[page 1] In a general sense any copy of a document which has been produced in the Soviet Union outside the chain of state publishing houses may be referred to as samizdat. […] [page 3] This term is modeled on the shortened form—gosizdat—of State Publishing House (Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel'stvo). […] According to Julius Telesin, a Russian writer who emigrated to Israel in 1970, the word samizdat occurs first in the late fifties when a Moscow poet, exasperated with the operation of the censorship system, bound together the typewritten sheets of his poems and wrote Samsebiaizdate (Publishing House for Oneself
) in the place where the name of the publishing house would normally appear. He also used the term samizdat with the same meaning but, as Telesin observes, samizdat (self-publishing house
) subsequently acquired a wider meaning.