The
Razumov
Press
"Poetry is so deep and intangible that one cannot define everything systematically"
- Vincent Van Gogh.
Samizdat and The Web
What is Samizdat?
As a word samizdat originates from the Russian and it is a term for any work which is self-published, i.e. - without censorship. During the years of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia there was a vast underground proliferation of dissident or samizdat literature, most often produced and perpetuated via the means of typewriters and sheets of carbon-paper; samizdat became a highly pervasive and extremely effective means of countering the illegality imposed on the basic human freedom of expression.
Samizdat and the Power of the Internet
It seems to me that nowadays the Internet is the most obvious means for self-publishing such pieces of personal expression. Certainly the Internet is a way of reaching the widest audience possible. Substitute the typewriter for the keyboard and the carbon-paper for HTML, and your work can be read right the way round the world.
In terms of the Internet then, I feel that this new endeavour is very valid, although I don't think anything will ever replace the written word or the printed text; but I do think, whilst it is still only an infant, the Internet has the potential to be a powerful tool in just this samizdat kind of way (beyond the mere money-making, marketing mad and advertising aspects), so long as it is used in that same spirit of openess and freedom for which the word samizdat had once been a synonym.
"A great many people can peck at a typewriter and, fortunately, no one can stop them. But for that reason, even in samizdat, there will always be countless bad books or poems for every important book. If anything, there will be more bad ones than in the days of printing because, even in the most liberated times, printing is still a more complicated process than typing. But even if, objectively, there were some possibility of selection, who could claim the right to exercise it? Who among us would dare to say that he can unerringly distinguish something of value - even though it may still be nascent, unfamiliar, as yet only potential - from its counterfeit? Who among us can know whether what may seem today to be marginal graphomania might not one day appear to our descendants as the most substantial thing written in our time? Who among us has the right to deprive them of that pleasure, no matter how incomprehensible it may seem to us?"
- Vaclav Havel: 'Six Asides About Culture' (August, 1984) Jednou nohu (Revolver Review); translated by Erazim Kohak, in 'Open Letters' by Vaclav Havel, Faber and Faber, 1991.
The Razumov Press [founded in 1994] aims to publish on-line (and occasionally in samizdat book form) new writing, mainly poetry but also some prose, by open minded writers & artists.
contact: the razumov press
Poems - by Tim Chamberlain
Definitive Definitions: Further Ruminations on Modern Haiku
Poems - by Kate Down
Poems after reading Insect Natural History by A D Imms