The Thinking Reed

All this influences legal culture as well, for it cannot be separated from the illegal variety, if only because the same readers have access to both legal and illegal literature, and sometimes the same authors write for samizdat and for the official publications. It has been said that ‘there is no going back’ from samizdat to legal literature, but some writers (Iskander, Lakshin, Yevtushenko and others) have managed to demonstrate the unsoundness of this formulation. The degree of oppositionism among samizdat writers is no less variegated than the degree of loyalty among writers for the censored publications. In any case, there is no gulf between legal and illegal culture. The principal service rendered by samizdat is that it ‘breaks the monopoly of the ruling ideology’s patterns of thought, and introduces new concepts and alternative ideas into the social consciousness. Even the most ancient and reactionary myths’, continues Rakovski, ‘have a clearly positive role from this point of view, since they in fact multiply the number of patterns of thought which can be confronted with each other.’68 Within the framework of samizdat the fundamental tendencies that exist in our thinking can formulate their principles more precisely, and this is very important.

Finally, samizdat, by virtue of its very existence, had a certain effect on the censorship, making it more liberal. P. Tamarin wrote in the uncensored Moscow journal Poiski:

Without the free expression by Solzhenitsyn, Zinoviev, Vladimov, Kopelev, Voinovich, Kornilov and Chukovskaya, without the threat that many more writers would follow their example and independently publish their work abroad, quitting the supervision of the Writers’ Union, would the authorities have allowed our publishing houses to bring out the writings of Okudzhava, Rasputin, Abramov, Trifonov, Aitmatov and others?… Would they have let Karyakin publish a book on Dostoevsky which does not fit into the framework of the ruling ideology?69

The dissident movement is vitally necessary for the development of legal culture. This is one of its historical tasks and it is in this field that it has scored its greatest successes, even though the dissidents themselves say little about it.

The ranks of the dissidents included many Novy Mir writers. This transition did not take place at once, but painfully and over a long time. Nevertheless, one after the other, they took that road. It is now possible to draw up a sort of balance sheet. Kopelev, Orlova, Sinyavsky, Nekrasov, Solzhenitsyn, Voinovich, Popovsky, Zhores Medvedev, Nekrich, Aksyonov, Kol'man are all abroad. Tvardovsky, Simonov, Ehrenburg, Sappak, Trifonov have died. Gnedin, Kornilov, Iskander publish their works abroad while themselves remaining in the USSR. Only a few prominent writers — Lakshin, Karyakin, Volin, Kon — continue to publish in the USSR through legal channels. The list of names speaks for itself. An illegal culture has come into being alongside the legal one.