samizdat

Indeed, there’s a novel nested within this novel, a samizdat work recounting the history of World War II and its aftermath as we know it, in which the Germans and Japanese are defeated.

After years of being out of print, with copies and PDFs circulating among gay artists and activists like samizdat, it was republished in 2018.

But the text of his speech was quickly leaked by his supporters who posted it online in a modern-day version of samizdat, the way works of dissident writers were copied and shared in Soviet times.

By contrast, the scenes of the teenage Adéla helping to produce samizdat in communist Czechoslovakia feel lived in and significant.

One day in the mid-1970s, Kurkov’s older brother brought home an unbound, hand-typed samizdat copy of a new work by Solzhenitsyn, “The Gulag Archipelago,” which had recently begun to circulate among dissidents.