Luxagraf

In the former Soviet Union there was a literary genre called samizdat (the word means “self-published” in Russian) that consisted of subversive political manifestos and unsanctioned — that is, good — poetry and fiction, circulated only in typescripts, painstakingly reproduced by volunteer typists who smashed their keys through four or five sheets of carbon paper at a time. Famous typescripts never published in the USSR included Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Recently I was talking about samizdat to my friend the sportswriter Charles Pierce. Charlie knows a lot about many different subjects; once when I let slip that I was writing about the impossibly obscure General Smedley Butler, he piped up, “Oh, yeah — the guy they tried to hire for the anti-FDR coup.” So it came as no surprise that he had a samizdat typescript in a drawer. But I was surprised when he started to quote from it from memory: “Ladies and gentlemen, here they are… Morganna!”

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