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...