The Cold War had hardly begun when Winston Churchill claimed an Iron Curtain had fallen across Europe. This arresting image quickly became the most powerful symbol of a divided continent. However, the border between East and West was never actually as impenetrable as Churchill's words suggested. Written Here, Published There is a vivid illustration of the holes that punctured the Iron Curtain. The book examines how underground literature traveled from East to West and back again during the period from the 1950s until the end of Communism. It unearths the complicated transnational networks that enabled the transmission of texts across closed borders and examines the Cold War as a space of interaction rather than division.

Written Here, Published There focuses on the production of tamizdat: texts written by nonconformist authors inside the Soviet sphere and published in the West. Ranging widely inside this subject, the book is divided into four lengthy, thematically organized chapters. The first chapter considers the beginnings of tamizdat in the 1950s and the impact of three controversies associated with it—the Western publication of Boris Paternak's novel Dr. Zhivago in 1957, the trial of Soviet writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky in 1966, and the Western publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novels One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago (1973). This chapter highlights the complicated relationship between tamizdat publications and Cold War politics, a recurring theme of the book. Eastern Bloc authors often lamented that Western audiences were more interested in how they had been persecuted by their governments than in the literary merit of their work. Yet, the act of publishing in the West inevitably had a political dimension. This theme is developed further in the book's last chapter, which considers how the production of tamizdat intersected with human rights activism in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in the aftermath of the 1977 Helsinki Accords. Unlike some historians of human rights (most notably Samuel Moyn), Friederike Kind-Kovács is not interested in the ways East European dissident writing may have helped inspire contemporary human rights ideologies. Rather, she wants to illustrate the place of human rights activism in creating a common European literary community that crossed Cold War boundaries.

The book's two middle chapters (which together comprise almost 250 pages) are concerned with tamizdat as a form of literary community and as a social practice. The second chapter traces the personal networks of Eastern Bloc writers, émigrés, and Western publishers involved in the production of tamizdat, while the third chapter examines the practical challenges involved in moving literature back and forth across closed borders. Kind-Kovács argues that we should look at tamizdat not simply as a set of texts or intellectual debates, but as a network of relationships and a sphere of personal interaction that stretched across borders. The book is at its strongest when it shows how the world of tamizdat created a shared lived experience that linked people on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The core of this shared experience was bound up in the need to outwit the Communist police, which required both secrecy and trust. It took devoted networks of people inside the region to type manuscripts, bind them, and then keep them safe. Some distributed copies locally as samizdat (or self-published underground material); others, often Westerners, worked to smuggle texts out of the country. To move printed books back into the bloc, volunteers drove vans from the West illegally filled with copies of banned books or with paper to create underground journals. From Western publishers who turned a blind eye at book fairs inside the Soviet Bloc when their sample copies were stolen to the Hungarian who sent underground manuscripts via the interlibrary loan service, all felt they were contributing to something that was larger than themselves. They all, Kind-Kovács contends, played a role in breaching the divisions of the Cold War.

In the end, Kind-Kovács argues, tamizdat helped to create a united European literary community, albeit one that was paradoxically dependent on Europe's division. To write its history, the author committed herself to writing a history that itself transcended boundaries. Written Here, Published There ignores national borders to focus instead on a protean group of writers, readers, editors, translators, and publishers that refused to be limited by their physical separation and inability to travel freely. This community had many differences of opinion, yet managed to sustain a conversation even across the Iron Curtain.