Open lecture “Soviet samizdat and Social Networks”

FRIDAY, 8 NOVEMBER - 3.00 PM
By Prof. Mikhail Iossel (Concordia University, Montreal, Canada)
VU, Faculty of Philology, Donelaičio Auditorium (Universiteto g. 5, Vilnius)
Free entrance
Duration 90 min

About the event
From Soviet literary samizdat of the 1970s-80s – to the infinite echo chambers of present-day social media: following modern world's ever-ongoing global transformations and readjustments, the modes of people's literary and artistic expression also have undergone major changes over the last several decades. And yet, their basic patterns and overall character in many instances and in a number of ways remain essentially the same. From underground to cyberground: one's transition between these two points of self-realization will be the focus of this talk.

Mikhail Iossel, the Leningrad-born author of the book of prose "Notes From Cyberground: Trumpland And My Old Soviet Feeling" (New Europe Books, 2018), story collection Every Hunter Wants to Know (W. W. Norton) and coeditor of the anthologies Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States (Dalkey Archive, 2004) and Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia (Tin House, 2010), is a professor of English/Creative Writing at Concordia University in Montreal and the founding director of the Summer Literary Seminars international program. Back in the Soviet Union, he belonged to the organization of samizdat writers, Club-81. Among his awards are the Guggenheim, NEA, and Stegner Fellowships. His stories and other prose, in English and in translation to several languages, have appeared in NewYorker.com, Guernica, Literarian, AGNI, North American Review Threepenny Review, Interia, Boulevard, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere.