The Department of Russian and Slavic Studies (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) invites you to the guest lecture
“Tamizdat as a Literary Practice and Political Institution”
by Yasha Klots (Hunter College of the City University of New York)

Monday, January 16, 2022, 13:00-14:30
Mt. Scopus, Library, Media 32

The term tamizdat, coined as a derivative of samizdat (self-publishing) and gosizdat (state publishing),
refers to the publishing industry “over there,” or abroad. It stands for the corpus of manuscripts rejected,
censored or never submitted for publication at home but smuggled through various channels across the
Iron Curtain and printed elsewhere, with or without the authors’ knowledge or consent. Tamizdat was a
weapon on the cultural fronts of the Cold War and remained as symbolic of the Soviet era as its more
familiar and better researched domestic counterparts, samizdat and gosizdat, until Perestroika, when the
Curtain began to rust. Each publication of these first editions of contraband literature from Russia and
Eastern Europe has its own history, making tamizdat a literary practice and a political institution of the
Soviet era.

 

Yasha Klots, director of Tamizdat Project, will speak about the history of tamizdat as a historical
phenomenon, as well as about its relevance today, when censorship and political persecution in Putin’s
Russia is back.