Introduction

This introductory chapter discusses the tamizdat as well as its history and present-day significance. It briefly explores the patterns of circulation, first publications, and reception abroad of contraband manuscripts from the Soviet Union in the 1950–1980s, covering the period from Khrushchev's Thaw to the Stagnation era under Brezhnev. The chapter traces the outbound itineraries of individual manuscripts across Soviet state borders, as well as their “repatriation” back home in printed form. In doing so, it reveals the history of literary exchanges between publishers, critics, and readers in the West with writers in Russia, whose clandestine texts bring the dynamics of these intricate relationships into focus. The chapter explains that the book is a cultural history of the “irregular heartbeat” of Russian literature on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, desynchronized as it were for political reasons and diagnosed on the basis of aesthetic and sociocultural symptoms caused by the dispersal of texts across different geographies and time zones.