A lot has been happening at Tamizdat Project — and we realize it’s not always easy to keep track of the various things we do! So we thought it was time to tell you just what we are up to and about.
Swipe through for a quick guide to what the Tamizdat Project consists of — from archives and library to publishing, public events, and a new bookstore in NYC.
Whether you’ve been with us from the start or just discovered us — thank you. Every follow, share, book purchase or a donation helps us keep banned literature alive!
We are honored to be featured in the New York Times earlier this week! Here are some quotes from an article by Sarah Chatta about the Tamizdat Project, its cause, and accomplishments. Let us just add that none of it would be possible without you – a global community of friends and colleagues, a remarkable team who have built the project and moved it forward, and a cohort of talented and enthusiastic students and volunteers who have inspired us and made it impossible for us to stop! Thank you!
Link to the full article — in bio and stories.
And don’t forget to come to the opening of our book corner at @whiterabbitsbooks on February 26 from 7 PM. See you soon!
Dear friends in Vilnius!
Join us in celebrating the publication of Tomas Venclova’s "Landscape with Polyphemus" - the first title in our poetry series!
May 28: Vilnius University, Faculty of Philology, Room 115a, 6 pm
May 29: Reforum Space Vilnius, Užupio g. 14, 6 pm
May 30: Book Club “Dialogues”. Trimitų g. 6-39. 4 pm
Copies will be available at all three events. You can also buy the book from "The Bookest World" in Vilnius (Užupio g. 13), and from our own Book Corner (200 West 86th Street at White Rabbit White Rabbit's Books).
See you in Vilnius soon! Aciu!
Soviet Belarus was long considered the most loyal of all Soviet republics. Tatsiana Astrouskaya’s @dr.astrouskaya research challenges this dominant narrative.
On Thursday, May 14, we’re co-hosting a lecture that shifts attention from overt political opposition to a wide range of cultural resistance practices — uncovering a rich intellectual underground from the Prague Spring of 1968 to 1988, when dissent in Belarus developed into an open political movement. Among the figures at the heart of this story: war novelist Vasil Bykaŭ, anti-nuclear activist Ales Adamovich, poet and Gulag survivor Larysa Heniush, and a young Ales Bialiatski — the future Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Join us for a talk by Tatsiana Astrouskaya, Visiting Research Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and author of the award-winning monograph Cultural Dissent in Soviet Belarus: Intelligentsia, Samizdat, and Nonconformist Discourses (1968–1988). Her work redraws the boundaries between underground and official culture, and between center and periphery — and makes a compelling case for a long-overdue rethinking of Soviet dissent altogether.
📅 Thursday, May 14, 6 PM
📍 Chanin Language Center, Insdorf Screening Center (B126 Hunter West Building), Hunter College CUNY
🎟 Free and open to the public. RSVP required.
A friendly reminder about another event with Eugene Ostashevsky, author of ”Alphabet Soup. The Translingual Sayings of Emma and Eva as Recorded by Their Father,” tomorrow at our Book Corner at @whiterabbitsbooks
7 PM
White Rabbit’s Books
200 W 86th St, New York, NY 10024 (1 train)
Tickets at $10 available via link in bio/stories.
You can also buy this beautiful book from our online store - link in bio, too.
”The first game of the Soviet National Basketball Team was in Las Vegas, and the public announcer said: ‘Now, ladies and gentlemen, the Soviet National Anthem’ — and played ‘The Internationale’.”
New Oral History episode — a conversation with Bill and Jane Taubman, two scholars whose careers span decades of Russian Studies in the U.S. Bill Taubman is the Bertrand Snell Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Amherst College and author of the biographies of Khrushchev (Pulitzer Prize) and Gorbachev. Jane Taubman is Professor Emerita of Russian at Amherst College, a specialist in Tsvetaeva, Kira Muratova, Russian modernist poetry, and film.
In this conversation, Bill and Jane reflect on how they first came to study the Russian language and culture, what it was like to travel through the Soviet Union in the 1960s, and how they built lasting friendships with Moscow intelligentsia across decades of the Cold War.
— What was it like to be an exchange scholar in Moscow in 1965 — and to realize you were being followed?
— How did a fatal road accident near Minsk shape Jane’s understanding of the Soviet Union?
— What was it like to have Brodsky as a colleague at the Five Colleges around Amherst, MA — and why would he only teach in English?
— How did an evening with a Soviet feminist end in chaos?
Watch the full interview on our YouTube channel — link in bio & stories.
Interviewer: Yasha Klots @yasha.klots
Video editing: Mikhail Levit @mikhallevite
Polina Barskova’s @barskova.polina “Красная книга” (The Red Book) is the second title in our Poetry Series!
The first edition came out in St. Petersburg in 2024 and can no longer be sold in Russia, since the author has been labeled a “foreign agent.” Hence our 2nd, revised edition.
Pre-order the book to receive it after May 15, our official publication date. And if you are in Berlin, it is available from the Tamizdat Project stand at the Berlin Book Fair @babelbooksberlin . Thank you for giving this book another life!
“Polina does not understand, cannot accept, that time passes, because then everyone will die in a different way: and this time they will die unbearably. And she uses all of herself to hold them back, here – she holds them back with a tendentious, meticulous love; she holds tight under her shirt this salved miracle, something unimaginable, priceless, for as long as Charon is rowing… and we know the rest. But they are all alive, they’re alive and they will stay alive, so eat shit, Charon, because this is Polina’s love – Polina, who writes in a mix of ash and snow, has no mercy for them and envies them, is prideful before them and runs as wild as she likes, seeks her “I,” gets annoyed by them, doesn’t believe in much – but carries on through everything.” — Linor Goralik @snorapp
Link in bio.
Meet us at the Berlin Book Fair of Russian-Language Literature @berlin_bebelplatz — Tamizdat Project will be there this weekend with all our books and merch!
— Both the English and Armenian editions of “Pkhentz” by Abram Tertz.
— “Alphabet Soup” by Eugene Ostashevsky
— “The Red Book” by Polina Barskova
— “Landscape with Polyphemus” by Tomas Venclova
— and “Exodus-22” by Linor Goralik
May 1 — 3
Immanuelkirchstr. 4, 10405 Berlin
Stand #21
Entrance is free.
Eugene Ostashevsky recites “First Peepeesaurus” from his newest book “Alphabet Soup,” just published by Tamizdat Project!
Buy the book and come to the book launch this Sunday, April 26, at N+1, and to Eugene Ostashevsky’s Book Corner Reading on May 6.
All links in bio. See you soon!
Tamizdat Project Poetry Series kicks off with the bilingual Lithuanian-Russian edition of “Peizažas su Polifemu | Пейзаж с Полифемом” (Landscape with Polyphemus) by Tomas Venclova, Lithuanian poet, former Soviet dissident, professor emeritus at Yale University.
Here are some of the poems from the book!
“These are poems about what happens afterward – after the great deed, after deprivations, after glory. When the fate of the hero is already dissolving into oblivion. When your fate has already been accomplished, as we learn from this book, the poet-hero is relegated to a special, hybrid space of activity: recollection and observation. This kind of work is where I see the sense and the triumph of Landscape with Polyphemus.” – Polina Barskova
Praise for “Landscape with Polyphemus”:
“Tomas Venclova is by nature a tireless wanderer. Like Odysseus, whom one might well call to mind when reading Landscape with Polyphemus. Venclova fits out the world with thoughtful metaphors and, again like Odysseus, tries on the masks of others. Addressing remote spheres, he is sure that he is ‘catching the voices afar.’ And this line of his recalls the poem Brodsky dedicated to him: ‘Only sound is able to separate from a body, like a ghost, Tomas.’” – Alexander Genis
Translations from Lithuanian into Russian are by Georgy Efremov, Anna Glukhova, Anna Halberstadt and Marina Vojckaya.
Pre-order the book to receive it after May 15, our official publication date!
Links in bio!
“When Stalin died, I wept.”
A new episode in our Oral History series — Pavel Litvinov, dissident, human rights activist, physicist, former teacher at Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York. One of the eight people who took to Red Square on August 25, 1968, to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The next five years Litvinov spent in exile in Siberia. After emigrating to New York in 1974, he co-published Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR with Valery Chalidze.
How did Khrushchev’s Secret Speech transform a devoted young communist into a dissident? How did he nearly derail the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — a year before it appeared in print? Which came first — “samizdat” or “tamizdat”? What did he and other dissidents expect from the demonstration on Red Square in August 1968? And what does the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine fifty years later mean for a Soviet dissident?
Watch the full interview — link in bio and stories!
Interview date: June 11, 2023
Interviewer: Yasha Klots @yasha.klots
Video editing: Mikhail Levit @mikhallevite
