Sakharov himself in 1981. Having no materials on hand and being in a rush, he was forced to bind the text using the suede from his wife's skirt. Lar'kov, interview, Moscow Memorial Society, May 2000.

12 Applebaum, Anne, “Inside the Gulag,” New York Review of Books 47 (15 June 2000): 10 Google Scholar. Although, as noted above, samizdat texts were rarely mimeographed. Mimeograph technology, like photocopying machines, was strictly controlled in pre-glasnost Soviet society.

13 See Kuz'minskii and Kovalev, eds., Antologiia, 1:28. The lyrics come from Galich's song “How are we worse than Horace?“

14 See Grigorenko's, Petr memoirs, Vpodpol'e mozhno vstretit’ tol'ko krys … (Moscow, 1997)Google Scholar; Kuz'minskii and Kovalev, eds., Antologiia, 1:31; and Natal'ia Trauberg, “Vsegda li pobezhdaet pobezhdennyi? Natal'ia Trauberg o khristianskom samizdate,” Literaturnaiagazeta (26 April-2 May 2000) 17/5787: 11.

15 In OfGrammatology, Jacques Derrida treated the genealogy of the theologically motivated logos and the play between signifier and signified implied by “writing.” Samizdat presents a special historical case of the written “trace” he examines. Derrida, , O/Grammatology (1967), trans. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (Baltimore, 1998)Google Scholar.

16 See Losev, Lev, “Samizdat i samogon,” Zakrytyi raspredelitel’ (Tsikl ocherkov) (Ann Arbor, 1984), 178 Google Scholar. Losev identified six categories of samizdat literature: literary, political, religious-philosophical, mystical and occult, erotica, and instructions. Ibid., 170-74.

17 The so-called White Book, compiled by Aleksandr Ginzburg et al., documented the trial of Andrei Siniavskii and Iulii Daniel’ and protests against the trial in Russia and abroad. The White Book was circulated in samizdat. It provoked further conflicts between the Soviet authorities and a burgeoning human-rights movement. Alekseeva, lstoriia inakomysliiav SSSR, 206. See Siniavskii's, comments on the nonpolitical character of artistic literature in his “final word.” Siniavskii, , Belaia kniga o dele Siniavskogo iDanielia (Moscow, 1966, and Frankfurt am Main, 1967), 301–6Google Scholar.

18 From the discussion of Nina Katerli's speech “Sovok—moi geroi i moi chitatel'“ in Stephen Lovell and Rosalind Marsh's article “Culture and Crisis: The Intelligentsia and Literature after 1953,” in Kelly, Catriona and Shepherd, David, eds., Russian Cultural Studies:An Introduction (New York, 1998), 60 Google Scholar. Lovell and Marsh cite G. Hosking, Beyond SocialistRealism (London, 1980), and Besancon, A. “Solzhenitsyn at Harvard,” Survey 24 (1979): 134 Google Scholar. In numerous articles in Sintaksis, Siniavskii and Mariia Rozanova criticized Solzhenitsyn and Maksimov for their intolerant, Soviet-style dogmatism.

19 Genis, Aleksandr, “Pravda duraka: Andrei Siniavskii,” in Ivan Petrovich umer: Stat'i irassledovaniia (Moscow, 1999), 34 Google Scholar. This English version can be found in Genis, “Archaic Postmodernism: The Aesthetics of Andrei Sinyavsky,” in Epshtein, Genis, and Vladiv- Glover, Russian Postmodernism, 186.

20 See Nepomnyashchy, Catharine, Abram Tertt and the Poetics of Crime (New Haven, 1995), 198 Google Scholar. See also Nepomnyashchy's, article “Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky,” Slavic andEast European Journal 42, no. 3 (1998): 367–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Genis called Terts Siniavskii's “main literary work.” Genis, “Pravda duraka,” 35. Vadim Linetskii asserted that Siniavskii's Terts represented the first use of “foolishness” in Russian culture for the construction of the author: Linetskii, , “Nuzhen li mat russkoi proze?” Vestnik novoi literatury, 1992, no. 4: 224–31Google Scholar.

21 Compare samizdat writer Venedikt Erofeev's lampooning of Maksim Gor'kii on Capri with his “hairy legs” sucking out from under white trousers. Erofeev, , “;Friazevo- 61st kilometer,” Moskva-Petushki (1969) (Moscow, 2000)Google Scholar, and Erofeev, Venedikt, MoscowStations, trans. Mulrine, Stephen (London, 1997)Google Scholar.

22 Roman Gul“s telling reference to the biblical prohibition described in Genesis 9:22-23 was part of his attack on Siniavskii in the emigre publication Novyi zhurnal. Gul', “Progulki Khama s Pushkinym,” Novyi zhurnal, 1976, no. 124:117-29. Nepomnyashchy illustrated die way the language of outraged Soviet and emigre authorities demonstrated Siniavskii's violation of essential language taboos. See Nepomnyashchy, Abram Tertz, 23. Siniavskii's inappropriate attention to the body scandalized sensibilities accustomed to the discreetly covered authorial body.

23 Roland Barthes talked about the centrality of the story of Noah's nakedness for narrative in general, “if it is true that every narradve (every unveiling of the truth) is a staging of the (absent, hidden, or hypostatized) father—which would explain the solidarity of narrative forms, of family structures, and of prohibitions of nudity, all collected in our culture in the myth of Noah's sons covering his nakedness.” Barthes, , The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Miller, Richard (New York, 1975), 10 Google Scholar.

24 From “Dimitry Prigov,” A-Ia (Paris, 1979) 1:52.

25 See Baudrillard, Jean, Pourune critique de l'économie politique du signe (Paris, 1972), 63–64 Google Scholar. He distinguishes the value of objects of consumption based on a logic of difference and semiotic signification rather than on usefulness, economic value, or symbolic exchange. Baudrillard's theory does not perfectly fit the Soviet situation. He treats objects of consumption in the context of neo-Marxist economic principles. Part of nonconformist ideology in the late Soviet Union was a belief in the “pure” status of the cultural object, particularly in the “unsold” samizdat text. Eduard Limonov lampooned this aspect by selling his samizdat texts and then writing about doing so. Olga Matich wrote of Limonov, “he was ignored by political dissidents, who expect writers to be socially responsible and politically anti-Soviet. In contrast to other samizdat authors, Limonov rejected all noble literary and political gestures, selling typescript volumes of his poetry, which he manufactured himself, at five rubles apiece.” Matich, , “The Moral Immoralist: Edward Limonov'sftoya- Edichka,” Slavic and East European Journal 30, no. 4 (1986): 527 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 See Chudakova, Marietta, “Pora mezh ottepel'iu i zastoem (Rannie semidesiatye),” in Rossiia/Russia (Moscow, 1998), 1(9):101, 109Google Scholar.

27 Baudrillard describes fetishization of objects as the passion for the sign as such, for coded difference. He links that mechanism to ideology. Baudrillard, Pourune critique, 100.

28 Prigov, Dmitrii and Florenskii, Aleksandr, Evgenii Onegin Pushkina (St. Petersburg, 1998)Google Scholar.

29 Ibid.

30 On the historical development of this logocentrism in Russian culture, see Iurii Lotman's analysis of the formerly religious authority transferred to modern secular authors in Russian culture: Lotman, “Literaturnaia biografiia v istoriko-kul'turnom kontekste (K tipologicheskomu sootnosheniiu teksta i lichnosti avtora),” Lotman, lu. M., hbrannyestat'i v trekh tomakh (Tallinn, 1992), 1:365–80Google Scholar; and “Russkaia literatura poslepetrovskoi epokhi i khristianskaia traditsiia,” lu. M. Lotman i tartusko-moskovskaia semioticheskaia shkola (Moscow, 1994), 364-79. Varlam Shalamov's letter vehemendy denounces such authority, linking Russian high-realist novels to twentieth-century bloodshed. Shreider, Iurii, ed., “Pis'mo Shalamova,” Voprosy literatury, 1989, no. 5:226–44Google Scholar. Indictment of a pretension to comment on life via art was widespread among the younger generation of the Soviet underground. Influential theorist Boris Groys posited a direct line from the programmatic pathos of the Soviet avant-garde to Stalin's program in Groys, Boris, The Total Artof Stalinism: Avant-garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans.Rougle, Charles (Princeton, 1992)Google Scholar.

31 See the chapter in Svedana Boym's book, “Writing Common Places: Graphomania, , ” Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 168–214 Google Scholar.

32 See Daniel', A., “Dissidentstvo: Kul'tura, uskol'zaiushchaia ot opredeleniia,” in Rossiia/Russia (Moscow, 1998), 1(9):114–15Google Scholar.

33 See discussion by members of the Leningrad underground on this pitfall of unofficial existence: V. Antonov, “Neofitsial'noe iskusstvo: Razvitie, sostoianie, perspektivy,“ and Krivulin, V., “Dvadtsat’ let noveishei russkoi poezii,” both in Tserkov', kul'tura, ideologiia (Leningrad Samizdat, 1980)Google Scholar, Hoover-NTS, Box 21, 1305/81, pp. 9 and 12, 15-16.

34 From Terts, Abram (Andrei Siniavskii), Sobraniesochinenii v dvukh tomakh (Moscow, 1992), 1:157Google Scholar. Lev Losev considered the productive effects of censorship on Russian literature generally in his study, On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern RussianLiterature (Munich, 1984).

35 See D. A. Prigov, Sobraniestikhov (Vienna, 1996- ). Advertisements for the edition draw attention to its “samizdat” aesthetics. See Prigov's, numerous other etudes of samizdat aesthetics: for example, his 13 Mini-boohs (13 Mini-bucher) (New York, 1996)Google Scholar.

36 Anna Gerasimova linked Igor’ Irten'ev's practice to that of OBERIuT Oleinikov. She cited A. Eremenko as another late Soviet writer employing Oleinikov's device of inserting the deliberately inadequate, “parodic hack” word into serious rhetoric. Gerasimov, “OBERIu [Problemasmeshnogo],” Voprosy literatury, 1988, no. 4:56. Krivulin described the OBERIuTs’ denning influence on underground culture, particularly in the period from 1966 to 1970. See Krivulin, “Dvadtsat’ let noveishei russkoi poezii,” 7.

37 Siniavskii, in his books on the founding fathers of Russian literature, “casts the two authors as opposite models for the writer—Pushkin as the pure artist and [Nikolai] Gogol as the artist who strives for authority. Ultimately, however, he aims to rescue both from canonicity, not so much by offering an alternative reading of their lives and works as by subverting the equation of the body of the writer with the body of the text on which canonicity rests.” Nepomnyashchy, Abram Tertz, 198.

38 For use of the term baroque to describe late Soviet culture, see Vail’, Petr and Genis, Aleksandr, Sovremennaia russkaiaproza (Ann Arbor, 1982), 154–55Google Scholar, Kuz'minskii and Kovalev, eds., Antologiia, 1:269, Lipovetskii, Russian Postmodernist Fiction, 22, among others.

39 Dmitrii Prigov, interview, Moscow, 2000. See Krivulin, , Okhota na mamonta (St. Petersburg, 1998), 41 Google Scholar.

40 “Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them, the fault, the flaw, which becomes so. The pleasure of the text is like that untenable, impossible, purely novelistic instant so relished by Sade's libertine when he manages to be hanged and then to cut the rope at the very moment of his orgasm, his bliss.” Barthes, Pleasureof the Text, 7.

41 The image was used as the frontispiece of Lacan's twentieth volume of “Seminars,“ of which chapter 1 was, “De la jouissance.” He wrote, “vous n'avez qu'à aller regarder à Rome la statue du Bernini pour comprendre tout de suite qu'elle jouit, ça ne fait pas de doute.” See Lacan, Jacques, Le Seminaire de Jacques Lacan (Paris, 1973), 70 Google Scholar. Georges Bataille used the image at the front of the first edition of his L'Érotisme (Paris, 1957).

42 Barthes refers to the “edges” of the text as those coming together at the fault line of pleasure. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 6-7. Barthes proposed a “death of the author” in his article of that name. See Barthes, , “The Death of the Author” (1968), Image, Music, Text, trans. Heath, Stephen (New York, 1977), 142–48Google Scholar. Foucault treated that possibility in his article “What Is an Author?” (1969), in Rabinow, Paul, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York, 1984), 101–20Google Scholar.

43 Copying technology was not commonly available for samizdat, but the metaphor is nicely evocative nonetheless. See Vladimir Berezin's review of the Russian translation of Carl Proffer's Kliuchi k ‘Lolite,’ “Ideal'nyi chitatel’ ‘Lolity,'” Nez.avisim.aia gazeta, 6 April 2000, 7.

44 From the afterword to Erofeev, Venedikt, Moskva-Petushki i pr. (Moscow, 1990), 124–27Google Scholar.

45 “So, where did all this start? Well, it all started when Tikhonov nailed his fourteen propositions to the door of the Yeliseiko village soviet. Or rather, he didn't nail them to the door, he chalked them up on the fence, and they were words, really, not propositions, very clear and succinct, and there weren't fourteen of them, just two.” Erofeev, Moscow Stations, 92.

46 Limonov addressed his article “Nuzhny li Rossii Zhany Kokto?” to editor Zinaida Shakhovskaia, Russkaia mysl', 12 August 1975. Near the end he wrote, “1 wrote this article at the request of my friends, the writers-avant-gardists who left the USSR and settled in New York. Recently we banded together into a New York group of Russian literati. We propose to publish general samizdat collections here in America. As before we will type them on typewriters (on those brought from the USSR) and distribute them by hand.” Amherst Russian Center, Zinaida Shakhovskaia Collection, Box 3, File 23, p. 7. The article was cut significantly and appeared as a letter “From a Group of Literati in New York,” Russkaiamysl', 4 September 1975,14. Members of this supposed group later disputed Limonov's status as their spokesman.

47 See the essay by Rimma, and Gerlovin, Valerii in Doria, Charles, ed., Russian SamizdatArt: Essays (New York, 1986), 126 Google Scholar. John Bowlt's essay in this same collection treats futurist art books as the starting point for late Soviet samizdat art.

48 See Kuz'minskii, and Kovalev, , eds., Antologiia, 1:27–28 and 20-21Google Scholar.

49 See G. Zagianskaia and N. Ordynskii, “Samizdat i izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo: Kak smotret’ etu knigu,” in Strelianyi et al., Samizdat veka, 11-16.

50 Kulakov and others see Lianozovo poetry as a Soviet version of western “concrete“ poetry. Initiated by Georg Witte and Sabina Hansgen, the presentation of Lianozovo school in Germany included Evgenii Kropivnitskii, Igor’ Kholin, Genrikh Sapgir, Ian Satunovskii, and Vsevolod Nekrasov. See Kulakov's “Lianozovo v Germanii” (1993), in Kulakov, Poeziiakakfakt, 161-63.