Sinyavsky, Andrei (Abram Tertz)

ANDREI SINYAVSKY (1925-1997) was a Russian writer, dissident and political prisoner who ridiculed the Soviet regime in satires smuggled abroad and published under the pseudonym ABRAM TERTZ.



A protégé of Pasternak and a respected literary scholar at the Gorky Institute, Sinyavsky became disillusioned with the Soviet system following the arrest of his father and the growing divergence between his own tastes in literature and art and those prescribed by the regime.  He decided to have certain of his writings that could not be published in his homeland smuggled out for publication abroad.  The first of these works to appear in the West was a literary manifesto of sorts entitled ON SOCIALIST REALISM (1959), an ironic tour de force in which Sinyavsky's narrator poses as a defender of the officially sanctioned Soviet approach to art in order to turn the tradition upside down by subverting it from within.



Between 1959 and 1965 three novellas, six short stories, and a brief collection of aphorisms by Sinyavsky appeared in the West under the pseudonym Abram Tertz.  The fictional works were, in essence, exemplars of the purposeless, phantasmagoric art invoked at the end of the essay on Socialist Realism, what Sinyavsky would later come to call "fantastic realism".  These include THE MAKEPEACE EXPERIMENT (1963), an allegorical novel of Russia where a village boss hoodwinks his constituents with myths and magic, and FANTASTIC STORIES (1963), a collection of short stories exploring the themes of tyranny, dissipation and spiritual loneliness, written in the tradition of Gogol, Hoffmann, and Zamyatin.



In 1965, he was arrested, along with fellow-writer Yuli Daniel, and openly convicted solely for their literary work in the infamous Sinyavsky-Daniel show trial.  Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years in a forced labor camp on charges of "anti-Soviet activity" for the opinions of his fictional characters.  The trial transcripts and associated documents, reproduced in two volumes edited by Leopold Labedz and/or Max Hayward, prompted domestic and international protest.  He was released in 1971 and allowed to emigrate in 1973 to France, where he was active in emigre literary life and continued to publish, both under his own name and the pseudonym.



STROLLS WITH PUSHKIN (1975), written while Sinyavsky was confined to a Soviet labor camp, is an irreverent portrait of the Russian master and provoked a storm of criticism both at home and abroad, although his "disrespect" was meant only to rescue Pushkin from the stifling cult of personality that had risen up around him.  LITTLE JINX (1980) is a fantasy in which the personalities of both Sinyavsky and Tertz are the objects of playful narrative manipulation.  In SOVIET CIVILIZATION (1990), Sinyavsky provides a merciless accounting of the Communist experiment, marked by permanent uncertainty, widespread worker theft, scarcity of consumer goods, despised communal apartments, appalling negligence, and systemic corruption.





The following books are in PDF format unless otherwise noted:





== FICTION ==



* Fantastic Stories (Pantheon, 1963).  Max Hayward & Ronald Hingley, trans.

* Goodnight! (Viking, 1989).  Richard Lourie, trans.

* Little Jinx (Northwestern, 1992).  Larry Joseph and Rachel May, trans.

* Makepeace Experiment, The (Northwestern, 1989).  Manya Harari, trans.



== NON-FICTION ==



* On Socialist Realism (Pantheon, 1960).  G. Dennis, trans.; Czeslaw Milosz, intro.

* On Socialist Realism (Dissent, Winter 1960).  George Dennis, trans.

* Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History (Arcade, 1990).  Joanne Turnbull, trans.

* Strolls with Pushkin (Columbia, 2017). Nepomnyashchy & Yastremski, trans. -- ePUB



== TRIAL DOCUMENTATION ==



* On Trial: The Case of Sinyavsky and Daniel (Collins, 1967).  Labedz and Hayward, eds.

* On Trial: The Soviet State vs. "Tertz" and "Arzhak" (Harper & Row, 1967). Hayward, ed.



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