A Voice from the Chorus
Pilon, Juliana G.
understanding him or who want him to fit into some category. He survived the praise of Dwight Eisenhower, the fatuous inanities of Sevareid, the adulation of conservatives who think that his...
...36 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976 Men need never consider themselves as "outcasts or prisoners, but reservoirs...
...Interesting," as every teacher of writing knows, is a weak word--but it is precisely the word for Hoffer...
...i n Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
...In his essay on Socialist Realism published in the French magazine Esprit in 1959, Sinyavsky had outlined his credo: Right now I put my hope in a phantasmagoric art, with hypotheses instead of a Purpose, an art in which the grotesque will replace realistic descriptions of ordinary life...
...Hoffer has even survived his own unfortunate tendencies to sound, at times, like everybody's favorite crank or a likeable eccentric and to exaggerate the virtues of the common man...
...The whole world of imagination and art is open: each personality is an ocean, a microcosm of all natural wonder, able to rejoice in the journeys of the mind...
...He believes that history is part of the furniture of every mind, its playground, its natural milieu: Celtic fairy-tales are not for dusty scholars, nor medieval sculptures for stuffy museums alone, and folklore is flowing in everyone's blood (a conception reminiscent of Jung and Eliade...
...While sharing Solzhenitsyn's abhorrence of a Socialist fiction antithetic to sincerity and human experience, as well as his need for "literary experiments," Sinyavsky takes the option, of allegory...
...The book is itself a testimony, a plea of "guilty" to the charges that brought Sinyavsky to his fate in 1966: writing in a spirit alien to Soviet literature--desecrating, in short, the Idols of the Communist Juliana G. Pilon teaches philosophy at the University of Chicago and is a research assistant at Michael Reese Hospital...
...Theatre...
...A. Law--t~uce Cldekertng Chrbtopher DeMuth Leslie Lenkowsky Peter J. Rusdsoven nen/.m~ Ste~ g. Emmett Tyrudl, Jr...
...A Voice from the Chorus applies this stylistic approach to the author's own experience in the camps...
...Nowhere is the life of the spirit lived at such a pitch, with such zest, as here, on the edge of the world...
...Behind Sinyavsky's intriguing and sophisticated aphorisms there lurks a spectre...
...Describing women as wild mermaids, a dictator as a magician who transforms putrid water into vodka, one's true self as literally another person--such is the stuff of Sinyavsky's nightmare, true to the life of terrified citizens whose wives become dehumanized in crowded shared kitchens, whose leaders ask them to see luxury in misery, whose very selves become strangers...
...He may be writing this of himseff or of any man who has dared to listen: In the night he hears a chorus of voices--of the spirits of the earth, perhaps, or of all the numberless tribes and peoples scattered over it...
...And as he listens he feels that ,if he were suddenly to understand but a single word out of this chorus, hc would go mad...
...Art is always secondary, allegorical...
...Care to have a speaker that sets the blood boiling and the mind's wheels turning...
...He is attuned to the convolutions of grass, to falling snow ("the very nerves can feel it snowing"), the scintillating chords of a Mozart quintet, the mesmerizing suspense of a Matisse drawing left unfinished...
...In his letters from camp, Sinyavsky (as Mandelstam before him) reflects on past treasures of our cultural heritage as if they belonged to him, to anyone...
...An emanation of the spirit and of the miraculous...
...sleep--the watering place of the soul...
...To understand is to go mad...
...BOOK REVIEW A Voice from the Chorus by Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky) / Farrar, Straus and Giroux / $10 Juliana G. Pilon It is tempting to descrtbe A Votcefrom the Chorus as pure art: this collection of aphorisms, selected from letters Andrei Sinyavsky wrote to his wife during his seven-year imprisonment in a Gulag camp, is a garden of exotic petals...
...Ideas are not culled from books, but grow out of a man's very bones...
...To really grasp it, one must take refuge in metaphor...
...lbumt Via KJmama Vree if your campus, club, business, social, or civic group could use a &qmd speaker, we ~ find one appropriate for you...
...It is easier to conceive the world as an allegory than this book...
...His books had been published in the West under the pseudonym "Tertz" for almost a decade, stunning the readership with wild, ironical, brilliant excursions into surrealism...
...And nothing is trivial: a tree is intermediate between sky and earth, a road to heaven, a sprouting coffin...
...horses are inscrutable (their souls dwelling in those twitching, twirling ears...
...In colorful, coarse language, in metaphor and proverb, the prisoners convey their emotions most vividly: I have so much anger in me that if you were to lay me on some ice it would thaw to a depth of four feet...
...For Hoffer always whets his reader's curiosity, even when he dares to say the obvious...
...Jackdaws over the wood are like flakes of soot...
...Moreover, Hoffer is a model of integrity, and, through the force of his character, he has made a great contribution to American intellectual life...
...Throughout the book he is acutely aware of the sounds of words, the meanings of unusual syntactical constructions, the beauty of all language, the plasticity of camp slang...
...Even if Sinyavsky's letters to his wife had not been so scrupulously censored he could not have said what can be said, what Solzhenitsyn has attempted to illustrate by listing atrocities...
...The "aesthetic" approach is not possible...
...Sinyavsky repudiates the distinction: art is simply the positive contribution to one's own universe, appearante enhances reality...
...blake your next meeting _9 memorable occasion...
...Whatever the metaphysical profundities Gulag might provide--with ample time for speculation and a detachment conducive to aesthetic insights--Sinyavsky does not for a moment forget the horror to which he has succumbed, the unprecedented injustice that pervades the Soviet system...
...Revealing a profound understanding of literary criticism, of psychology and folklore, of man and death, these fragments come alive--and with a simplicity that infuses only the finest of man's gropings for the sublime...
...Or: The good thing about this place is that a man feels he is nothing but a naked soul...
...The question is not to be answered or even entertained...
...In Our Time is a collection of 32 brief essays (if three-page pieces can be called essays) dealing with a wide range of topics: the middle class and its strengths and weaknesses, the need for each human being to master a skill, the necessity for those without power to organize, the fallacy of black studies programs--on each, Hoffer has something interesting to say...
...Thus Sinyavsky yearns "to be truthful with the aid of the absurd and the fantastic," ready to observe "the metamorphoses of God that take place before our very eyes, the miraculous transformations of His entrails and His cerebral convolutions...
...Have we a new version of' the Bible here--with God resurrected to become man, worshiping his own mortality in a chant of dreams...
...To be sure, survival is not overestimated: he recalls nostalgically the days when people valued it less--" it was easier to breathe...
...Surrealism alone and not literal photography of sentiment will capture such madness...
...But perhaps there is no life--just art...
...With the same openness and familiarity as he approaches all nature, Sinyavsky speaks of man's artistic creations, commenting on meaning and style...
...Call or write: The Shore Line Company Post ~ BoxS$$ Bloomington, IN 47401 (812) 3.34-2761 There,s opportunit y "America...
...Bloomington, Indiana The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976 37...
...But here all is directness...
...He is in love with the very process of being alive and aware-qua man, artist and critic...
...Drab reality is never as drab as it seems to the uninitiated: art is not luxury but the very marrow of one's bones...
...What Sinyavsky says of the Gospels (a book he kept hidden in his boot throughout his imprisonment, defying prohibitions against it) applies also to his own creation: Feeling is conveyed directly...
...The prison camp is a training ground for the keenest perception and the highest vitality: Here people think and philosophize more intensely than in the world of scholarship and science...
...Liven up your next meeting with one of the following: Arran Bakshln, Jr...
...The parables have only an auxiliary role-to help us in our lack of understanding...
...Yet mere art it is not...
...In Our Time, despite a few lapses into banality, bears the Hoffer imprint throughout and therefore deserves a wide audience...
...He survived the praise of Dwight Eisenhower, the fatuous inanities of Sevareid, the adulation of conservatives who think that his hard line toward rioters makes him a charter member of the Right-Wing-Hit-'em-WhereIt-Hurts Society, and the admiration of those on the Left who feel that any man who is critical of religious belief (as Holler was in The True Believer) can't be all bad...
...And so he is: Sinyavsky proves it...
...Sinyavsky's parables reveal the miraculous, the spirit in its magical nakedness laughing at its own naughty flights into truth parading as fantasy...
...It is a curious phenomenon that intellectuals--and surely Hoffer has earned that title, no mattei" how offensive he might find it--either praise workingmen too much or too little...
...Not men but wells, deep pools of meaning...
...At the same time, he appreciates the heroism it takes to uphold principle...
...17 Care for a C, ood Old-Fashioned Harangue...
...And what are these metamorphoses if not irony, myth, satire...
...Against an antiphonal chant of prisoners' utterances--at times absurd, amusing, or grotesque, but always genuine--Sinyavsky's solo is both accompaniment and contrast...
...Art and life...
...It is literature in the grand tradition of Gogol, Babel, Kafka, Ionesco, a bold repudiation of the standard-plotted, sloganful fiction of Red Russia...
Vol. 10 • October 1976 • No. 1
