Notes on the Context of Siniavskii's Reception in Gorbachev's Russia

Abstract

In 1989, as the final restrictions on publishing were being lifted in the Soviet Union, works by previously unpublishable emigre authors began to fill the pages of Soviet journals. Among the returnees was Andrei Donatovich Siniavskii, whose writings began to appear in Soviet periodicals in February of that year. Although his works had had some circulation in samizdat, Siniavskii was clearly, at the time of his return, among the least read of the major emigre and dissident writers. Thus, in a survey of readers published in the summer of 1989, only 24 percent of the people polled claimed to have read Siniavskii (as opposed to 84 percent who had read works by Solzhenitsyn).1