ABSTRACT
The poet Andrei Voznesensky, who had the earliest fruitful contacts with the Beats, is perhaps also the best example of the limits of direct Beat–Soviet exchange. As for translation of the Beats, it did not take off until the 1990s. Beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the unofficial Soviet-Russian culture developed an ethos—akin to the Beats of the late 1940s-early 1950s—of socio-professional invisibility, literary and cultural independence, and individual quest for truth. However, from the viewpoint of the emerging unofficial culture, the dissident movement was too much a mirror image of the dominant culture; too much preoccupied with ideology, too concerned with power, too much aimed at reaching "the masses", even if from the opposite side. A final area of Soviet-Russian unofficial writing to consider is the various forms of intimate writing—diaries, journals, and letters—and of mixed forms.
