Soviet Poet-Emigre Praises 'Samizdat'

Underground publications in the Soviet Union are growing bolder and more political, Natalia Garbanevskaya, a former Soviet dissident, told a crowd of about 50 at Harvard's Russian Research Center yesterday.

Garbanevskaya, a poet, was a founder of the underground journal "Chronicle of Current Events," which is still published in Russia. In 1968 she was arrested for demonstrating in Red Square against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia and was later placed in a psychiatric institution--a familiar ordeal for a Soviet dissident. After her release, Garbanevskaya emmigrated to Paris, where she is now the editor-in-chief of "Memory," a Russian literary journal.

Speaking in Russian, Garbanevskaya said yesterday the underground publishing network in the Soviet Union--known as "samizdat"--began a movement after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953 to publish "good and free poetry," not political dissent.

In the '60s, she added, prose and politics entered the pages of samizdat, but the Soviet authorities cracked down after the 1962 publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," a novel that explores life in a Soviet labor camp. Despite the crackdown, samizdat became increasingly political during the '70s, Garbanevskaya said.

Since photocopying is still "like a fantasy of the 21st century" in the Soviet Union--although it is becoming slightly more common--it is almost impossible to print materials in large quantities and to reach the masses, she noted. However, Garbanevskaya said she hopes that samizdat materials can be reproduced in the West and that they will "return to readers in the Soviet Union" in larger quantities.