Abstract
A great deal is now known about the professional difficulties of dissident intellectuals in the Soviet Union and the publication problems of outspoken Russian writers. These have led to the rise of the phenomenon known as samizdat or ‘self-publishing’ in manuscript form. Far less, however, has been written about similar activities in the non-Russian parts of the Soviet Union, notably in the Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) and the Ukraine.
In the Ukraine the problems of the writers are intimately bound up with the problem of Ukrainian cultural independence and Ukrainian autonomy and are complicated by the political bogey of ‘nationalism’. But apart from this the Ukrainian writers' situation has much in common with that of their Russian colleagues, as is shown by a series of trials and by the ries of a samizdat journal, the Ukrainian Herald, that is remarkably similar to the Russian Chronicle of Current Events.
In our last issue we published an extract from Mykhaylo Osadchy's autobiographical novel The Mote in order to convey something of the flavour of today's literary life in the Ukraine, and now Victor Swoboda discusses some typical cases.