The Leningrad Underground as a Living Archive: Considering Informal Philology in the Late Soviet Union

This chapter proposes a multi-perspectival approach to archival practices of the Soviet underground. While Leningrad samizdat poetry represents a counter-archive of modernism in a general way, from the viewpoint of the actors themselves a conflicting relationship within the underground can be observed between an anti-archival, quasi-spiritualist model of memory and a more material and literalist one. The case of informal philology in its tension with institutional philology, especially with the Soviet scholarship on Aleksandr Blok, clearly highlights this conflict. This chapter discusses the archival practices of such informal philologists as Leonid Chertkov (1933–2000), Tat′iana Nikol′skaia (b. 1945), Vladimir Erl′ (1947–2020), Iurii Kolker (b. 1946), and Anna Gerasimova (b. 1961). It argues that their ethos of philological “accuracy” (tochnost′) was at least as much an intra-communal statement as a dissident attitude toward official culture. What most clearly distinguishes their work from official philology is its high degree of personalization of the archive. Specifically, this chapter addresses tekstologiia, i.e., edition philology, which made accessible unrepresented authors of (post)symbolism and the avant-garde, thus shaping the counter-canon of the Leningrad underground. With a particular focus on the samizdat editorial achievement of the poet Vladimir Erl′, this chapter identifies tekstologiia as a reading practice that intimately combines the archive with artistic intuition and a strong ethos of serving others.