Kontinent was an émigré dissident

Dissident

A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....

 journal

Magazine

Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...

 which focused on the politics of the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 and its satellites. Founded in 1974 by writer Vladimir Maximov, its first editor-in-chief, it was published in German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 and Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

 and later translated into English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

. A Norwegian

Norwegian language

Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...

 edition, Kontinent Skandinavia, was published from 1979 to 1981.

Its Editorial Board included Raymond Aron

Raymond Aron

Raymond-Claude-Ferdinand Aron was a French philosopher, sociologist, journalist and political scientist.He is best known for his 1955 book The Opium of the Intellectuals, the title of which inverts Karl Marx's claim that religion was the opium of the people -- in contrast, Aron argued that in...

, George Bailey, Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born Jewish American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts...

, Józef Czapski

Józef Czapski

Józef Czapski was a Polish artist, author, and critic, as well as an officer of the Polish Army. As a painter, he is notable for his membership in the Kapist movement, which was heavily influenced by Cézanne...

, Robert Conquest

Robert Conquest

George Robert Ackworth Conquest CMG is a British historian who became a well-known writer and researcher on the Soviet Union with the publication in 1968 of The Great Terror, an account of Stalin's purges of the 1930s...

, Milovan Djilas, Alexander Galich

Alexander Galich

Alexander Galich , was a Russian poet, screenwriter, playwright, and singer-songwriter. Galich is a pen name, a sort of acronym of his last name, first name, and patronymic: Ginzburg Alexander Arkadievich. He adopted this name to conceal his Jewish ancestry in the face of antisemitism in the Soviet...

, Jerzy Giedroye, Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski

Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski

Gustaw Herling-Grudziński was a Polish writer, journalist, essayist and soldier. He is best known for writing a personal account of life in the Soviet gulag - A World Apart.-Biography:...

, Eugène Ionesco

Eugène Ionesco

Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian and French playwright and dramatist, and one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd...

, Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler CBE was a Hungarian author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria...

, Naum Korzhavin

Naum Korzhavin

Nahum Moiseyevich Korzhavin is a Russian poet of Jewish descent, a dissident and emigrant living in Boston.Korzhavin was given the Big Book National Award-2006 for his contribution into literature...

, Mihajlo Mihajlov, Ludek Pachman

Ludek Pachman

Luděk Pachman was a Czechoslovak-German chess grandmaster, chess writer, and political activist. In 1972, after being imprisoned and tortured almost to death by the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, he was allowed to emigrate to West Germany...

, Alexander Sakharov, Alexander Schmemann

Alexander Schmemann

Alexander Schmemann was a prominent 20th century Orthodox Christian priest, teacher, and writer.-Early life:...

, Zïnaida Schakovskoy, Wolf Siedler, Ignazio Silone

Ignazio Silone

Ignazio Silone was the pseudonym of Secondino Tranquilli, an Italian author and politician.-Early life and career:...

, Strannik, and Carl-Gustav Ströhm.

This initial issue featured a debate

Debate

Debate or debating is a method of interactive and representational argument. Debate is a broader form of argument than logical argument, which only examines consistency from axiom, and factual argument, which only examines what is or isn't the case or rhetoric which is a technique of persuasion...

 between Andrei Sakharov

Andrei Sakharov

Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist. He earned renown as the designer of the Soviet Union's Third Idea, a codename for Soviet development of thermonuclear weapons. Sakharov was an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the...

 and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...

 regarding Solzhenitsyn's Letter to the Soviet Leaders.

Current status

Kontinent continues to be published in English and Russian by Russia House. Currently, the editorial is located at Moscow,
registered in the committee on the printed materials of the Russian federation, registration license є 014255. Kontinent follows traditions of scientific journal

Scientific journal

In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication intended to further the progress of science, usually by reporting new research. There are thousands of scientific journals in publication, and many more have been published at various points in the past...

s correcting errors indicated by readers. The Russian version has been available online since 1999.

Further reading

• Vladimir E. Maximov, editor, Kontinent, Anchor Books (1976), trade paperback, 196 pages, ISBN 0-385-06611-2
• Vladimir E. Maximov, editor, Kontinent 2, Doubleday (1977), trade paperback, ISBN 0-385-12579-8