Samizdat
Samizdat means “self-publishing”
and is the term used of unofficial or illegal publications produced
or circulated in the Soviet period (often just barely legible
carbon copies of typescripts) – although a similar tradition had
existed of the circulation of hand-written copies of non-permitted,
or imported, texts during the Tsarist era. Many banned works
achieved limited circulation by such methods – as opposed to
resorting to tamizdat (publication
“over there” [tam] – i.e. in the West: illegal for Soviet
authors, without permission; or achieving gosizdat (“state”, or o…
256 words
Citation: Cornwell, Neil. "Soviet Literature - Samizdat, Tamizdat and Gosizdat publishing". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 15 September 2005 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1590, accessed 21 November 2024.]