Also, what was the political climate in Russia like at that time, and how did it affect artists?
“Samizdat” means self-publishing. In earlier days, it was a forbidden fruit in Soviet Russia; which had a big crop of such fruits in the dissident movement. If you refract the rays of this underground activity through the prism of art, the result can be described as a hybrid of conceptual art, visual and concrete poetry, artists’ books, performance art and so on. It was not an imitation of the West. It was something that was brewing out in the isolated, almost hermetic, vessel of Soviet Russia. Its constitution permitted almost everything de jure and forbade almost everything de facto. That was our beginning. Probably the visual language of our art will give you the better picture. Hypothetically, our situation could be symbolized by Rimma’s early cubic poem Quintessence, 1974.
