Abram Tertz Research Articles

Was Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto a Hidden Homage?

Shostakovich’s direct quotation from the Odessan street song “Bagels, Buy My Bagels!” (Bubliki, kupite bubliki!) in his Second Cello Concerto Op. 126 (1966) featured an unusual style, even in relation to some of his other compositions referencing popular and Jewish music. The song is widely known as one of the icons of the Odessa underworld. Shostakovich’s use of this melody as one of the main leit-themes of the Concerto can be compared to the use by the non-Jewish Andrei Sinyavsky of the Jewish pseudonym Abram Tertz, a bandit from the Odessa underworld—the only locus of freedom to tell the truth in a totalitarian society. The time of Shostakovich’s address to this song remarkably coincided with the famous Soviet trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel in the fall of 1965 and their final sentencing (February 1966) to years in a Gulag camp. The dramaturgy of Shostakovich’s Concerto, written in the same spring of 1966, demonstrates the transformation of the theme of “Bagels” into a tragic image. The totality of circumstantial evidence suggests that this opus could be the composer’s hidden tribute to the feats of Russian heroic writers.

“This does not interest the court!”: the 1966 Soviet Satire Trial and its persistent legacy

Abstract Soviet writers Yuli Daniel (aka Nikolay Arzhak) and Andrey Sinyavsky (aka Abram Tertz) published several satires anonymously in capitalist countries during the Cold War. In 1965 both writers were arrested in the Soviet Union and they were put on trial in February 1966. They were charged under Article 70 of the Penal Code that criminalized libel and defamation of the state and agitation with the aim of undermining or weakening the state. Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years in a labor camp and Daniel was given five years. This trial’s controversial discussions about authorial opinions and intentions and the complex relationship between satire and social reality remain highly relevant today. This article presents seven contradictions and ambiguities inherent to satire in order to disentangle different arguments and viewpoints in their context. The reception of satirical texts is complicated by issues surrounding ethics and violence, seriousness and non-seriousness, truth and fiction, ambiguous or dubious empathy, morality, political content in non-political texts, and the use of a fictional persona. The vagueness and in-betweenness of satire can pose a challenge to environments averse to ambiguity, as was the case in this Soviet trial, but also in similar cases until today.

A Ransomed Dissident: A Life in Art under the Soviets

The persecuted Soviet author and, eventually, Parisian émigré Andrey Sinyavsky (who used the pen name Abram Tertz) once pronounced that his quarrel with the Soviet state concerned aesthetics rather than politics. His longtime friend Igor Golomstock (1929–2017) concurred with Sinyavsky's position, as he announces at several moments in this account of a remarkable life that extends from early experiences as the child of non-prisoner civilians working in the Kolyma Gulag, to the social upheavals of Moscow during the Thaw of the 1960s, to a life in Great Britain from 1972 on. A specialist in Western European and, eventually, totalitarian art, Golomstock founded his resistance to the Soviet regime on rejection of its ugliness and falsity, rather than on any ideological commitment.His stance of principled nonpartisan resistance enabled Golomstock to circulate among many and varied circles of Soviet social life in the decades of de-Stalinization under Khrushchev, succeeded by the return to social discipline and conservatism under Brezhnev. Golomstock's friendships and contacts are a who's who of the nonconformist Soviet intelligentsia, including Sinyavsky and his wife (the art historian Maria Rozanova), the idiosyncratic “methodologist” Georgy Shchedrovitsky, the philosopher Alexander Piatigorsky, the guitar poet Alexander Galich, and the artist Boris Sveshnikov, known for his Gulag drawings. Golomstock's life experiences are a chronicle of highpoints in the social history of the Moscow intelligentsia: he held a position in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, hub of unofficial Soviet cultural activity; worked as a guide at the art pavilions of the 1956 Moscow International Youth Festival, where Soviets could for the first time see twentieth-century Western art; and later obtained a post in the Scientific Institute for Technical Aesthetics, a “Noah's Ark” for nonconformist thought as the Thaw turned frosty. Finally, Golomstock enjoyed a front-row seat, as unwilling witness for the prosecution, at the trial of Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel for “anti-Soviet agitation”—which is to say, the smuggling of phantasmagorical fiction to the West for publication. This episode was a crucial stimulus for the rise and organization of Soviet dissident groups, which Golomstock frequented but never “joined.” He himself was prosecuted for refusal to testify, leading to official ostracization, loss of work, and eventual emigration.In the West, Golomstock's path took him, once again, through key sites of activity: work as a writer and broadcaster for Radio Liberty and the BBC Russian Service, along with critical and editorial activity around the influential émigré journals Sintaksis (edited by Sinyavsky) and Kontinent. Here the reluctance of Sinyavsky, and Golomstock along with him, to march under ideological banners led to clashes with the self-appointed leaders of Soviet émigré society and anti-Soviet activism—most importantly, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Golomstock's account of life in emigration, which takes up the last quarter of the book, presents a mirror image of his stories of conflict with Soviet dogmatism, but now it was his former dissident allies who played the role of ideological purists.In sum, Golomstock's life is an encyclopedic account of the ironies of Soviet and Cold War culture and politics. He ends with a note (“The Benefits of Pessimism”) on his lack of faith in political programs (especially in Russia), but thanks to his sharp wit; ear for anecdote; and evocative tales of art, books, and tables of food, drink, and conversation, Golomstock delivers a dose of optimistic joie de vivre.

"Анатомия личности" Гоголя в повествовании Абрама Терца "В тени Гоголя"

The article aims to analyze the content and narrative systems of Andrei Sinyavsky’s “philological prose” based on the material of Abram Tertz’s narrative In the Shadow of Gogol and to prove the involvement of his “literary essay” in modern Gogol studies. The authors explore the little-studied text of Sinyavsky-Tertz, trace the history of the perception of In the Shadow of Gogol by modern Gogoliade, review a number of critical provisions of modern science about the Russian comedian, and on this foundation to justify the scholarly potential of the neotraditionalist researcher. The main methods the authors used in the study are historical-literary, comparative-historical, intertextual, in their unity and complementarity. The comprehensive approach showed the new facets of Sinyavsky- Tertz’s creative talent. The analysis identified the main research strategy of the “free” investigation by Tertz – the structural and compositional integrity of the work, the setting of the research aim and objectives, the choice of the research methodology, the use of references and bibliography, the following of the logic, analytical thinking, focus of final conclusions, etc. The format of the research (for example, a “dissertation”), which Sinyavsky-Tertz resorted to, allowed the authors to trust the research hypothesis proposed in the work and related to the understanding of the personality of the “Tertzian” Gogol, an artist and thinker. In Sinyavsky-Tertz’s opinion (contrary to the traditional scholarly view), Gogol did not experience a “spiritual crisis” in the last years of his life, but by the end of the first volume of Dead Souls and the final Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends he returned to his origins and authenticity rising above his own literary works that served him as “material” support in his metaphysical quest and approaching the transcendent philosophical understanding of universal truth. Sinyavsky-Tertz subjects Gogol’s “personality anatomy” to associative and metaphorical analysis, and comprehends it in several stages: (1) on the basis of a detailed literary analysis of the texts of the comedy The Government Inspector and the novel-poem Dead Souls, and (2) in the course of a comparative analysis of the discourses of fiction and journalism (mainly epistolary ones). Combining the various components of Gogol’s creative personality leads the researcher to realize the unity and integrity of the path of Gogol-the writer and Gogol-the thinker, avoiding the “mystical crisis” (or “madness”), its gradual and cross-cutting evolution towards a deeply philosophical perception of the world and person. The authors reveal solidarity to Sinyavsky-Tertz’s position and draw a conclusion that the researcher’s judgments are substantiated and persuasive. The results obtained show that Sinyavsky’s hypothesis is valid for a number of criteria and can (should) be perceived by modern Gogol studies as a research conception that opens up new perspectives for understanding Gogol’s personality and works.

Stalin’s death as a crisis of religious conscience, or Abram Tertz’ birth

Моё выступление посвящено рождению подпольного писателя Абрама Терца (двойника известного критика Андрея Синявского), – писателя, значение которого в развитии русской литературы послесталинского периода, на мой взгляд, до сих пор недооценено. Но, поскольку я хотел бы выступить не только как литературовед, но и как свидетель эпохи полстолетней давности, которую многие из присутствующих знают только по книгам (и конечно по рассказам моих сверстников), позвольте мне начать с двух личных воспомин...

Art and Reality in a Post-Modernistic Paradigm of Abram Tertz: “Life Situations” and “Art Situations”

Art and Reality in a Post-Modernistic Paradigm of Abram Tertz: “Life Situations” and “Art Situations”

Author and Autocrat: Tertz's Stalin and the Ruse of Charisma

Adored or despised, Stalin serves as an indisputable lodestone in twentieth-century Soviet cultural history. Volumes of materials vilifying the autocrat, documentary and fictional, have appeared in print since the advent of glasnost during the mid-1980s. Reversing the uniform adulation of the press during Stalin's rule, the perestroika press projected him as an embodiment of evil responsible for all of Russia's postrevolutionary woes. Such are his literary portraits in Solzhenitsyn's First Circle, Vasilii Grossmann's Life and Fate, and Anatolii Rybakov's Children of the Arbat, realist fictional accounts written during the fifties and sixties, but published in the Soviet Union only in the late eighties.) Yet, during the thirties, great poets honored Stalin, linking the leader's image with their own fates as writers. Pasternak and Mandelstam composed poems about Stalin in which the leader appeared as a vague double for the poet. Bulgakov offered a fictional version of the close relationship between writer and leader in Master and Margarita. Negative or positive, all previous literary portraits have shown Stalin as omnipotent and invincible. Andrei Sinyavsky, both in his role as cultural critic and in his guise as the provocateur, Abram Tertz, surely affirms Stalin's magnetic force, but his approach differs from the others because it begins to dismantle Stalin's mesmerising effect. Similar to his literary predecessors, Sinyavsky/Tertz approaches Stalin and his artistry with fascination. However, the historical vantage point of the late 1950s from which he regards Stalin reveals the tyrant publicly discredited. For Sinyavsky, the cracks in the edifice become visible when Stalin is understood not as power itself, but as an image of power which can be manipulated and exaggerated beyond proportion, but which is also vulnerable to erosion and collapse. Sinyavsky's Stalin, successively mesmerising and banal, terrifying and humble, comes apart into metonyms; the figures of speech no longer coalesce properly to produce the benevolent, stern father, or evil executioner of all Soviet Russia. Sinyavsky in his Tertzian guise is the only Russian writer who identifies himself with Stalin after the tyrant's fall from the pinnacle of charismatic leadership. Paradoxically, it is this very demise, from 1956 onward, that enables Sinyavsky's version of iden-

Abram tertz, Literary Critic on Comedic Terrain

Abram tertz, Literary Critic on Comedic Terrain

Abram Tertz and the Poetics of Crime

Abram Tertz and the Poetics of Crime

Abram Tertz and the Poetics of Crime

Abram Tertz and the Poetics of Crime

Abram Tertz and the poetics of crime

Andrei Sinyavsky, a post-Stalin Russian writer and author of fiction, essays and criticism, also wrote under the pseudonym Abram Tertz. In this book Tertz's writings are examined by the author, discussing the literary scandals and then analyzing individual works.

Abram Tertz and the Poetics of Crime. By Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, x, 390 pp. Index. $32.50, hard bound.

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A Discussion of Abram Tertz's Book Strolls with Pushkin

In the preceding issue of Voprosy literatury we completed publication of the text of the book Strolls with Pushkin. As we promised, we now offer the materials of a discussion of that book, which, after its publication in the West, provoked a stormy reaction abroad, and in 1989—after the appearance of an excerpt in the journal Oktiabr'—a polemical response in our country, which grew beyond the boundaries of a literary argument, becoming a social and political event. After this first, rather spontaneous response, now that passions have cooled, we must try to examine the essay Strolls with Pushkin more calmly and professionally. In preparing this discussion we were guided by two conditions: how competent and well argued the analysis was, and the diversity of approach from both the professional and the social points of view.

Andrei Siniavskii—Abram Tertz and His Novel Goodnight!

I have long been planning to have a mental chat with Siniavskii: to synchronize our watches, our paths, and our generations. … To chew over this object and write a sort of confesstory. With whom else would it be more nourishing to measure swords and thoughts? And perhaps only in that intonation—turning inside oneself—is it worth starting to write. For if you assume a pose in front of the reader (and what kind of reader are you expecting—one of ours or a Western one?) you immediately start using platitudes, lose your voice (in your take-out orientation), and your need for this sizing up (which is, in fact, the beginning of all your endeavors) will pass.

Sasha Sokolov's Palisandriia: History and Myth

The demythologizing of the official version of Soviet history has been one of the most important developments in post-Stalin literature. Nostalgia for history, Boris Shragin calls it.1 In accordance with Russian political tradition, the government took the first taboo-lifting steps, initiating the policy of deStalinization and the cautious re-evaluation of the recent Soviet past. The association of letters with the recovery of the historical and personal past has been especially striking in the very rich memoir and testimonial literature of the post-Stalin period, manifest most clearly in Solzhenitsyn's writing. Coming to terms with Soviet history has taken the form of collective purifying ritual that has affected all of Russian literature-traditional and experimental, official and unofficial, fictional and documentary. Whereas the more traditional writers have demythologized the past by means of its accurate, thorough, and reconstruction, the more innovative authors have followed the dictum of Abram Tertz, developing a phantasmagoric art [...] in which the grotesque has replaced realistic description.2 Post-Stalin liberalization has not been limited to the public domain: the rehabilitation of literary eroticism is the most obvious example of taboo-lifting in the private sphere.3 But in the politicized atmosphere of unofficial Russian culture, even sexually explicit literature and obscenity have become informed with political meaning; shocking political revelation is intensified by shocking language and provocative sexual description. As Edward Brown says of Yuz Aleshkovsky, these writers have produced massive scatological detonation which explodes the official Russian language into shreds.4

The Trial Begins; On Socialist Realism

Abram Tertz, one of the most important writers to emerge in the Soviet Union since World War II, came to prominence in 1959 when On Socialist Realism was published in the West. It was the first important critique of the central dogma of Soviet literature. It arrived with a novel - The Trial Begins, which was published in 1960. Other books followed these into the West, until in 1965 a respected literary scholar at the Gorky Institute, Andrei Sinyavsky was arrested, revealed to be Abram Tertz, tried, and sentenced to seven years in a forced labor camp.

A Voice from the Chorus

Andrei Sinyavsky, who writes under the pseudonym of Abram Tertz, has been called by Saul Bellow one of the most intelligent, most original, and most brilliant of contemporary writers. A noted Russian dissident, he was incarcerated from 1966 to 1971 in Soviet forced-labor camps for allowing some of his most satirical writings to be smuggled out of Russia and published in the West. This extraordinary literary work is Sinyavsky's prison memoir. Based on letters to his wife, the diary includes Sinyavsky's meditations on religion, sex, art, literature, and myths, the inner world to which he removed himself to escape from the degradation of prison. Interjected into these thoughts, however, are random snatches of prisoners' conversations--a chorus of their tales, legends, songs, and curses that evoke the horror and spiritual desolation of their existence. The result is at once an oblique evocation of prison life, a celebration of literature and art, and a tribute to the endurance of the human spirit. Originally published in 1976, A Voice from the Chorus is now available with a new preface from the author. Reviews of the original edition:An enormously rich and stimulating collection of reflections, vignettes, and brief essays. An eloquent testimonial to the human spirit and the will to survive.--Publishers WeeklyRanks with the famous testimonies Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn dispatched from their 'houses of the dead.' This writer's diary has a haunting, totally affecting quality, holding the reader with the astuteness of its comments on art and character and the exemplary, strangely serene spirit with which Sinyavsky accepted his terrible fate. A memorable and unique document.--Kirkus ReviewsAndrei Sinyavsky writes fiction, essays, and criticism under the name Abram Tertz. He now teaches at the Sorbonne. His book Strolls with Pushkin was recently translated into English and published by Yale University Press.

The Art of Andrei Siniavsky

The imprisonment of Andrei Siniavsky in 1965 stilled, in mid-career, the most original and enigmatic voice in contemporary Soviet literature. At the time of his arrest he was known in the USSR solely as a gifted, liberal literary critic and scholar. Abroad he was known as Abram Tertz, a mysterious Russian author—possibly not even a resident of the Soviet Union—who had written a brilliant, devastating critique of socialist realism, two short novels (The Trial Begins and Liubimov), six short stories, and a small collection of aphorisms (Unguarded Thoughts).

On Trial: The Soviet State versus “Abram Tertz” and “Nikolai Arzhak.” Translated, edited, and with an Introduction, by Max Hayward. New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1966. Pages vi, 183, $4.95.

On Trial: The Soviet State versus “Abram Tertz” and “Nikolai Arzhak.” Translated, edited, and with an Introduction, by Max Hayward. New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1966. Pages vi, 183, $4.95. - Volume 27 Issue 1

Book Reviews : On Trial: The Soviet State Versus "Abram Tertz" and "Nikolai Arzhak." Edited by M. HAYWARD. (New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Pp. vi, 183. $4.95.)

Book Reviews : On Trial: The Soviet State Versus "Abram Tertz" and "Nikolai Arzhak." Edited by M. HAYWARD. (New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Pp. vi, 183. $4.95.)