THE LEGACY OF RUSSIAN EMIGRATION IN THE UNOFFICIAL CULTURE OF LENINGRAD

Annotation

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of “cultural return” of Russian emigration in the 1920s and 1930s. Before the era of Perestroika, Soviet people got acquainted with the heritage of the Russian diaspora (poetry, prose, journalism, fine art, philosophy), as a rule, in the samizdat format. Therefore, the culture of the Russian diaspora had a significant impact on the creative environment of the “underground” in the mid-1950s and early 1980s. The Leningrad/St. Petersburg material shows the main ways of distributing the works of emigrants, as well as their influence on the creative intelligentsia in the late Soviet period. Based on the materials of the “oral history” and the Samizdat periodicals of Leningrad, a conclusion is drawn about the formation and development of a reader’s culture in relation to the works of emigrants of the first third of the 20th century.

Keywords

“cultural return”, emigration, re-emigration, samizdat, Leningrad “underground”, Russian literature, art of the Russian diaspora, history of reading, oral history

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The article was written with the support of the Russian Emigration Heritage Foundation as part
of the project “The Return of Odysseus: The Legacy of Russian Emigration in the Intellectual and
Artistic Life of Leningrad in the Mid-1950s to the 1980s” (Contract No. 342/G)