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Tamizdat: Banned Books of the (Cold) War Era
Wed 30 October 202430 Oct 2024 
07:0008:30 PM
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Livestream ticket
Description
How did manuscripts denied publication at home leak through the Iron Curtain, get published and read abroad? What did the authors know and think about it? And why is tamizdat (im)possible today?
 
Professor Yasha Klots, in conversation with Professor Polly Jones, will speak about Russian-language tamizdat of the Cold War era, its points of departure and intersection with other East-European and Western literary cultures and institutions, as well as about whether tamizdat is in fact limited to the Soviet period and geopolitical context. 
Speakers
Yasha Klots

Yasha Klots is an associate professor of Russian literature at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. His research interests are book history, Russian and East European émigré literature and culture, urbanism, and Gulag narratives (particularly Varlam Shalamov). He is the author of several books, including Tamizdat: Contraband Russian Literature in the Cold War Era (Cornell UP, 2023), and the director of the Tamizdat Project, a public scholarship and charity initiative for the study of banned books from the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.

Polly Jones

Polly Jones is Professor of Russian and Schrecker-Barbour Fellow at University College, Oxford, and Deputy Chair of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. She is the author and editor of several books on Soviet cultural history and politics, including Revolution Rekindled. The Writers and Readers of Late Soviet Biography and Myth (OUP, 2019) and Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70 (Yale, 2013). Her next book Gulag Fiction: Labour Camp Literature from Stalin to Putin will be published later this year by Bloomsbury. Professor Jones appears regularly on radio and TV to talk about Russian culture and history, and was consultant to Armando Iannucci’s film The Death of Stalin.

Location

5a Bloomsbury Square London WC1A 2TA

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