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Subscribing to Sovietdom

Subscribing to Sovietdom

The Lives of the Socialist Literary Journal

by Philip Tuxbury-Gleissner

Published by: University of Toronto Press

Imprint: University of Toronto Press

384 Pages, 160.00 × 235.00 × 25.00 mm, 87 illustrations

Hardcover
9781487561017
Published: June 2025

£47.00

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Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

In the Soviet Union, literary journals were ubiquitous. Citizens read these so-called thick journals on crowded buses and debated the most recent issue with colleagues at work or friends at the kitchen table. Writers competed for spots in the most prestigious periodicals and formed communities around editorial offices that operated in a complex relationship with censorship and Party authorities. Significant resources were allocated to the design and production of these monthlies, with press runs in the hundreds of thousands and even millions at their peak.
Subscribing to Sovietdom offers a comprehensive study of the socialist literary journal as a unique cultural form – from the early revolutionary years to the end of socialism – within the Soviet Union and abroad. Synthesizing visual and literary analysis of the periodicals, archive-based literary history, and computational approaches to the study of bibliographical data, the book reveals the medium in its role as literary institution, visual object of everyday life, and cultural event.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
A Note on Transliteration, Translation, and References to Periodicals

Introduction: The Socialist Literary Journal

Part One: The Domestic Life of the Journal
1. Through Thick and Thin: Emergence of the Soviet Literary Journal in the 1920s
2. From War to Thaw: Decline and Revival of the Soviet Journal
3. The Social Life of Journals: Periodical Kinship Networks in the 1960s

Part Two: The Transnational Life of the Journal
4. Transnational Circulations: International Literature between Moscow, Prague, and Berlin
5. The Socialist Journal without Socialism? The Case of the Third Wave Emigration

Conclusion: The Death and Afterlife of the Socialist Literary Journal

Appendix to Chapter 3: The Soviet Journals Reconnected Data
Notes
Bibliography
Periodicals
Archives
Published Sources
Index

Philip Gleissner is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at the Ohio State University.

"Soviet ‘thick journals’ have been strikingly understudied, considering their almost legendary role in Soviet and socialist cultures. Subscribing to Sovietdom offers the first comprehensive history of this significant genre. Philip Tuxbury-Gleissner combines meticulous archive work with digital visualizations to reconstruct the complex set of networks, connections, and contrasts between Soviet journals (and their émigré counterparts). This book is a game changer for Soviet historians and Slavists, and a substantial contribution to periodical studies too." - Polly Jones, Professor of Russian, University College Oxford
"Philip Tuxbury-Gleissner shows that the post-Stalin era of the Russian literary journal deserves our attention no less than the nineteenth-century ‘golden age’ of Turgenev and Tolstoy. He reveals the 1950s and 1960s as a period not only of dynamic expansion of the periodical press but also of aesthetic innovation and the cultivation of new relationships with readers and contributors. Anyone with an interest in Soviet culture will want to get to know this book." - Stephen Lovell, Professor of Modern History, King's College London
"Philip Tuxbury-Gleissner’s Subscribing to Sovietdom combines distant reading of big data with close reading of archival materials to offer exciting new insights into the national and transnational life of Soviet journals. The contributions of this book are at once empirical and methodological, debunking previously held assumptions about the workings of Soviet culture while modelling new approaches to the study of such complex cultural phenomena." - Brian James Baer, Professor of Russian and Translation Studies, Kent State University