Olga Matich. “Tamizdat: The Spatial Turn, Textual Embodiment, Individual Stories”
5TAMIZDAT: PUBLISHING RUSSIAN LITERATURE IN THE COLD WAR
International Conference and Book Exhibition December 10-11, 2018
Hunter College of the City University of New York Elizabeth
Hemmerdinger Hall, Room 706 (HE)
Organized by Yasha Klots (Hunter College) and Polina Barskova (Hampshire College)
Co-sponsored by the Harriman Institute of Columbia University, with the participation of the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at NYU.
https://www.reechunter.com/tamizdat-conference.html
OLGA MATICH (University of California, Berkeley)
"Tamizdat: The Spatial Turn, Textual Embodiment, My Personal Stories"
The spatial turn in social and humanities theory of the 1970s and 1980s, spearheaded by Michel Foucault, Henri Lefevre, and Michel de Certeau, reversed the traditional privileging of time over space. In discussing tamizdat, I will focus on illegal boundary crossing defined as the spatial relationship between here (Soviet Union) and there (beyond Soviet borders) that involved in-between movement in both directions. Foucault’s concern with surveillance and his spatial metaphor of panopticism also became important. The relationship may also be described as one between gosizdat and tamizdat, the latter initiating its authors’ in-betweenness. The talk will consider Andrey Sinyavsky’s metaphor of Abram Tertz as textual embodiment: Tertz became Sinyavsky’s textual body that crossed the panoptic Soviet border into unbounded space. My primary authors will be Sinyavsky/Tertz and Vasily Aksyonov, including Metropol’ as a collective project, that represented very different instantiations of tamizdat.
Olga Matich is professor emerita of Russian literature and culture at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle (2005); Russian version (2008); editor and author of Part I of Petersburg/Petersburg: Novel and City 1900 – 1921 (2010); Записки русской американки: Семейные хроники и случайные встречи (2016). Tamizdat was widely discussed at the largest conference on The Third Wave: Russian Literature in Emigration organized by Matich (1981, volume 1984); more recent article on third wave tamizdat literature and boundary crossing appeared in diaspora issue of Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (2014). Most recent publications: article on Baroque and Neo-baroque (modernist) visual culture in the Fin de Siècle Issue of same journal (2018); “Foreword” to Maguire & Malmstad English translation of Petersburg (2018).
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