There existed also underground literary circles like the Kyiv school of poetry, a circle of Lviv writers around the samizdat "Skrynya" almanac (Hryhoriy Chubay, Oleh Lysheha, Mykola Ryabchuk, Viktor Morozov, Roman Kis, Orest Yavorskyi), separate dissident writers like Ihor Kalynets.
His immersion in samizdat literature at this time brought him into contact with the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov and Robert Conquest.
He translated a large number of texts and also published within samizdat, in particularly the books of Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz.
As head of the information department, he was editor and author of several illegal samizdat publications with Rainer Eppelmann of the peace circle of the East Berlin Samariterkirche (Church of the Good Samaritan) in Berlin-Friedrichshain.