The project has achieved significant milestones and has yielded valuable insights in data collection, methodological developments, and preliminary data analysis and digital visualizations. The work realized so far have been dedicated mainly to achieving the Research Objectives (ROs) through intensive archival research and the subsequent data mining necessary for structuring the data to perform digital data analysis and visualization of maps and relational networks.
Archival research was conducted at major institutions, including the Hoover Archive (Stanford), Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori (FAAM, Milan), Houghton Library (Harvard), Pontificio Istituto Orientale (Rome), the International Institute of Social History (IISH, Amsterdam) and the Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee (ASAC, Marghera). With the aim to assess the material and symbolic production (Bourdieu) of tamizdat, case studies focusing on key works were selected, including A. Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle (V kruge pervom), Cancer Ward (Rakovyi korpus) and The Gulag Archipelago (Arkhipelag GULag), N. Mandel’shtam’s Hope Against Hope (Vospominaniia), V. Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales (Kolymskie rasskazy), S. Alliluyeva’s Twenty Letters to a Friend (Dvadtsat’ pisem k drugu) and Only One Year (Tol’ko odin god), and G. Orwell’s Animal Farm translations in Polish (Folwark zwierzęcy), Ukrainian (Kolgosp Tvarin), Czech (Farma zvířat) and Russian (Skotskii khutor).
A corpus comprising approx. 3.000 letters has been systematically compiled from the personal papers of Olga Andreyev Carlisle, Leopold Łabedz, Gleb Struve, Andrei Sakharov, Elena Bonner, Samuel Walker, Erich Linder, George Minden, Alec Flegon, and from the collection of Free Europe Press, Alexander Herzen Foundation, Mondadori, Il Saggiatore, Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale and Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe. Employing micro-historical methods, comprehensive data on individuals and institutions involved in the production and circulation of tamizdat have been gathered. The analysis of correspondence has been realized to recollect data on the relational networks among the socio-cultural actors (writers, publishers, translators, dissidents, human rights activists, diplomats, associations, covert organizations etc.) cooperating in the production and circulation of manuscripts (samizdat) and books (tamizdat).
From this corpus comprehensive data on the employees and collaborators of several institutions (Free Europe Committee, Congress for Cultural Freedom, International Advisory Council, International Literary Center, Associazione Letteraria Internazionale, Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale, Mondadori, Il Saggiatore, Harper & Row, Atheneum, Posev, Instytut Literacki, Alexander Herzen Foundation and Flegon Press) have been also gathered, with the aim of assessing the role and position of each individual, whose agency was determined in the transnational circulation and publication of such texts. For each collections, the letters have been annotated in DOCX files by recording several data [date of sending, sender(s), receiver(s), person(s) and/or institution(s) mentioned, summary of content and comments]: the files were converted into TXT format to make easier the extraction of data in cases where using digital tools for data mining was proved ineffective. Throughout this process, a number of optical character recognition (OCR) tools and large language models (LLMs) – including Transkribus, Adobe Reader, Mistral, Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini, Qwen and ChatGPT – were tested to transcribe the letters. The data mining from this corpus is still in progress, due to the large amounts of sources analyzed and to the necessity to extract manually the information from the Russian handwritten sources (which represents most of the cases, with an average of 2200 letters), as the digital tools to transcribe them were proved unsatisfactory for the intended purposes. In order to structure these data, a multi model dataset with relational, temporal and spatial attributes has been created by the fellow on the platform Nodegoat: the record of data on the model is still in progress. The preliminary results of this work, as well as the digital visualizations of the ‘Solzhenitsyn Galaxy’ and the ‘Polish Galaxy’, has been presented and discussed in several international conferences and workshops.
An additional corpus of 200 operational reports and memoranda of the secret book distribution programs coordinated by several covert organizations (among which Free Europe Committee, Congress for Cultural Freedom, International Advisory Council and International Literary Center) in the years 1956-1991, has been also systematically compiled and analysed. The corpus has undergone computational text analysis, generating statistical data on various aspect of the circulation of tamizdat: occurrences of titles sent, categories of books sent, categories of recipients, points of sending and receiving, numbers of copies sent monthly, etc. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of these data allowed to assess the impact of the secret book distribution programs, map and visualize the routes and flow of tamizdat from W to E bloc, quantify and assess the circulation and reception of tamizdat in the E bloc. The data mining from this corpus resulted in the creation of a dataset (composed, at the moment, of 14.000 records) which has been used also to the creation of digital visualization (stream graphs, cluster visualizations, GIS visualizations). The preliminary results of this work, as well as the digital visualizations, has been presented and discussed in several international conferences and workshops. For a detailed account, please refer to section
To place tamizdat in the context of the Cold War and US “soft power” strategies, a timeline of major political and cultural events (1957–1991) has been created. This work identified 1977 – the year of the ‘Biennale of Cultural Dissent in Eastern European Countries’ – as a crucial year for the transnational reception of tamizdat. At the Biennale of Dissent an exhibition titled Libri, Riviste, Manifesti, Fotografie, Videotapes, Samizdat (Book, Journals, Posters, Photographs, Videotapes, Samizdat) showcased a collection of 2.000 tamizdat, giving to this publishing phenomenon an international resonance. Crossing the data recollected in several archival collections (Biennale, Free Europe/Radio Liberty), a corpus of 200 tamizdat exhibited at the Biennale of Dissent and donated to the Ca’ Foscari University Library has been found by the fellow: the data of these 200 books have been structured in a spreadsheet used to analyse the reception of tamizdat in the W bloc. Data analysis of archival sources conveyed also interesting information about the networks of socio-cultural actors involved in the organization of this event: these data has been also extracted and structured into a relational dataset. Digital visualizations of this dataset have been realized (relational and stream graphs). The fellow is planning to realize a digital exhibition of this book collection – Tamizdat@Ca’Foscari – as planned in the DoA.
For allowing the preservation and accessibility of research outputs, by the end of the project the datasets will be shared in CSV format on the permanent OA repository Zenodo (CERN), in compliance with FAIR data principles and in line with the DoA.