In the context of the widespread availability of the Internet and the development of accessible publishing technologies, traditional types of alternative book publishing are being modified and new ones are emerging. The lack of a settled understanding of the terminology as well as the framework of the phenomenon call for a comprehensive approach, taking into account new realities. The article deals with the problem of the composition and boundaries of the concept of alternative book publishing. In the proposed classification of alternative book publishing types, opposition (countercultural) and amateur (subcultural) book publishing are distinguished. The article outlines the main stages in the development of alternative book publishing, highlighting the dominant types such as lubok in the 17-18^th centuries; album culture in the first half of the 19^th century; free and illegal printing in the second half of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries; proto-samizdat and samizdat during the Soviet period, and zines and artist’s book in the post-Soviet period. As a rule, opposition and amateur book publishing types have been studied separately, without being considered within the broader context of alternative book publishing. The author attempts to highlight the interconnections and continuity between different forms of alternative book publishing. Special attention is given to amateur (subcultural) book publishing, as in the 20^th century, against the backdrop of the dominance of countercultural samizdat in this sector, subcultural publishing was somewhat overshadowed, and the reasons for its resurgence at the end of the 20^th and beginning of the 21st centuries may seem less obvious without a historical perspective.

The third edition of Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture by Stephen Duncombe was published in 2017. The author researches zines as an underground’s mouthpiece, as an opportunity for “losers” who do not fit in to speak up for themselves. According to Duncombe, zines serve as an identity constructor and help to find one’s place through joining a community of like-minded individuals. By deviating from conventional publishing practices, zinesters, following the DIY principle, prefer authenticity to professionalism, creativity to consumption, and the personal to the accepted and popular. Zines, while remaining in the realm of the pre-political, engage in complex relationships with politics as such. The ideology of zines allows one for a continuous questioning of existing cultural norms, never offering fixed politics but always inviting a zinester to remain in a “free space” of exploration. This enables them to evade a consumer culture that threatens to absorb certain underground identities and strategies. New challenges for zines arise from self-publishing and the overall change in communication practices associated with the development of the Internet. The translations of two chapters from the book, presented for the first time in Russian, shed light on fundamental questions about what zines are and what their place is in the modern world.

The article examines two samizdat publications created in the Soviet hippies’ milieu of the 1970s, both titled Alternative. One of them survived in two copies and contained articles about Western youth, mostly reprinted from the official Soviet press. The author was V. Teplyshev, a Soviet hippie and member of the underground ecumenical community. We know about the second book only from mentions in interviews and memoirs of hippie community members. It was a Russian translation of a book on American hippie communes published in the United States in 1970. Both collections depicted Western hippies as a religious and social movement aimed at radical societal changes through a spiritual revolution, led by countercultural youth. The emergence of these books is closely linked to the communitarian aspirations of hippies, and their attempts to establish communes as an alternative social form to Soviet collectivism. While the history of the emergence and dissemination of these books contains many unanswered questions, this study provides insights into the political imagination of Soviet hippies in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The article examines a scheme of Moscow samizdat, published in the samizdat journal Kontr Kult Ur’a (1990, No. 2). The scheme, developed by the journal’s editors S. G. Guryev and A. S. Volkov with the participation of A. I. Kushnir, outlines the connections between samizdat journals, which were published in Moscow from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. Most of them had a predominantly rock music focus. At its core, the scheme illustrates the evolution of the dominant form of subcultural publication in the 1980s: from the literary journal Litsey, the music journals Zerkalo, Ukho, and Urlait to a broader cultural journal Kontr Kult Ur’a. The scheme captures the final stage in the development of late Soviet samizdat S. G. Guryev, the author of this scheme provided his main commentary over 30 years later. It was provided with additional commentaries from A. I. Kushnir and A. S. Volkov. The comments include both relatively well-known facts about the history of rock samizdat in the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as previously unpublished information. An appendix to the article presents additional and updated reference data about the publications featured in the scheme.

Reading literature published in samizdat is an important element of the book culture of the USSR in the second half of the 20^th century. The purpose of this work is to reconstruct the readership of the Odessa Samizdat Library, one of the largest unofficial collections in the territory of the Soviet Union. The research is based on interviews and memoirs of participants in the events. The facts presented in the sources show how the composition of readers and their preferences have changed throughout the existence of the library mentioned above.

The publication is based on a report related to artist’s book, read at a round table at the Garage Museum of Modern Art on December 13, 2023. The examples given in the presentation are based on the book art scheme proposed by C. Phillpot in 1982. The scheme allows one to determine different levels of book involvement in the visual art environment. The term book art, which in the early classification of C. Phillpot meant an artist’s book, was replaced by the term bookwork, and book art more often began to be understood as art objects created from books. The initial difficulties in defining the artist’s book and the instability of terminology (both English and Russian) formed the basis of the discussion that followed the report. In addition to the problems of terminology and classification, it addressed the issues of accounting and cataloging non-traditional publications, ways of displaying them, as well as the very specifics of publishing in this area. The author provides western examples of the institutionalization of non-traditional forms of book culture and suggests the optimal exhibition option for working with the artist’s book: maximum media documentation followed by the translation of individual fragments of the digitized object, an equivalent to reading the original.

Review: Komaromi, Ann. Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022. xv + 297 p.