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Subscribing to Sovietdom

The Lives of the Socialist Literary Journal

Philip Tuxbury-Gleissner

$135

Hardback

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English
University of Toronto Press
29 July 2025
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.

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.
By:  
Imprint:   University of Toronto Press
Country of Publication:   Canada
Dimensions:   Height: 235mm,  Width: 160mm,  Spine: 25mm
Weight:   700g
ISBN:   9781487561017
ISBN 10:   1487561016
Pages:   384
Publication Date:  
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Further / Higher Education ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

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

Reviews for Subscribing to Sovietdom: The Lives of the Socialist Literary Journal

""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


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