Conclusion

As typewriters and other printing devices were hard to access at the time СИРЕНА was produced in the Soviet Union, it is clear to see that the transmission of knowledge was harder to do back then. Only five copies of CИРЕНА exist. Some were sent to Riga and Leningrad while the others stayed in Moscow. Thus, the socio-political ideas, poetic works and illustrations shared at the Mayakovsky monument that are found in CИРЕНА were only able to reach people in these cities. Besides, this does not mean that everyone in these cities were able to acquire the knowledge, see the art of this samizdat as you had to know where to find such books and understand that it was illegal to do so. Hence, the State’s control over typewriters and printing devices in the 1960s made the transmission of knowledge in CИРЕНА quite challenging.

Additionally, this has also affected the transmission of knowledge through the years. In fact, since there exists only five copies СИРЕНА, it is hard to share the knowledge found in this book and shared at the gatherings at the Makakovsky at an international level. Thankfully, the Research Centre for East European Studies at Bremen University made their copies found in their collection available for the Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat. This helps today’s transmission of knowledge found in СИРЕНА.

Alan Liu defines new media encounter as a conversation between the original technology in which the СИРЕНА was produced and the digital platform used today to reflect on it. As mentioned in the article “A Companion to Digital Literary Studies”, new media encounters have many aspects. In this encounter, I mainly deal with historical and socio-political aspects. The old media used, the samizdat journal, was influenced by the situation in which it was created. Samizdat journals, according to Ann Komorami, was the “backbone of Soviet dissidence”. It was used to create links between people forming unofficial networks that shared uncensored – and thus illegal – art, ideas, literature, and so on. This old media created bonds between people facing dangerous living conditions as it was passed around from person to person. Hence, the relationships between readers, editor and illustrator of СИРЕНА is something that people in today’s North America will most likely never experience. Through the use of new media for exploring this samizdat, we lose this feeling as it is not dangerous for people to share samizdat journals online. Nonetheless, by using new media to share the old media, the journal was able to gain in visibility. Therefore, while the transmission of knowledge was difficult in the Soviet Union in the 1960s, this new encounter media helps promote the transmission of knowledge found in CИРЕНА. We might not live in dangerous situations, yet this knowledge is still relevant to today’s understanding of the past.