samizdat

The “Old” Samizdat Is Dead, Long Live the “New” Samizdat! The Liberated Samizdat Club in the PostCommunist Czechoslovak Book Market

Loučová, Petra

In the final issue of the clandestine Lidové noviny from December 1989, Václav Havel bid farewell to the newspaper’s samizdat era in his “Goodbye samizdat” editorial: “Goodbye samizdat Lidové noviny, goodbye conspiracies, goodbye interrogations! Hello printer, hello new readers, hello freedom!” A few months later the press began to report about an extraordinary project by the Liberated Samizdat Club and its promise to literally “return to samizdat” by self-publishing the first editions of previously unpublished books.

Space, Paper, Transition/ality at Bolzanova 7. The Dissolution of the Czech Samizdat Scene and the Growth of Zine Culture in the 1990s

Tharp, Martin

The present contribution takes a relatively unconventional angle for its investigation of the abrupt shift in Czech unofficial journalistic culture from severely repressed samizdat before November 1989 to significant social force in the first years of the subsequent decade. It takes as its locus the Prague office building at the address Bolzanova 7, a former Czech Rail property assigned to the samizdat-based independent journalistic agency Informační servis at the end of 1990.

Music Samizdat as Zines? The Case of “Ot Vinta” from Soviet Latvia

Daugavietis, Jānis

The conceptual problem this article aims to research is how zines (of the Western or “the first world”) and music samizdat (of socialist countries or “the second world”) should be analysed. Thus far, they have been regarded as separate phenomena; however, do these two forms of underground literature differ so greatly that they should be analysed using different theoretical approaches? The subject of the paper, От Винта (Ot Vinta), is a Russian-language music samizdat from the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic which was published in the late Soviet period.

Self-publishing as a Surrealist Strategy: The Samizdat Catalogues of the Surrealist Group in Czechoslovakia

Watterott, Kristin

During the period of so-called normalization in the former Czechoslovakia, the restrictive cultural policy ousted numerous oppositional artists, theoreticians, and writers from the public cultural sphere through bans on exhibitions and publications. As a consequence, the affected individuals developed their own means of enabling creative, scientific, and literary work beyond censorship. A key medium for the realization of officially banned texts, studies, and projects was illegal and clandestine self-publishing, also called “samizdat”.

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