“Mitin Journal” was one of the most popular and influential unofficial literary magazines of the Perestroika era and the only self-crafted magazine that continued to exist after the collapse of the Soviet Empire. However, the role of “Mitin Journal” in unofficial culture has never been fully acknowledged by scholars, particularly those studying samizdat. Unlike many leaders of the independent press, the “editorial board” of Mitin Journal did not see samizdat technology and the “kitchen” form of literary life merely as a forced, artisanal method of preserving the non-Soviet poetic line of Russian literature under censorship oppression. Instead, they viewed it as a meaningful form of artistic expression particularly suited to the communicative conditions of the underground. From “Mitin Journal’s perspective”, the history of samizdat is not a linear progression but a record of cultural and epistemological intuitions that emerged through the practice of unofficial media. Dmitrii Bresler’s presentation will explore the challenges of documenting this history.
Dmitrii Bresler (PhD) is an independent researcher specializing in Soviet-era literature and culture, with a focus on the modernist tradition in the 1920s–1930s Leningrad and the post-war underground cultural movement. He earned his PhD (kandidatskaya) from Saint Petersburg State University in 2015. Previously, he has taught at the Higher School of Economics (St. Petersburg, Russia), the Faculty of Arts at Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic), and the Department of Humanities at the University of Macerata (Macerata, Italy).