SOURCE: Pospielovsky, D. “From Gosizdat to Samizdat and Tamizdat.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 20 (1978): 44-62.

[In the following essay, Pospielovsky traces the historical and intellectual development of underground Russian literature in the 1970s, making distinctions between the literature of the gosizdat, published by official Soviet publishing houses, the samizdat, which was writing unapproved by and produced independently of the Soviet government, and tamizdat, works that were both denied approval by the Soviet censorship machine, but were published abroad and then smuggled back into the Soviet Union.]

The purpose of this paper¹ is to trace the historical and intellectual development of contemporary uncensored Russian literature. Three types of literary output will be discussed: gosizdat—literature emanating from official Soviet publishing houses and thus having the approval of the state censor; samizdat—unapproved material reproduced unofficially in the Soviet Union by hand, typewriter, mimeograph or occasionally by Xerography; and tamizdat—works also denied approval by the official censor but published abroad (either with or without their author's consent) and then smuggled back into the Soviet Union. The latter category includes the republication of pre-revolutionary works unobtainable in Soviet libraries as well as the printing of manuscripts written by Russian émigrés or by Soviet authors denied an outlet in their homeland.² As shall be seen, gosizdat, samizdat and tamizdat are not separate phenomena isolated from one another but three offshoots of one Russian culture, each seeking its own means of unhindered expression.

The fact that the Golden Age of Russian literature coincided with one of the harshest periods of pre-revolutionary censorship indicates that the contemporary phenomena of samizdat and tamizdat cannot be directly traced to censorship per se, or at least cannot be reduced to it alone. Moreover, with the rare exception of Alexander Herzen, whose nonpolitical writing was banned in Imperial Russia because of his political rôle, pre-revolutionary underground literary figures did not produce writings of very high artistic caliber. Even the post-revolutionary rehabilitation of the narodnik writers has failed to assure them of real literary prominence. In contrast, contemporary samizdat and tamizdat includes the greatest writers and poets—both living and dead—of the Soviet era, while the bulk of the contemporary gosizdat output is grey mediocrity at best. Another qualitative difference between Soviet and tsarist cultural policies is that pre-revolutionary authors of works banned by the censor but circulated in manuscript form or even published abroad, were not automatically subjected to persecution and were not prevented from publishing other works which the censor approved in their own country.³

The most distinguishing feature between the censorship limitations imposed by an authoritarian régime and those set by an ideocratic totalitarian dictatorship is that the former can even stimulate fine art: it forces intellectual, artistic, and emotional self-discipline upon the author. The author, if he is talented enough, develops a metaphorical style with elegant allusions, understatements, etc., which are the ingredients of good literature even if not of good social science or socially-oriented philosophy. Hence, it seems it is in conditions of negative censorship that gifted, imaginative and creative individuals are stimulated to engage in the arts; and thus censorship, as Andrei Siniavsky suggested, can be a blessing for literature.⁴ Moreover, it may also help in the education of the artistic tastes of the masses by banning trash and pornography and thus limiting the choice of cultural entertainment for the consumer. Recently discovered masterpieces of the 1930's—by Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrei Platonov and others—show that even ideological diktat and terror do not kill art; they only push it into the underground at best or into the writer's desk drawer at worst, although they may physically kill the artist. Writing for the desk drawer, tamizdat or samizdat become in a totalitarian state the mainstream of man's creativity, in quality if not in quantity. In all other social systems, the qualitative artistic mainstream is to be found in the legally tolerated publications, with the underground arts functioning only on the fringes.

Hence, samizdat and tamizdat as we know them today, are new and historically unprecedented phenomena born of totalitarian ideocratic diktat by the régime, its rejection by those who write, and a thirst for alternative values by the public.⁵ They are a product of a system which rejects and bans independent thought as a matter of principle, while the censorship of traditional absolutist states banned only that thought which it considered to be a direct threat to the public order. Indeed, the Bolshevik era opened with the expulsion of several hundred leading thinkers in 1921-22, the execution of N. S. Gumilev, the first execution of a leading literary figure in modern Russian history, the persecution of the Acmeist literary movement in general, and the appearance of samizdat and tamizdat. The earliest proto-samizdat were the encyclicals of Patriarch Tikhon, which the government printing establishments refused to print. The disenfranchised and disestablished church had been deprived of its own printing base, but its thought did not die since throughout the 'twenties, 'thirties, and 'forties—long before the contemporary flow of samizdat—the leading thinkers of the church continued to write, while the faithful retyped and circulated their works in clandestine Christian study circles.⁶ In 1921 printing workers discovered the galleys of De Profundis which they published on their own initiative and distributed clandestinely despite its having been banned by Lenin's censor.⁷ In the literary proto-samizdat of the 'twenties and 'thirties, the poems of Gumilev, Osip Mandelstam, and Maximilian Voloshin also circulated clandestinely, to name but a few of the most famous authors banned in the early Soviet period.⁸Tamizdat, if it be interpreted as works of Soviet authors smuggled to the West, was represented in the 'twenties by B. Pil'niak and E. I. Zamiatin, who immediately fell prey to persecution for publishing their works abroad.

The deceitful NEP “liberalism” divided the Russian intelligentsia into the politically and philosophically less sensitive majority who, terrified by the bloody experience of the Civil War, were now psychologically prepared to welcome any “strong power” as long as it allowed them some cultural and creative freedom. They became the so-called “fellow-travellers.”⁹ A prescient few recognized the signs of the times to come, and wrote in a manner surpassing the tolerance limits of even the relatively mild censorship of the 1920's. These few wrote for proto-samizdat or for proto-tamizdat. But precisely because the majority of their colleagues and even of their potential readers did not see what they saw, they remained a “voice crying in the wilderness.” Characteristically, among these proto-samizdat and tamizdatchiks were to be found some who had embraced the revolution as a means of purification and as new freedom for the nation and who now were deeply disappointed.¹⁰ “Fellow travelling” was more acceptable to those who never cared for the revolution, who had been politically more neutral or alienated from the very beginning.

Although by the 1930's there should have been a larger and more understanding audience for samizdat or tamizdat, the effect of the all-penetrating terror was fear and total isolation. Fear alone was incapable of totally halting man's creativity. Isolation, both from the outside world and from one's own countrymen, was more destructive. In Nadezhda Mandelstam's words, this world of compulsory collectivism and suspiciousness resulted in the most extreme form of individualism.¹¹ Hence, writers, poets, and even painters wrote mostly for the drawer with the faint hope of better times to come in a distant future.

The appearance in gosizdat after Stalin's death of such works as Vladimir Pomerantsev's “On Sincerity in Literature,” Valentin Ovechkin's District Routine, Iliia Ehrenburg's Thaw, although greeted by a harangue of party criticism, was seen by many as the long awaited signal of hope that gosizdat could yet become a channel for genuine artistic expression. Veniamin Kaverin expressed the hopes of many when, at the Second Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in December 1954, he reflected on his vision of the literature of the future:

I see a literature in which a strong independent criticism daringly determines the road of the writer, his capabilities and prospects. I see a literature in which the most experienced, the most famous writers concentrate on their creative work, without distraction and without forcing readers to wait for decades for their new works. I see a literature in which editorial boards of literary journals bravely support those works which had been published in their journals, defending their independent ideas and standing up for their authors. … I see a literature in which critics analyze a work from the platform of its author, not measuring another's corn by one's own bushel, and remembering Pushkin's words that a writer should be tried according to laws which the author alone recognizes as laws over his working methods. I see a literature in which any, even a most authoritative opinion, does not close the gates to a literary work, because the fate of a book is the fate of its author, while the author's fate should be cherished and loved. I see a literature, in which personal relations play no role whatsoever. … I see a literature, in which the sticking of labels is considered a shame and is prosecuted by law; a literature which remembers and loves its past. … Sombre skeptics will be found who will say that all this is unrealistic daydreaming. …¹²

Boris Pasternak's decision to send Doctor Zhivago abroad through unofficial channels once it had been refused publication in the USSR, and the wild reaction of the Khrushchev leadership and of the party-literary Establishment, served at once as a precedent for the revival of tamizdat and as a very serious, though not yet final, blow to the hopes of achieving creative freedom within the confines of gosizdat.¹³

It served also in many ways as an impetus for the gradual birth of samizdat as we understand it today; that is, as a competitor to gosizdat, as an institution, a parallel culture, rather than a fringe phenomenon. This was a period of physical coexistence of the still considerable remnants of the original generation of fellow-travellers in the literary world and of the as yet rather immature post-war generation of young writers who had only very recently shaken off their faith in Stalin and still romantically idealized the revolutions of 1917 and Leninism.¹⁴ It was hard for the fellow-travellers to recognize publicly toward the end of their lives that they had erred from the very beginning, and thus to recognize their own share of guilt for the terror.¹⁵ They still hoped for an apolitical niche for themselves in the post-Stalin era. The fear inherited from recent experience further helped them to rationalize a “neutralist” position, especially since in comparison with Stalinism the atmosphere continued to be relatively relaxed. The Axenovs, the Evtushenkos, and the Ehrenburgs continued to publish their half-truths and incomplete truths.

The party-literary leadership with Khrushchev's support reacted to the writers' ferment of the 'fifties by depriving the Moscow writers' community—the most troublesome one—of the possibility of direct influence on literary policies. This was done in 1958 by creating two bureaucratic buffer zones between it and the USSR Writers' Union Board: the Moscow City Branch of the Union of Writers, primarily through the recruitment of members from the periphery. In other words, the relatively numerous and outspoken minority of Moscow writers and a similar but smaller group in Leningrad from then on were totally submerged by the amorphous and heterogenous ocean of literary nonentities from the Russian provinces and the non-Russian autonomous areas of the huge RSFSR.¹⁶

This predictably caused a further deterioration and bureaucratization in the Union of Writers at a time when the remnants of the original generation of fellow-travellers were gradually retiring or dying, while the outspoken elements of the post-war generation of writers were still too young and uninfluential in the Union to make an impact on it, or were prevented from joining it by the aged bureaucracy of the Union.¹⁷ Paradoxically, the Union of Writers morally deteriorated in the more liberal post-Stalin era even in comparison with its image under Stalin. Whereas, in the older generation, both “the good guys” and “the bad guys” had participated in forming the Union of Writers, in the younger generation a much more clear-cut differentiation occurred: “the bad guys” mostly provincial literary non-entities replaced the older generation as the functionaries and power brokers of the Union, while the real writers remained on the fringes of the Union. The latter felt no attachment to it whatsoever, and eventually took expulsion from the Union almost as an act of honor for themselves, as if they were following in the footsteps of Pasternak, M. E. Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova.¹⁸ Psychologically this facilitated their participation in samizdat and culminated in the alienation of the real writers from the Soviet establishment.¹⁹ The Pasternak affair had in the long-run a shattering effect on the young generation, on the future samizdatchiki. On the one hand, his failure to publish at home stimulated the development of samizdat. Many aspiring writers undoubtedly reasoned after 1958 that “if the great Pasternak cannot get published, what hope can there be for our unorthodox experiments to see the light of day via the official publishing channels?” On the other hand the eventual smuggling back into Russia of the foreign-printed copies of Doctor Zhivago, with its devastating critique of the revolution and of Marxist materialism, helped the younger people to reassess the whole Soviet-Marxist-Leninist legacy in a critical light.

The chain of development from Pasternak to “dissent” and samizdat of the late 'sixties, not only in simple chronology but even in personalities, seems not to have been accidental:

—1958: the Pasternak ‘affair.’

—1959-65: Siniavsky, who as early as 1957 had been congratulated by Pasternak as the literary critic who understood him the best,²⁰ rejected socialist-realism, proclaimed his literary manifesto of phantasmagoria, and published abroad along with Iu. Daniel under the pseudonyms A. Tertz and N. Arzhak respectively.

—1959-61: Two young litterateurs, Alexander Ginzburg and Iurri Galanskov, “published” in samizdat three issues of Syntax and one of Phoenix (1961), respectively. Both “periodicals” were among the earliest samizdat productions to reach the West.²¹ This is significant. Resort to samizdat was in itself a sign of growing alienation from the system and from the establishment; its arrival in the West in the wake of Doctor Zhivago demonstrated a growth of contacts with the West and of friendliness toward it. It was, in other words, another manifestation of the growth of alienation from the régime and of skepticism toward its propaganda.

—1965-67: Galanskov began and Ginzburg completed during this period a White Book on the Siniavsky-Daniel case with the hope of drawing maximum attention to them and of securing their release or a review of their sentences. Galanskov published his Phoenix 1966—a voluminous collection of philosophical, sociological, literary, and historiographic essays—in samizdat.²² The unprecedented trial of writers for their literary works caused a reaction in the Soviet intellectual and literary spheres which was diametrically opposite to the expectations of the leadership: instead of cowardly submitting to these acts of terror, there were mass protests and a beginning of the period of mature samizdat.

After 1967 samizdat started to become the mainstream of independent thought and opinion, of free uncensored Russian literature. This process was assisted by the more severe censorship which developed after the trial of Siniavsky and Daniel and by the shredding of the galleys of Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, which forced Russia's greatest writer reluctantly to turn to samizdat.²³ Alexander Tvardovskii's retirement from Novyi Mir in 1970 (followed by his death a year later) closed the last remaining loophole within gosizdat. To more discriminating readers, there remained no doubt that the real “specific gravity” of Russian literature was now to be found jointly in samizdat and tamizdat.

The links between the literary samizdat and the general human rights movement, known more commonly in the West by the misnomer of “dissent,”²⁴ were demonstrated by the trial and sentence to long terms of strict-régime imprisonment of Vladimir Osipov and two of his closest associates in 1961 for initiating and leading the uncensored literary readings in Mayakovskii Square. Just like Galanskov, Ginzburg and Bukovskii later, Osipov began his “defiant” activities in the sphere of literature and art.²⁵ It was the punitive reaction of the state that politicized all four. Galanskov and Ginzburg were sentenced in 1968 to seven and five years of strict régime respectively for their actions in defense of Siniavsky and Daniel and for their literary-civic activities; the younger Vladimir Bukovskii and his friend Victor Khaustov received sentences of three years hard labor each for organizing a public demonstration in January 1967 in protest against the arrest of their above-named friends.²⁶

The literary and civic cause célèbre of this period was both Solzhenitsyn's expulsion from the Writers Union in 1969 and the award of the Nobel Prize to him in 1970. His behavior on both occasions contrasted favorably with that of Pasternak in 1958. This is explained in part by the fact that Pasternak, while a pioneer in such defiance and still an isolated figure in his stance, wavered under the influence of nearly thirty years of terror and general submission.

The contemporary period is but a logical development of the preceding. As the régime tightened its grip in the 1970's by more and more severe sentences for samizdat, and as the epoch of the unspecified human rights movement began to give way to deeper ideological and ideational seekings and consequent diversification of “dissent” into separate smaller groups, it has become more practical for samizdat authors to resort to the growing possibilities of tamizdat. This takes many forms. A very important factor has been the Western short-wave radio, particularly Radio Liberty, which began in early 1969 to broadcast regularly back to the Soviet Union almost all samizdat material it received. Thus samizdat writings, formerly available to only a few thousand readers at best via the pedestrian method of typed carbon copies and retypings, have become available to millions of Soviet short-wave radio listeners. The other form has been the smuggling into the Soviet Union of Russian books printed in the West, mostly by émigré presses. With the growth of ideological indifference and corruption of all levels of the Soviet establishment (combined with probable secret sympathy and deliberate coöperation of some officials) on the one hand, and the insatiable demand of the growing black market in books and the fantastic prices which Soviet readers are prepared to pay, on the other, an ever-greater number of books published in the West have reached the Soviet reader despite state controls.²⁷ The expulsion of some of Russia's most prominent writers and poets—Solzhenitsyn, Siniavsky, Naum Korzhavin, Joseph Brodskii, Victor Nekrasov, among others—has made the Western publishing world and the prospects of tamizdat psychologically infinitely more appealing, trustworthy and intimate to the remaining writers and readers in the USSR. The psychological Iron Curtain has become thinner and more transparent.

Two quite different and yet interrelated essays, which could be called literary manifestoes, appeared in the first six years after Stalin's death. The first one, Pomerantsev's “On Sincerity in Literature,” was published in the official press.²⁸ The violent attack to which it was subjected by the die-hard critics led to the appearance in tamizdat of the second manifesto: Andrei Siniavsky's “On Socialist Realism” written under the pseudonym of Abram Tertz.

Pomerantsev maintained that not only great but even readable literature can be created only if an author is free from all ideological and other clichés and remains honest to himself, to his convictions, to his sincere ideas, and to true unvarnished observations. He condemned the “industrial novel” for its total lack of these values and for subordinating human beings to the machine, to plan fulfillment, etc. He thereby implied that the “communist enthusiasm” and “ideological devotion” of the orthodox Soviet writers was insincere, and that therefore the whole school of socialist realism was a total fraud.

Siniavsky, in a way, was kinder to socialist realism. He saw it as a teleological art, subjugating facts and realities to the aim and values of communism. The suffering inflicted on human beings in the name of this ideal, he felt, led to its complete discrediting, especially after the death of Stalin. In this he saw the inevitable death of socialist realism as a viable style capable of inspiring true artistic creativity. In fact, he predicted the contemporary petrification of the Soviet literary establishment and its output. Seeing his contemporary world as macabre, Siniavsky believed that the true future of Russian literature should be found not in a return to nineteenth-century realism but in a new art of phantasmagoria.

… with hypotheses instead of aims and the grotesque in place of portrayal of living reality (bytopisanie). It corresponds the most to the spirit of contemporaneity. Let the exaggerated images of Hofmann, Dostoevskii, Goya, and Chagal … teach us how to be truthful with the help of an absurd fantasy.²⁹

Siniavsky's manifesto and his works in samizdat did not come out of a tabula rasa. Phantasmagoric works of the Soviet period include those of Olesha, Andrei Platonov,³⁰ Mikhail Bulgakov,³¹ Iulii Daniel, the Strugatskii brothers (especially their Troyka Fable and the fascinating Ugly Swans), Vladimir Voinovich's The Life and Unusual Exploits of Private Ivan Chonkin, and the recent Yawning Heights by the philosopher Alexander Zinoviev, to name but a few.

The dichotomy between a return to unhyphenated realism and the adoption of the style of hyperbole or phantasmagoria is in reality a debate on the best means to give a true, faithful and sincere expression to one's age, reality and experience. In this context, the messages of Pomerantsev and Siniavsky meet and jointly represent the strivings of the true artists of today's Russian literature.

It is not a coincidence that the advocates of realism tend toward “factism” and documentaries. This is one of the most interesting trends in contemporary Russian literary realism. Its most outstanding representatives are Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Maximov and Vladimir Voinovich in samizdat, as well as Gavriil Troepolskii, Konstantin Paustovskii, Valentin Ovechkin and Efim Dorosh who published earlier through gosizdat.

This trend has been noted by some leading Soviet literary figures, who see it as a reflection of “the sharpening [in our time] … of socio-political problems, a result of social searching.” A litterateur-documentalist remains a man of letters because, as distinguished from a reporter, he “acts as an investigator of particularly important acts of man.”³² He thus “invents his heroes … because he selects details and traits, re-interprets a phenomenon, forms his point of view, etc. … [But] the influence of [artistic] publicism on the reader is achieved only on the condition that the author remains within the confines of art, expresses himself in the language of literature. …”³³

What is this language of literature that makes a documentary a work of art, albeit, perhaps a new type of art? To answer this, one has only to read some of the above-mentioned authors, particularly Solzhenitsyn and Maximov. The “un-literary” memoir by a former fellow prisoner of Solzhenitsyn establishes how close the First Circle is to a documentary, where most of the characters are drawn almost entirely from life and where practically all the events described actually took place.³⁴ Yet, there is no doubt that the book is a work of art. In the book the events of several years are squeezed into one weekend. Much selection takes place; thoughts, metaphors and imaginary penetration into the mind of Stalin and other party functionaries add the necessary juxtapositions, artistic, intellectual and philosophic dimensions, which only a great piece of art can possess and which no straight memoir could hope to reproduce. The historian and the documentalist in Solzhenitsyn take him a step further in his August 1914, where the “screens” (whether they add to the artistic quality of the novel or not) are intended to provide the reader, who is mentally far removed from the pre-revolutionary epoch, with the atmosphere of the day by presenting conglomerations of headlines from the newspapers of the day. His presentation of historical sequence and facts in their appropriate historical and socio-economico-political context is factually so accurate that the book becomes a great historiographic and “historiosophic” achievement.

As a litterateur Solzhenitsyn faced his most difficult test in Gulag Achipelago. It is, no doubt, the greatest sociological and documentary-historical study of the first forty years of the Soviet penal system that could be produced on the basis of the human testimonies and the limited documentation available to the author. But he also created a major work of literature, a major piece of art. The compositional selections, the philosophizing, the unexpected sudden metaphors, the peculiarly Solzhenitsian linguistic style and linguistic innovations, the psychological insights into the mind of the bureaucrat and of the policeman, make the work unusual, unique, and yet undoubtedly a work of art.

Maximov illustrates the same documentary tendency, particularly in his Farewell from Nowhere.³⁵ (It is completely autobiographical; so much so that the author, his relatives, and all those persons he feels cannot be hurt, appear under their real names with accurate data on their biographies. Much of this “neo-novel” describes the delinquent and criminal adolescence and youth of the author. At first glance it would appear that it has much in common with Pyotr Yakir's Childhood in Prison, which is an autobiographical memoir describing similar experiences. Yet, there is a world of difference between the two works in that Maximov alone succeeds in making his work a work of art by using tools of displacement, selection and metaphor.

One wonders if these professed critical realists, these stylistic and methodological antipodes to Siniavsky's theory of phantasmagoria, are not by their documentary realism unconsciously confirming his theory. Their whole contemporary world and life-experience is so grotesquely unreal, so Kafkaesque, that its very description as a documentary arrangement of facts, becomes a work of art. Take, for instance, the two latest samizdat works of V. Voinovich. His intentionally phantasmagoric Ivan Chonkin sounds no more fantastic than his wholly autobiographical Ivankiad.³⁶ The latter is a chronicle of his struggle to move into a new apartment in Moscow, where the characters—including his main antagonist, a Soviet diplomat named Ivanko, and the mayor of Moscow—appear under their real names. It is as if these authors were saying to Siniavsky: ‘You needn't create imaginary situations and artificial hyperboles to assert your literary “manifesto.” The very life experienced by you and by all of us is such a hyperbole to the normal human imagination, that all you have to do is to pick the necessary themes and events from it and present them as they take place, arrange them to fit your story or plot, and you have all the hyperbole and phantasmagoria you want.’ It seems that in his unusual book of “incidental” thoughts, observations, and citations from dialogues and conversations of fellow-prisoners, Siniavsky himself infers a similar conclusion.³⁷

This literary revival, in its search for a means to express the deeper realities of life soon had to come into contact with the narrow gates of “Newspeak” and to overflow them. Ideological taboos and clichés have deprived the language of the means to express the ideas and concepts of a major part of man's cultural legacy, i.e., all that which deals with religion, religious philosophies, and other concepts not reducible to the notions of dialectical materialism. An early samizdat poem appealed: “The word has been debased as a worn coin. Who if not we must raise it once again?”³⁸

The trend to revive the original wealth and flexibility of the Russian language is not only an empirical rejection of the official culture which had castrated the language, but also amounts to an explicit or implicit replacement of the Marxian credo “in the beginning there was work” with the Christian “in the beginning there was the Word.” It is a Neo-Acmeist affirmation of inseparability of form and content, a rejection of the Marxist-Stalinist dualism (e.g., “national in form, socialist in content”). It is no coincidence, therefore, that the Acmeists with their assertion of the unity of form and content reached unprecedented popularity in the 'sixties and 'seventies, making up a large part of the literary samizdat and tamizdat circulating in the Soviet Union.³⁹

Of the more modern literary works, the major breakthrough in the revitalization of the language was Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Denisovich, followed by Matriona's House. The then-young Grigorii Baklanov wrote that after Ivan Denisovich it would never again be possible to write the way Soviet writers had been writing up to then. Solzhenitsyn, he wrote, had set certain moral and literary standards from which it would be impossible to return.⁴⁰

The prospect of Solzhenitsyn becoming the token of literary method and standards prompted the mediocrities of the party-literary establishment, who had sold their talents for a mess of pottage, to attack him as soon as they were permitted to do so. Such an opportunity availed itself with the publication of Matriona's House—a hymn to the sainthood of a humble, suffering, semi-literate kolkhoz woman. Its thesis that neither a village nor the whole world can survive without its saints—i.e., an assertion of the priority of the ethical world of the human being over the individual's rôle in the world and over economic or industrial achievements—was intolerable to the official ideology. Solzhenitsyn was accused of “a one-sided depiction of life without an historical perspective,” of serving isolated facts rather than the optimistic reality of Soviet life, etc.⁴¹

For all practical purposes, this marked the end of Solzhenitsyn as a legally publishable Soviet author. After 1963 he was allowed to publish only one short essay and an article. The article, however, was a program for the restoration of the lost wealth of the Russian language. He maintained that the major source for the restoration of the lost flexibility and richness of expression remained the pre-Petrine Russo-Slavonic and the vocabulary of the peasants in the less-adulterated isolated rural pockets of some areas of central and northern Russia.⁴² Not accidentally, therefore, the linguistic and stylistic revival of literary Russian in the 'sixties was associated with ruralist or religiously oriented writers.⁴³ It was recognized at a seminar of Soviet literary critics that the ruralists owed their origins to Solzhenitsyn.⁴⁴

All these writers have found it increasingly difficult to publish through gosizdat. The flourishing samizdat of the late 'sixties provided an optional outlet to them; a creatively much more challenging option, for here the circulation of their works depended entirely on demand of the literary consumer, and thus was a better measuring stick of the author's talents than gosizdat and the official critics. It was in response to and in solidarity with Solzhenitsyn's “Letter to the Fourth Congress of the Union of Writers” that Georgii Vladimov, another outstanding and very original writer whose Faithful Ruslan had already been circulating in samizdat by that time, wrote to the Writers' Union Presidium in 1967:

Soviet literature … cannot exist without creative freedom. … And I must say that there is such a freedom. It is being realized … in the activity of the so-called samizdat. Unpublished works of M. Bulgakov, M. Tsvetaeva, O. Mandelstam, A. Platonov, and of many living writers whose names I do not want to mention for obvious reasons, circulate in typewritten seventh or eighth carbon copies from hand to hand. … One of my works unaccepted for publication has also found harbor for itself in samizdat. … Besides uncensored songs and literature there is also uncensored art and sculpture and I even foresee the appearance of uncensored films if amateur film equipment rises to the necessary level. This process of emancipation of art from all chains of ‘administrative directives’ is developing and broadening, and attempts to prevent this spread are just as stupid as attempts to forbid drinking and smoking. You better reflect on the following: there are now two kinds of art in the country. One is free and uninhibited … whose distribution and influence depend only on its genuinely artistic qualities. And the other one, commanded and paid for … [is] badly mutilated, suppressed, and oppressed. … It is not hard to predict which of these two arts will be victorious. …⁴⁵

The options given to the régime and the Establishment were clear. The régime chose the more familiar road of suppressions and expulsions—a safer way for itself in the short run. As a consequence, in the words of Iurii Mal'tsev, a literary critic from Moscow,

It is difficult to find an educated person in Russia today who is not familiar with the literary underground, has not read proscribed books. … Banned is the living and the genuine Russian culture (it is not only literature that flourishes in the underground today, but also art, music, philosophy, sociology, and religion), i.e., that which is spiritual food of the contemporary Russian people, that which expresses their methodology of thought, their Weltanschauung. The official Soviet culture, that which can be learned from Soviet books, periodicals, films and broadcasts, is but a dead shell; it is pseudo-culture, for it is based on values (or pseudo-values) which no one believes anymore. It is difficult to find historical analogies to this situation, because never before has there been such a total control over all forms of human creativity, and never before has a society had to lead a double life to such a degree. In Soviet society the genuine, although ‘underground,’ life of a whole nation seethes behind a false, artificially supported façade.⁴⁶

In the decade that elapsed between Vladimov's letter and Mal'tsev's book, samizdat itself underwent a self-purification of sorts. At first samizdat literary works,⁴⁷ and even some philosophical ones,⁴⁸ were originally written for but rejected by gosizdat. Naturally, however brave and honest, authors writing with the hope of publishing their works officially under Soviet conditions, consciously or subconsciously subjected their stories, or even more their emotions, to the “inner censor” (to use Tvardovskii's expression). Even when writing with no hope of publication, authors chose their expressions and limited their topics so as to play it safe when the régime was selectively punitive and when they could avoid responsibility by claiming that their works were circulating in samizdat or published in tamizdat without authorization. With the loss of any hope of publishing in the USSR, and with the Soviet signing of the Copyright Agreement, authors have had to take full responsibility for delivering their works to samizdat or tamizdat. In doing so, their writings have become truly liberated.⁴⁹ Among the remarkable byproducts of this liberation has been the disappearance of the Marxist Weltanschauung from samizdat literary works; the growing preoccupation with religion in one form or another; and the permeation of works with Christian-personalist values.⁵⁰ The latter is also true of the few decent works still appearing in gosizdat. The theme of religion and spirituality recurs in the work of Fedor Abramov, in some of Bella Akhmadulina's latest poems, in Iurii Trifonov's novel on Zheliabov, even in recent writings of V. Semin who was not given to religious subjects in his earlier works.⁵¹ One of the most strikingly Christian-personalist works recently published through gosizdat is Vladimir Tendriakov's “Spring Turn-Overs” which is very much akin to Solzhenitsyn's Matriona's House. In it a thirteen-year-old boy, through his love and compassion, causes nothing short of a revolution in human relations in a small industrial settlement. He shows that the relativist-communist morality, with its respect only for the successful, can lead to intolerable human relations. He convinces his utilitarian and positivist parents that their neighbor—a failure who once dreamt of becoming a poet, a near-pauper because he refused to write stereotyped propaganda articles in a local newspaper, despised by all because of his failure to adapt—is in fact the noblest creature in the whole village and one whose moral beauty is worthy of respect and emulation.⁵²

But the publication of literary works of such caliber in gosizdat in the post-Tvardovskii era is very rare, and even these examples belong to the early 'seventies. They indicate, however, the direction contemporary Russian literature might have taken if it had been free from censorship. They also indicate that samizdat literature represents the prevalent and not the exceptional trend in Russian thought and literature: that samizdat authors differ from the other writers more in courage than in ideas. It may therefore be surmised that the more talented writers who had not yet joined the ranks of samizdatchiks are simply following the traditions of the Stalin era by writing for their desk drawer, not daring to make the final step. Be that as it may, desk drawer, samizdat and tamizdat works represent, what Geoffrey Hosking has called the post-totalitarian culture. He sees personalism, “concern with the personal,” the rejection of the Chernyshevskii tradition of real'nyi chelovek—where power, success and achievement are the sole criteria of human dignity and value—as the most striking features of this culture.⁵³

One of the clues to the near-total expulsion of this new Russian culture from the official media lies in the incompatibility of the antipersonalist totalitarian system with the personalist post-totalitarian culture. This is perhaps even sensed subconsciously by the régime. Thus the Soviet Union is the first case in modern history of a cultural and spiritual breakthrough beyond totalitarianism from within, without a prior external destruction or loosening up of the totalitarian system itself. Perhaps the failure of the West to comprehend the magnitude of this dichotomy lies in the fact that while the regenerating Russian culture is post-totalitarian, Western culture on the whole is pre-totalitarian.

Notes

1. Some parts of this paper, in revised form, are taken from D. Pospielovsky, Soviet Society and Uncensored Thought, 1956-76 (Belmont, Mass., 1978).

2. A more limited definition of tamizdat would include only works by Russian émigré authors. Barred works by Soviet authors, even if published abroad, by this definition would be considered samizdat. This division, while making for easier classification of émigré works, is not yet in common usage and therefore is not employed in this paper.

3. An example of this would be Nikolai Karamzin's Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia which circulated in manuscript while he continued to publish his other works officially and to enjoy high government positions and social prestige. A. Khomiakov's fortunes were not damaged by the fact that he published his theological works in Germany, after having been prevented by the censor from doing so at home. In fact, the unofficial social censorship of the radicals was often more severe than the official tsarist censors. For example, the radicals Vissarion Belinskii and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin enjoyed special privileges with several Russian publishers and periodicals, while the monarchist poet A. Fet was ostracized and practically silenced by the literary and publishing Establishment dominated by radical populists. See also, Iurii Mal'tsev, Vol'naia russkaia literatura, 1955-1975 (Frankfurt, 1976), pp. 7-8.

4. Abram Tertz, “The Literary Process in Russia,” Kontinent, 2 vols. (New York, 1976-77), I, 79-97.

5. The black market is the best indicator in police societies of levels of demand for certain goods. The tamizdat black market has reached such proportions that Soviet sailors pay Soviet prostitutes with Russian books imported from abroad; and a deputy-director of a Glavlit department (chief censorship administration) in Moscow was caught supplying the black market with tamizdat books confiscated by Soviet customs officials. See Vladimir Bukovsky's interview, “The Word is Freedom,” in the National Review, 1 April 1977, p. 378; and Khronika tekushchikh sobytii, no. 42 (8 October 1976), pp. 84-85.

6. A. Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULAG, 3 vols. (Paris, 1973-77), I, 328; Anonymous, “Krestnyi put' preosviashchennogo Afanasiia Sakharova,” Vestnik RSKhD, 1973, no. 1 (107), pp. 187-206. These early efforts were not known as “samizdat,” per se. The first use of the term (in its earlier version of samoizdat) known to this writer belongs to 1961. See Igor' Avdeev, “Stikhi,” Grani, XXVII, no. 85 (October 1972), 53.

7. Iz glubiny. Sbornik statei o russkoi revolutsii (Paris, 1967), p.v. De Profundis was a religio-philosophic and “historiosophic” symposium by the same group of thinkers who had produced Vekhi in 1909.

8. Mal'tsev, p. 8.

9. A samizdat author, O. Altayev, calls this a hope for “a Thermidorean regeneration … of Bolshevism” (“The Dual Consciousness of the Intelligentsia and Pseudo-Culture,” Survey, XIX, no. 1 [86] [Winter 1973], 109). Similar views are to be found in N. Mandelstam's Hope Abandoned and in many other contemporary uncensored Russian writings.

10. For example, E. Zamiatin, S. Esenin, B. Pil'niak and Osip Mandelstam.

11. N. Mandelstam, Vtoraia kniga (Paris, 1972), pp. 9-11 and 457.

12. Literaturnaia gazeta, 22 December 1954.

13. Mal'tsev, pp. 16-36.

14. Vladimir Osipov, “Ploshchad' Mayakovskogo, stat'ia 70,” Grani, XXVI, no. 80 (September 1971), pp. 110-31. See also biographies of the leaders of the All-Russian Social-Christian Union for the Liberation of People (VSKhSON) in John Dunlop, The New Russian Revolutionaries (Belmont, Mass., 1976), pp. 19-36.

15. N. Mandelstam gives numerous examples of such behavior by fellow-writers. A more theoretical discussion of this is provided by Altayev, Survey, XIX, no. 1 (86) (Winter 1973), 101-13.

16. Harold Swayze, Political Control of Literature in the USSR, 1946-1959 (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 199-200.

17. See, for instance, Mikhail Sholokhov's speech at the Fourth Congress of the Soviet Writers' Union in Pravda, 26 May 1967.

18. See, for instance, reactions of Vladimir Maximov, Lidiia Chukovskaia, and Vladimir Voinovich, in Posev, XXIX, no. 8 (August 1973), 3; XXX, no. 4 (April 1974), 6-7; XXX, no. 5 (May 1974), 14-15.

19. This alienation of the younger writers (in terms of seniority in the Union if not always in terms of age) was best reflected in Solzhenitsyn's “Letter to the Fourth Congress of the Writers Union,” in his Sobranie sochinenii, 6 vols. (Frankfurt, 1970), VI, 7-13.

20. See Pasternak's letter to Siniavsky in A. Ginzburg (ed.), Belaia kniga po delu A. Siniavskogo i Iu. Danielia (Frankfurt, 1967), pp. 144-45. Also Siniavsky's “Introduction” to Boris Pasternak, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy (Moscow, 1965), pp. 5-62.

21. Much of the material appearing in these journals, as well as in Osipov's Boomerang, came from the Maiakovskii Square readings and its participants. See Osipov, Grani, XXVI, no. 80 (September 1971), 110-31.

22. Materials from Phoenix 1966 were published individually in Grani, nos. 63 to 75 (March 1967 to April 1970).

23. In 1965-67 he still made every possible effort to publish through gosizdat; by 1970-71 Solzhenitsyn was already resorting constantly to samizdat, but even then he made an effort to publish his August 1914 before resorting to tamizdat and samizdat. See his autobiographical Bodalsia telenok s dubom (Paris, 1975), pp. 135-77, 304-309, and 495-545.

24. The term “dissent” presupposes a dialogue between a dominant and a dissenting opinion. There can be no question of such dialogue when “dissidents” are dealt with administratively and when the official “opinion” is an administrative compulsion allowing no individual interpretation or deviation. See also, Dmitrii Nelidov, “Ideokraticheskoe soznanie i lichnost',” in Samosoznanie (New York, 1976), p. 148; and Tat'iana Khodorovich, “Po veleniiu sovesti,” Radio Liberty Samizdat Archive, No. AS 1518, p. 3.

25. Osipov, Grani, XXVI, no. 80 (September 1971), 110-31.

26. See Pavel Litvinov (ed.), Protsess chetyrekh (Amsterdam, 1971), and Pavel Litvinov (ed.), Pravosudie ili rasprava? (London, 1968).

27. See footnote 5, above; and Il'ia Zemtsov, Partiia ili mafiia? (Paris, 1976), passim.

28. Novyi mir, 1953 no. 12, pp. 218-45.

29. Abram Tertz, Fantasticheskii mir Abrama Tertza (New York, 1967), pp. 444-46.

30. Particularly his Kotlovan (Ann Arbor, 1973) and Chevengur (Paris, 1973).

31. Especially his Master and Margarita, Dog's Heart, and his play on a time-machine, “Blazhenstvo,” Grani, XXVII, no. 85 (October, 1972), 3-52.

32. Sergei Zalygin, “Cherty dokumental'nosti,” Voprosy literatury, 1970, no. 2, pp. 41-53.

33. Vladimir Kantorovich, “Pravda publitsistiki,” Novyi mir, 1973, no. 12, pp. 246 and 251. See also the “round-table” discussion: “Publitsistika-perednii krai literatury,” Voprosy literatury, 1970, no. 1, pp. 44-94.

34. Dimitrii Panin, Zapiski Sologdina (Frankfurt, 1973), pp. 417-61.

35. Vladimir Maximov, Proshchanie iz niotkuda (Frankfurt, 1974).

36. V. Voinovich, Zhizn'i neobychainye prikliucheniia soldata Ivana Chonkina, Parts 1 and 2 (Paris, 1975); and Ivan'kiada (Ann Arbor, 1976).

37. A. Sinavsky, Golos iz khora (London, 1973).

38. Aleksandr Timofeyevsky, “The Word,” in Russia's Other Poets, Keith Bosley, Dimitry Pospielovsky, and Janis Sapiets (eds.) (London, 1968), p. 84.

39. Mandelstam, pp. 11-15, 114, 141 and passim; Mal'tsev, p. 8 and passim. N. Mandelstam even explains the particular interest of Soviet readers today in Acmeist poetry and other complex forms of writing and art by a phenomenon of special attraction toward things that cannot be grasped by rational thinking alone. The Soviet citizen, she writes, “has been cheated too long, fed by surrogates which were presented to him as thought” (p. 14).

40. Literaturnaia gazeta, 22 November 1962, p. 3.

41. N. Sergovantsev, “Tragediia odinochestva i ‘sploshnoi byt’,” Oktiabr', 1963, no. 4, pp. 204-207. See also Victor Poltoratskii, “Matrionin dvor i ego okrestnosti,” Izvestiia, 30 March 1963; Alexander Dymshyts, “Rasskazy o rasskazakh zametki o povestrakh,” Ogoniok, 1963, no. 13, pp. 30-31; V. Chalmaev, “Sviatye i besy,” Oktiabr', 1963, no. 10, pp. 215-17.

42. A. Solzhenitsyn, “Ne obychai degtem shchi belit', na to smetana,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 4 November 1965. Solzhenitsyn later criticized himself for “concealing the main thought: that the socialists in their sloppy brochures, and especially Lenin, adulterated the Russian language more than anybody else” (Bodalsia telenok, p. 135).

43. Naum Korzhavin well illustrates this new mood of reconsideration and rejection of the relativist morality of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism and the fruits thereof in the following lines written in 1955: “… But lies cannot become the means to gain the Truth” (“Na smert' Stalina,” Vremena [Frankfurt, 1976], p. 81). These new topics, new values and new ideas required a vocabulary other then the “Newspeak” of orthodox Soviet literature and philosophy. This new “metaphysical” orientation, and thus a different and enriched vocabulary to express these ideas, affected not only such avowedly practicing Christian authors as Siniavsky, Solzhenitsyn, Maximov, and Alexander Galich, but practically all of the more outstanding writers: the atheists Efim Dorosh and Vladimir Tendriakov, both trying “to penetrate” the religious soul; the avowedly agnostic Voinovich whose portrait of Ivan Chonkin is fully in the tradition of the Russian folk-sainthood of fools-in-Christ and “Ivanushkas-the-fools.” The religious sentiments of Fedor Abramov, Boris Mozhaev, V. Semin and G. Vladimov are unknown, and yet their assessment of human characters is clearly Christian-personalist.

44. Anatolii Lanshchikov's speech of 25 April 1969, in “Seminar literaturnykh kritikov,” Politicheskii dnevnik, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1972), I, 505.

45. “Pis'mo Vladimova …” in Solzhenitsyn, Sobranie sochinenii, VI, 16-18. Recently Vladimov performed an unprecedented act in the history of the Union of Soviet Writers which, in itself, may become an important precedent in the spirit of Solzhenitsyn's appeal for non-coöperation with the oppressors: he broke with the Union of Soviet Writers. Portions of his letter to the Union's administration follow.

    The Samizdat epoch is now being replaced by the more long lasting one of Tamizdat. … In contrast to you, the reader is interested in the text, not in the place of publication of a book. He wants a book, not seventh or eighth typewritten copies. … [My choice] is not between Tamizdat and Gosizdat but between the reader and you. … Literature cannot be administered. But you can either help a writer in his most difficult task or harm him. Your great Union has always chosen the latter … sometimes helping the government and sometimes initiating … the physical destruction of over 600 writers and poets under Stalin, and persecuting Pasternak, Brodsky, Siniavsky and Daniel, Solzhenitsyn, Tvardovskii … since Stalin's death. The process [of degeneration of the Union] has reached the point of irreversibility due to the fact that writers whose books do not sell and are not read are in command of the fates of writers whose books do sell and are read. … I do not want to remain with you, … I erase you from my life. I am sorry that by my departure from the Union I am abandoning a tiny group of truly gifted authors whose continued membership in your Union is but an accident. Tomorrow they will understand that the bell tolls for each of us. …

    Moscow, 10 October 1977

    Four days later Vladimov took upon himself chairmanship of the unofficial Moscow branch of Amnesty International, replacing Professor V. F. Turchin who was forced to emigrate. (Posev, no. 11 [November 1977], pp. 5-6, 12.)

46. Mal'tsev, pp. 409-10.

47. For example, E. Ginzburg's Krutoi marshrut (Frankfurt, 1967), Alexander Bek's Novoe naznachenie (Frankfurt, 1971), G. Gladilin's Prognoz na zavtra (Frankfurt, 1972) and Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward as well as several of his short stories (e.g., “The Right Wrist”). For confirmation of Solzhenitsyn's original reluctance to act through samizdat, see his Bodalsia telenok, pp. 135-42.

48. For instance, Grigorii Pomerants' “Nravstvennyi oblik istoricheskoi lichnosti” was the text of his open lecture to the Institute of Philosophy at the USSR Academy of Science (3 December 1965). It was prepared for publication in Novyi mir but rejected by the censor. See his Neopublikovannoe (Frankfurt, 1972), p. 207.

49. Voinovich, for example, has said the original version of Ivan Chonkin was meant to be a harmless farce. “But when I heard the nonsense being circulated by the Writers' Union secretaries on my alleged intentions, my style involuntarily changed from harmless irony to acute satire.” “Proisshestvie v Metropole,” Kontinent, no. 5 (1975), pp. 83-84.

50. Here we face the perennial cause-effect question: is the growing prevalence of the Christian-personalist Weltanschauung an indicator of the writers' showing their real views, which had earlier been somewhat camouflaged in hope of accommodating themselves to gosizdat demands, or is it a development in the chain of their ideational evolution which leads to their alienation from the Establishment?

51. See B. Akhmadulina, “Iz novoi knigi,” Novyi mir, 1972, no. 5, pp. 24-25; V. Semin, “Zhenia i Valentina,” Novyi Mir, 1972, no. 11, pp. 15-69, and no. 12, pp. 43-104; F. Abramov, “Iz rasskazov Aleny Danilovny,” Novyi mir, 1970, no. 2, pp. 90-99; Iurii Trifonov, “Neterpenie,” Novyi mir, 1973, no. 3, pp. 44-116; no. 4, pp. 35-112; and no. 5, pp. 8-90.

52. Vladimir Tendriakov, “Vesennie perevertyshi,” Novyi mir, 1973, no. 1, pp. 118-71.

53. Geoffrey Hosking, “The Search for the Image of Man in Contemporary Soviet Fiction,” Forum for Modern Language Studies, XI, no. 4 (October 1975), 349-51 and 360-65 (emphasis in the original).