CBEES Advanced Seminar with Josephine von Zitzewitz, Lecturer in Russian at New College, University of Oxford

Speaker: Josephine von Zitzewitz, Lecturer in Russian, New College, University of Oxford

Discussant: Julie Hansen, Associate Professor of Slavic Languages at the Department of Modern Languages, Uppsala University

Chair: Irina Sandomirskaja, Professor of Cultural Studies, CBEES, Södertörn University

Abstract: Samizdat – the effectively illegal production and circulation of texts outside official channels – was a major cultural phenomenon in the later decades of the Soviet Union where the state held a monopoly on textual production. At the centre of samizdat culture was the reader: readers created demand for samizdat texts, readers manufactured new copies using typewriters, and readers circulated texts to new readers. But the ordinary samizdat reader left few if any records behind. Josephine von Zitzewitz will introduce samizdat as a reading culture and present innovative methods for collecting and interpreting information from and about the elusive “ordinary samizdat reader”.

Josephine von Zitzewitz is currently Lecturer in Russian at New College, University of Oxford. She has held positions at the universities of Cambridge, Bristol and UiT - The Arctic University of Norway. She has published widely on late Soviet samizdat and is author of two monographs, Poetry and the Leningrad Religious-Philosophical Seminar, 1976 - 1980 (2016) and The Culture of Samizdat: Literature and Underground Networks in the Late Soviet Union (2020).

Join the seminar on campus: MA 796

Or via Zoom:
https://sh-se.zoom.us/j/63693878820?pwd=eGxydHVYejN2dGV1VzhocTB1RVgvQT09
Meeting ID: 636 9387 8820
Passcode: 344404