Philip Tuxbury-Gleissner’s meticulously researched and amply illustrated volume is not just a (long-overdue) systematic study of the Soviet thick journal. It reaches far beyond a survey of titles habitually associated with that term. Instead, Tuxbury-Gleissner has written a history of the thick journal as a Soviet “intellectual habitus” (257). This angle allows him to present literary journals as a system of interconnected networks reaching beyond the Soviet Union into countries that fell under Soviet influence after WWII and Third Wave émigré communities.
The focus of the book is, perhaps unavoidably, on the post-Stalin era. By the mid-1950s, the socialist journal system had matured, while the changing political climate led to, or allowed for, rapid development and diversification. In relevant chapters, Tuxbury-Gleissner’s detailed case studies, using a wealth of archival materials, are supplemented by digital visualizations of various relationships within and between journals based on comparable, quantitative data. Such data-based presentations of shifting associations and overlapping author bases over time weaken commonly held assumptions about ideological binaries (such as in the case of the émigré journals Sintaksis and Kontinent in Ch. 5). They also bolster Tuxbury-Gleissner’s case for considering socialist journals as a system of interconnected networks, something that is hard to prove using only qualitative case studies, which are often determined by the availability of useable material (a case in point are the manuscript reviews in the archive of Nash sovremennik [Our Contemporary] referred to on 174–75).
The emphasis on the post-Stalin years notwithstanding, Tuxbury-Gleissner’s study provides a useful chronology of the evolution of the socialist journal. The first chapter establishes the foundations. Examining the colorful scene of the 1920s, Tuxbury-Gleissner’s richly specific case studies revisit the fundamental debates on the role of the literary journal under socialism: whether a journal should actively shape or merely disseminate proletarian culture. He then proceeds to illustrate how the highbrow textual journal came to prevail over “visual” and “participative” formats and explains the continuity between the extensively researched nineteenth-century literary journal and its Soviet-era successor.
The chronology fills in many gaps, too, charting the decline of the journal landscape in the 1930s, the disruption of the war years and the repressive campaigns of the late 1940s. Throughout the entire study, the author moves his discussion beyond content and individual editorial decisions. Alongside political and systemic considerations, he also considers the influence of material factors on the journal landscape, such as paper shortages, the limitations of various printing techniques, and the remuneration of professional writers in later decades. This approach constitutes a major strength of the volume and advances Tuxbury-Gleissner’s stated aim of introducing the tools of book studies to the study of Soviet periodicals.
The volume is divided into two distinctive parts. The first part is a chronological history of the evolution of the literary journal within the USSR itself, arranged to support the argument that the 1960s somewhat restored the multifaceted landscape of the 1920s. The second part details the evolution of the socialist journal in the countries of the eastern bloc and the fate of foreign literature in the USSR on the example of the journal Inostrannaia literatura (Foreign Literature), followed by a fascinating chapter on émigré journals of the Third Wave. Tuxbury-Gleissner justifies the inclusion of only Third Wave émigré journals by the fact that unlike intellectuals who left after the Revolution or in the wake of WWII, those who emigrated in the 1970s and 1980s had adopted distinctly Soviet practices of literary production. The presentation of Russian-speaking diaspora journals as an inalienable part of the Soviet journal “scene” is another way of highlighting how late Soviet literature was split into gosizdat and tamizdat, works printed by the state-controlled press at home and works printed abroad. This argument would have been only strengthened by a mention of journals produced in samizdat: the typewritten literary journals of the Soviet underground and their emulation of the official literary process. However, a study of this scope cannot possibly include everything, and a consideration of samizdat would have exploded the very effective bipartite structure of Tuxbury-Gleissner’s book.
Tuxbury-Gleissner has not just produced an indispensable reference work and made a major contribution to periodical studies. He has also managed to complete his monumental research just in time. It would be impossible to repeat his feat in 2026: so many of the archives he used are once again out of reach for researchers.
