Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Censorship in Twentieth-Century Literature - Geoffrey F. Peterson (essay date 2000)

Geoffrey F. Peterson (essay date 2000)

SOURCE: Peterson, Geoffrey F. “The Soviet Censorship and Samizdat.” In The Images of the Twentieth Century in Literature, Media, and Society, edited by Steven Kaplan, pp. 79-84. Pueblo, Colo.: University of Colorado, 2000.

[In the following essay, Peterson explains how samizdat, or underground émigré publishing, functioned as a response to Soviet censorship in the twentieth century.]

On September 8, 1965, Andrei Sinyavsky was on his way to read a lecture at Moscow State University when he was arrested in the streets. As Sinyavsky recalled a few years ago, “A first arrest is almost like first love. You remember everything down to the smallest details. The last words my wife said to me before I left the house were, ‘Dear, we've run out of money. Maybe you could borrow from someone until you get your salary.’”¹ For the next five months, Sinyavsky had no contact with his wife and...

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