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Civilization on Trial
| Article
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18927 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1991 |
2,976 Words |
| Author
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Richard Stites
Richard Stites is professor of Russian and Soviet history at
Georgetown University and the author of the Women's Liberation
Movement in Russia, Revolution Dreams, and Soviet Popular
Culture. |
SOVIET CIVILIZATION
A Cultural History
Andrei Sinyavsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov
New York: Arcade, 1990
291 pp., $24.95
Stalin' s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, was a colleague of Andrei Sinyavsky's at a literary institute in Moscow. Years later, when he sat in jail and she was abroad, she wrote:
Why do I see you Andrusha, my poor suffering friend, standing barefoot with buckets of cold water in your hands, your hair unkempt, and your clothes in rags?... You never did have much to say for yourself, Andrusha, and you were not the most handsome man in the world, but you had the stubborn courage to be true to yourself and honest before your conscience!
The buckets of water were added by Alliluyeva, but Sinyavsky suffered enough, as much from moral anguish as from prison conditions. There is no word about convict life in this book and only a few not very kind ones about Alliluyeva. But it is drenched with sadness none the less. Its sinuous authority stems from the voice of the author, one of the towering intellectual witnesses of our time against the mindlessness of police states. His voice is deep and resonant, never strident-aching from pain but never whining. His life, his writing, his persecution, and trial under the recently vilified Brezhnev regime were the major events shaping the birth of Soviet dissidence.
Andrei Sinyavsky, now a professor of literature at the Sorbonne, is a Russian writer who came to maturity after the war. He was stunned by the arrest of his father in the last years of Stalin and shaken again by the selective revelations about the Stalinist terror made by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956. His writings, especially "On Socialist Realism" and The Court Is in Session, contained bitter mockery of the Soviet system and its cultural controls and thus could not be published at home. When they appeared abroad under his pen name, Abram Terts, Sinyavsky and his friend Yuly Daniel were arrested and tried a few months later, in 1966, on charges of anti-Soviet propaganda.
Political trials have often been turning points in Russian history. A century before the court condemned Sinyavsky, dozens of upper- and middle-class youth and students were rounded up by the police in the infamous Nechev case and put on trial. Their fate
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