This is about the underground and samizdat literary and artistic life in the former Soviet Union and the parallels that process had with the one taking place in the West. 

By mid-70s Samizdat – or, more broadly, independent cultural movement – became self-sufficient and diverse enough to recognize that one of its initial tasks – to bridge the gap between the violently interrupted prerevolutionary Russian culture (so called Silver Age in the first place) and the Soviet present, to restore the early modernist tradition in the communist context is an impossible, nostalgic and probably false project pushing an unofficial (sub)culture even more to the margins and self-enclosure then the pressure of the official ideological and political restrictions. New Samizdat  magazines, like Chasy (Hours), Transponans, Obvodny Kanal (Obvodny Channel) and later Mitin Journal and Predlog, in contrast to their sporadic and short-lived predecessors, started to publish not only previously banned or contemporary Russian poetry and prose but also the critical and philosophical essays, reviews and – what is crucial to our topic – translations which included radical Western post-war writing (from concrete poetry to Beckett, from Duras to Language school). This shift of interest represented the urgency to break the limits of the modernist aesthetics and to open up itself to the new cosmopolitan – cross- or intercultural – tendencies. Literature was appropriating strategies provided by contemporary art, poetry was experimenting with free jazz and happening. Everything became text. Or performance. We will focus on this fruitful transgressive moment and its central actors in the literary field (like Dmitry Prigov in Moscow and Arkadii Dragomoschenko in Leningrad) when suddenly everything became possible and when – quite before the real collapse of the actual political borders in the Soviet Union – language and cultural barriers were overcome for the sake of somewhat utopian and all too transient encounter of Russian and American yearning to “make it new.”