Samizdat as a mission: publisher Boris Taygin and the unofficial culture of Leningrad in the 1950–1970s

The article aims to analyze Boris Taigin’s publishing activities. He was a poet and also one of the most important figures of samizdat in the USSR. If in Moscow the pioneer of this phenomenon was Nikolai Glazkov, then in Leningrad the same role of unofficial book publisher went to Taigin. Having started his career in an underground studio for the production of music records in the late 1940s, Taigin soon became an uncensored publisher of Leningrad poets of the “thaw” and the first years of “stagnation”. As part of his own project “Be Ta”, he created more than a hundred collections of unofficial authors of Leningrad, thereby ensuring them a certain fame in literary circles and preserving their legacy for contemporaries and descendants. Almost all of Taigin’s publishing projects had a small print run (3-5 copies), were created on a typewriter, were not copied and were practically not distributed outside of friendly literary circles. Among the most famous author’s works of Taigin: the debut collection of N. Rubtsov, the first printed book of J. Brodsky, a huge collection of publications of G. Gorbovsky. Despite the fact that the uncensored culture of the USSR is very actively studied today, the topic of Taigin’s influence on this process has practically not been considered by Russian speaking philologists. The sources analyzed in the article allow us to fill this gap and suggest how non governmental mechanisms for distributing literature worked in Leningrad in the 1950s-1970s and what contribution had this seemingly insignificant, “home” publishing activity of one person.