Samizdat is one of the touchstones that inspires Vox Clamantis Books.
Samizdat was literature as resistance:
“Samizdat (Russian: самиздат, pronounced [səmɨzˈdat], lit. ‘self-publishing’), also samvydav (Ukrainian: самвидав), was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader. The practice of manual reproduction was widespread, because printed texts could be traced back to the source. This was a grassroots practice used to evade official Soviet censorship.
Samizdat distinguishes itself not only by the ideas and debates that it helped spread to a wider audience but also by its physical form. The hand-typed, often blurry and wrinkled pages with numerous typographical errors and nondescript covers helped to separate and elevate Russian samizdat from Western literature.
The physical form of samizdat arose from a simple lack of resources and the necessity to be inconspicuous.
In time, dissidents in the USSR began to admire these qualities for their own sake, the ragged appearance of samizdat contrasting sharply with the smooth, well-produced appearance of texts passed by the censor’s office for publication by the State. The form samizdat took gained precedence over the ideas it expressed and became a potent symbol of the resourcefulness and rebellious spirit of the inhabitants of the Soviet Union. In effect, the physical form of samizdat itself elevated the reading of samizdat to a prized clandestine act.Tamizdat refers to literature published abroad (там, tam ‘there’), often from smuggled manuscripts.”
— From Wikipedia
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