{Dissidents [continued (3)]}[7th April 1991]

[Redbook9:44][19910407:1231f]{Dissidents [continued (3)]}[7th April 1991]

19910407.1231 (Sun[day])

[continued]

‘That movement,* helped along by the return from the camps of some 10,000 political prisoners between 1953 and 1956,** began to take form through the spontaneous appearance of “kompanii”, groups of friends who would meet regularly *** to eat, drink and exchange views, information and reading matter. From this came “samizdat”: “If you liked a manuscript, you borrowed it overnight and copied it on your typewriter” in blurred carbon copies. (Alexeyeva usually made five – three for friends, one for the lender, and one for herself). First it was poetry, then the memoirs of returned prisoners, then translations of “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, “Darkness at Noon”, then “Doctor Zhivago” and the unpublished Solzhenitsyn.

****

*[Dissidence in the Soviet Union – see last previous ts entry]

**64A~1952

[64]J~1960

***Presumably how the late-19th century revolutionary movements had begun....

****[– ibid (T[imes] L[iterary] S[upplement] 4589, 19910315:5, ‘Homo Sovieticus: Utopia & reality in Russian experience’, D. Fanger, Professor of Slavic and Comparative History at Harvard University): 5-6]

[continued]

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