Subscribing to Sovietdom

"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