Our Notes & References

A lovely example of samizdat. This is the Russian translation of Joseph Brodsky’s second book of poems, A Halt in the Desert, which was published in 1970 in the United States. The later Nobel Prize Laureate’s verse had circulated in Soviet samizdat since the early 1960s but could not be published for political reasons; in 1972 he was forced to emigrate and settled permanently in the United States.

“Like many other poets of the Thaw generation, [Brodsky] sought to reassemble the fragments of the literary past and to return to the tradition at the point where it was cut off by the imposition of socialist realism… in Ostanovka v pustyne the most salient affinities are with the English tradition of Donne, Eliot and Auden” (Cornwell 194).

The word samizdat (from Russian ‘sam’, self, and ‘izdat”, to publish) refers to the illicit copying of banned texts in the Soviet Union and its satellite states, most often using a typewriter or mimeograph machine. Aside from the technical difficulties, this was doubly dangerous: many works of literature or political writings were banned by the state, but the means of duplication were also subject to confiscation. In many cases, the creation and distribution of samizdat led to prison terms.