Markesinis, Eugenie Andrei Siniavskii: A Hero of His Time? (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 351 Markesinis, Eugenie. Andrei Siniavskii: A Hero of His Time? Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures, and History. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2013. xvi + 243 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $79.00. Reviewerssometimescomeacrossaverystimulatingandrewardingbookonly years after its publication. The title finally being ‘noticed’ in this periodical is a good example. Unlike most of those widely regarded as (anti-)Soviet dissidents, Siniavskii (1925–97) was not really interested in politics, realizing early on that there are other, more consequential, factors at play in world history. He disliked the Soviet regime on aesthetic grounds, believing in the importance of freedom from politics. Markesinis suggests (p. 11) that he began to see the light a full decade earlier than most future dissidents, not in 1956, but in 1946, with Zhdanov’s ferociously crude attack on Akhmatova and Zoshchenko. The real breakthrough from the deadening Communist system, with its primitive and warped views on what is kul´turno and nekul´turno, would more likely come about through genuine, authentic, autonomous culture that was neither ‘Soviet’ nor ‘anti-Soviet’ but simply ‘non-Soviet’, like himself, the ultimate outsider, living, perhaps, not so much ‘in history’ as ‘in eternity’. Close as he was to Pasternak, Siniavskii became convinced, partly because of the tragic fate of the much admired Maiakovskii, that true art in Russia had in principle to be above the real and metaphorical curtains, walls and barriers erected by the philistine regime (see especially p. 59). While reading this monograph, I found myself periodically recalling the essays of the independent writer and thinker Grigorii Pomerants (1918–2013) and wondering what Siniavskii thought of him. It seems to me that the most important point to bear in mind is that Siniavskii’s main differences with the Soviet regime, Soviet orthodoxy and Soviet society were not political but much more fundamental. They were stylistic, as he himself stated without being in the least bit flippant. (Style really is not only the man but also the woman, and one of the best features of this volume is the well-deserved tribute it pays to the supportive and creative role of Siniavskii’s wife, Mariia Vasil´evna Rozanova, for decades the target of distasteful and completely unjustified jokes and attacks.) Indeed, many dissidents — and not least Siniavskii’s long-time opponent in the Russian emigration, Vladimir Maksimov, (who, however, later repented and apologised) — were as much Soviet as anti-Soviet in the crudity of their thinking. Style is intrinsically connected to taste, and in the USSR many people with unconventional ‘likes’, whether Communist Party members or not, had to account for their ‘uncomradely’ tastes, in Siniavskii’s case by undergoing a six-year period of ‘deprivation of liberty’. Characteristically, he put this time to very good use by writing long, substantial letters (later published) to his wife, by refining his thoughts about Pushkin and Gogol´, resulting in two SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 352 highly original monographs, and, like Dostoevskii, by getting to understand his fellow-countrymen much better than would have been possible otherwise. (In a way, he was lucky. Three years after he was sentenced, the poet Natal´ia Gorbanevskaia was punished for her dissidence by confinement in a punitive psychiatric hospital. Having led a double life for ten years as a respectable liberal, reasonably conformist, literary critic and as a secret underground fiction writer calling himself Abram Terts and publishing ‘anti-Soviet’ works abroad, Siniavskii might well have been misdiagnosed as suffering from the dreaded malady known as ‘sluggish schizophrenia’.) Here one should mention that although ‘socialist realism’ was officially said to be the main method to be applied in the production of ‘Soviet’ literature, it was in reality the only permitted way of writing, before the second half of the 1980s, if one wanted to be published in the USSR. Even SF (scientific fantasy, not science fiction) had to at least appear to conform to the dictates of the official, allegedly ‘scientific’, dialectical materialism and historical materialism. Because of this virtual monopoly on the content (as well as the form) of new works of fiction, Siniavskii, as a born writer, felt obliged to play a double game and publish abroad those of his works...