A (2008b) Suspending the political: Late Soviet artistic experiments on the margins of the state. Poetics Today 29: 713–733

Let them read on my gravestone: He wrestled with the notion of species and freed himself from its hold. Velimir Khlebnikov, 1920s Abstract The Russian term samizdat originally referred to self-published literature that was forbidden by or at least unavailable in the Soviet state, circulated through unofficial channels, and represented certain views that were alternative to the offi-cial ideology of that state. Sometimes, in the Soviet Union itself, the term samiz-dat was used in a broader sense, to mean diverse phenomena of unofficial cultural production—not necessarily of literary origin or dissident politics. In this broader sense, the term may be used to describe music samizdat (also known as magnitizdat), cinematic samizdat (also known as parallel’noe kino—parallel cinema), artistic samiz-dat, and so forth. This essay considers samizdat in this broader sense, focusing on two examples of cinematic and artistic samizdat that emerged in Leningrad in the early 1980s. Although these cases in point existed unofficially and represented alter-native political views, they cannot be qualified as oppositional or “dissident ” in the traditional sense of the term. In the early 1980s, when these unofficial artistic groups first emerged, they were relatively small and unknown. However, by the end of the decade, when the Soviet state experienced political crisis and suddenly collapsed, these two groups achieved phenomenal fame in Russia. They became popularly associated with the period of “late socialism ” in the 1970s–1980s, before the collaps