Textual hauntings: Samizdat reading practices

What does it mean to take the act of reading to the extreme? I will consider the act of reading illicitly under various countries within the Soviet Union (USSR), where the underground production, smuggling and consumption of illicit texts of all kinds took place on a huge scale over a span of decades. I focus on the reading practices of samizdat: underground, illegally produced or reproduced literature. I will explore samizdat not only as a text type, but as a wholistic practice that involves reading, textual production and maintenance, and social networking. I will explore the unique characteristics of these texts, the reading practices associated with them and the ways in which samizdat resists the contemporary notion of reading, and what a text is on a number of fronts.