Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky (
Russian: Андре́й Дона́тович Синя́вский; 8 October 1925 – 25 February 1997) was a Russian
writer and
Soviet dissident known as a defendant in the
Sinyavsky–Daniel trial of 1965.
Sinyavsky became one of the leading
literary critics of the Novy Mir magazine, at the time headed by
Aleksandr Tvardovsky. In the early 1960s, Novy Mir was considered the most
liberal legal publications in the Soviet Union, and Sinyavsky began leaning towards a
dissident position. In November 1962, Novy Mir became famous for publishing
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's groundbreaking One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a
novella about a prisoner of the
Gulag. Sinyavsky, a protégé of
Boris Pasternak, described the realities of Soviet life in short fiction stories which were often critical in nature. Sinyavsky published his novels in the
West under the
pseudonym Abram Tertz, derived from the name of a historical Russian
Jewishgangster, although Sinyavsky himself was not Jewish. Sinyavsky's works were naturally rejected for publication by the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) during a time of extreme
censorship.
On 4 September 1965, Sinyavsky was arrested along with fellow-writer and friend
Yuli Daniel, and tried in the first Soviet
show trial during which writers were openly convicted solely for their literary work. Sinyavsky and Daniel were arrested as part of widespread
political repression in the Soviet Union due to their works critical of Soviet life being published abroad. Legally, Sinyavsky and Daniel could not be charged for their publications outside the Soviet Union, and instead were charged under Article 70 of the Russian SFSR Criminal Code for producing materials labeled as "
Anti-Soviet agitation". This was the first time anti-Soviet laws were applied to works of fiction. Dozens of Soviet writers and intellectuals came to the defence of Sinyavsky and Daniel, and on 5 December 1965 held the
Glasnost meeting in Moscow, the first spontaneous public
political demonstration in the Soviet Union after the Second World War. The Sinyavsky–Daniel trial was accompanied by harsh
propaganda campaigns in the
Soviet media, perceived as a sign of demise of the
Khrushchev Thaw which had allowed greater freedoms of expression during the late 1950s and early 1960s.
On 14 February 1966, Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years on charges of "
anti-Soviet activity" for the opinions of his fictional characters. After the trial, 63 supporters of Sinyavsky and Daniel signed a petition requesting their release. In response to the petition, members of the Secretariat of the Union of Soviet Writers spoke out against Sinyavsky and Daniel. As historian Fred Coleman writes, "Historians now have no difficulty pinpointing the birth of the modern Soviet dissident movement. It began in February 1966 with the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, two Russian writers who ridiculed the Communist regime in satires smuggled abroad and published under pen names... Little did they realize at the time that they were starting a movement that would help end Communist rule."[1]
Sinyavsky was the catalyst for the formation of the Russian-English translation team of
Larissa Volokhonsky and
Richard Pevear, who have translated a number of works by
Mikhail Bulgakov,
Anton Chekhov,
Fyodor Dostoyevski,
Nikolai Gogol, and
Leo Tolstoy. Volokhonsky, who was born and raised in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), first visited the United States in the early 1970s and happened across Pevear's Hudson Review article about Sinyavsky. At the time, Pevear believed Sinyavsky was still in a Russian prison; Volokhonsky had just helped him immigrate to Paris. Pevear was surprised and pleased to be mistaken: "Larissa had just helped Sinyavsky leave Russia," Pevear recalled. "And she let me know that, while I'd said he was still in prison, he was actually in Paris. I was glad to know it."
Bibliography
Books
On Socialist Realism (1959) criticised the poor quality of the drearily positive-toned, conflict-free structures in the style of the state-backed
socialist realism, and called for a return to the fantastic in Soviet literature, the tradition, Sinyavsky said, of
Gogol and
Vladimir Mayakovsky. This work also drew connections between socialist realism and
classicism. It asserted that greater similarities exist between Soviet literature and that predating the 19th century than exist between Soviet (socialist realist) literature and the intellectual skepticism plaguing the protagonists of 19th-century Russian novels.
The Trial Begins (1960) is a short novel with characters reacting in different ways to their roles in a totalitarian society, told with elements of the fantastic.
A Voice from the Chorus (1973) is a collection of scattered thoughts from the
Gulag, composed in letters he wrote to his wife. It contains snippets of literary thoughts as well as the comments and conversations of fellow prisoners, most of them criminals or even German war prisoners.
Artz, Martine (15 May 1995). "Literature in the dock: the trial against Andrej Sinjavskij". Russian Literature. 37 (4): 441–450.
doi:
10.1016/0304-3479(95)91600-T.
Borden, Richard (Autumn 1998). "Andrei Sinyavsky: in memoriam". The Slavic and East European Journal. 42 (3): 372–376.
JSTOR309673.
Chapple, Richard (February 1976). "Criminals and criminality according to the Soviet dissidents–works of Andrey Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel". In Fox, Vernon (ed.). Proceedings of the 21st annual Southern conference on corrections. Vol. 21. Tallahassee: Florida State University. pp. 149–158.
Kolonosky, Walter (1975). "Andrei Siniavskii: the chorus and the critic". Canadian-American Slavic Studies. 9 (3): 352–360.
doi:
10.1163/221023975X00126.
Kolonosky, Walter (Autumn 1998). "Andrei Sinyavsky: puzzle maker". The Slavic and East European Journal. 42 (3): 385–388.
doi:
10.2307/309676.
JSTOR309676.
Matich, Olga (Spring 1989). "Spokojnoj noči: Andrej Sinjavskij's rebirth as Abram Terc". The Slavic and East European Journal. 33 (1): 50–63.
doi:
10.2307/308383.
JSTOR308383.
Nepomnyashchy, Catharine (Spring 1991). "Andrei Sinyavsky's 'return' to the Soviet Union". Formations. 6 (1): 24–44.
Nepomnyashchy, Catharine (1995). Abram Tertz and the poetics of crime. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.
ISBN978-0300062106.
Nepomnyashchy, Catharine (Autumn 1998). "Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky (1925–1997)". The Slavic and East European Journal. 42 (3): 367–371.
doi:
10.2307/309672.
JSTOR309672.
Parthé, Kathleen (Autumn 1998). "Sinyavsky on his way to tomorrow". The Slavic and East European Journal. 42 (3): 394–398.
doi:
10.2307/309678.
JSTOR309678.
Phillips, William; Shragin, Boris; Aleshkovsky, Yuz; Kott, Jan; Siniavski, Andrei; Aksyonov, Vassily; Litvinov, Pavel; Dovlatov, Sergei; Nekrassov, Viktor; Etkind, Efim; Voinovich, Vladimir; Kohak, Erazim; Loebl, Eugen (Winter 1984). "Writers in exile III: a conference of Soviet and East European dissidents". The Partisan Review. 51 (1): 11–44.
Woronzoff, Alexander (Winter–Spring 1983). "The writer as artist and critic: the case of Andrej Sinjavskij". Russian Language Journal. 37 (126/127): 139–145.
JSTOR43659908.
References
^Coleman, Fred (August 15, 1997). The Decline and Fall of Soviet Empire : Forty Years That Shook The World, From Stalin to Yeltsin. St. Martin's Griffin. p. 95.
ISBN978-0-312-16816-2.