Reporting the Tertz Affair

...To support its casual view, it pointed out that, after all, Valery Tarsis, another controversial writer who has published works in the West, is free...

...Philippe Radley is Chairman of the Russian Department at Amherst...

...Eastern Europeans, as Mihajlo Mihajlov wrote in "Why We Are Silent" (NL, August 30), hesitate to speak openly for fear of feeding reactionary propagandists in the West...

...Evgeny Evtushenko, for example, who has been in and out of trouble with the government and is in it again for his recent public recitation of a new poem in which he attacked the head of the Komsomol, was not allowed to come to Paris as earlier planned...

...And as the inevitable coup de grace, Sinyavsky was called a "friend of Pasternak...

...It reported several unsuccessful attempts by Tertz' British publisher to contact Sholokhov in Stockholm, where he was to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, and gave the impression that the author of And Quiet Flows The Don would say nothing on the Sinyavsky case...

...Such corrections rarely do have the impact of the original report...

...Therein seems to lie his importance...

...Sinyavsky was taken to be just another political pawn...

...Readers of both the Times and the New York Herald Tribune (its coverage of this case can scarcely be criticized, for it has been all but nonexistent) on that same day must have been puzzled...

...Correspondents dismissed the possibility that Sinyavskv might be a major Soviet writer whose arrest was the signal of a new Soviet attack on creative freedom...

...It seems to make no difference that Tarsis is a poor writer, and perhaps even mentally ill (as suggested in the New Republic's own review of his Ward No...

...Actually, Sinyavsky was known not as a friend of Pasternak (although he might have been that, too) but as possibly the best critic of that poet in the USSR...

...According to Tass, he has voluntarily joined the Soviet Army for awhile as part of the research for his next work...

...Moscow rumors, filtered to foreign correspondents by that indispensable aid, the "reliable source," said Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were charged with publishing antiCommunist stories and essays in the West under the respective pen names Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak...

...Sinyavsky was wrongly described as the author of "anti-Communist works," Daniel's name was given as "Daniil," his pen name Arzhak became "Arzhanov," and the four stories written by Arzhak became one...

...He is not only an important critic but a major author (as New Leader readers already know...

...The Times makes a Sinyavsky statement of March 1965 appear to be a call for political freedom, when in fact it was part of an esthetic argument...

...This, however, is the very reason Sinyavsky and Daniel had to publish their works abroad in the first place...

...But what is the excuse of our responsible, influential newspapers and journals...

...It is amusing to note that practically no Soviet author, with the exception of Sholokhov, can be mentioned today in the Western press without being summarily posited at the feet of Pasternak...

...It is also the reason for the Kremlin's continuing restrictions on the travel of Russian writers...

...No one evidently, had bothered to read it...

...Printing a selection of excerpts from Tertz, it chose the most political passages in all of his writings...

...From later stories on the two men, one has the impression that even Times editors and reporters were not affected by-or were not aware of-the Schwartz piece and the editorial...

...7 in the same issue...

...Misprints and errors are not uncommon in a newspaper story, nor are they inexcusable: Transmission problems and deadline pressures often make accuracy and thoroughness virtually impossible...

...Indifference and shallowness add up to callousness...

...The rumors of the SinyavskyDaniel arrest began in mid-October, and then, on October 22, the New York Times published the "facts...

...PERSPECTIVES Reporting the Tertz Affair By Philippe Radley The story was certainly simple and, sadly, almost commonplace to the Western reader: Two Soviet writers had been arrested...

...Yet I am told that, although informed of the meeting beforehand, the New York Times did not deem it worthy of coverage...

...What all this suggests is an unwillingness-not confined to the Times but shared by the Western press generally-to recognize that there is a campaign afoot in the USSR to systematically inhibit creative writers...

...The editorial concluded hopefully: "So far there are no other indications that a tightening up is in progress...

...Though the problems are great, and we live in a political world, it is about time we realized that Soviet literature does not always "mean" ideology...

...In an editorial that included a reference to the "Yosip" Brodsky case, the New Republic (December 11) surmised that the Sinyavsky and Daniel arrests were brought about by "petty jealousies...

...More recently, on December 10, the New York Times printed a long dispatch under the headline "SHOLOKHOV EVADES PLEA FOR jailed soviet writers...

...The Times dispatch, for example, concluded: "The literary sources insisted the arrests should not be interpreted as any tightening of restraints on writers by the Kremlin leadership...

...The failure to distinguish between Sinyavsky and Tarsis contrasts with the Soviet attitude and indicates that though we may not recognize a talented writer, the Soviets do...

...Soviet writers need our informed aid and attention, not ignorant gestures such as that of the prominent European writer who, in a telegram agreeing to sign a Sinyavskv protest petition, confused Sinyavsky with Sholokhov...

...It is distressing to note that Tertz' books have sold rather poorly in this country, and that his last novel was reviewed only in the "Reader's Report" section of the Sunday Times Book Review...

...Even some of the weekly magazines foundered on the story...

...The Times' subsequent fine, but very brief analysis of the arrests by Harry Schwartz on October 24, and its excellent editorial of November 9, did not erase the damage caused by the initial classification of Sinyavsky and Daniel as minor political figures...

...Of Daniel he could only say, "What is he and for what is he known...

...We need real information and genuine discussion of these writers, such as is given in an excellent article in the French newspaper Le Monde for November 23-in which two scholars who had known Sinyavsky and were conversant with bis work offered a sound estimate of him as a first-rate creative artist...

...Liubimov, Tertz' wonderful satire, was ridiculously oversimplified and made to appear political in essence...

...Sinyavsky's arrest was confirmed by Aleksei Surkov, Secretary of the Union of Soviet Authors and Writers, at a press conference held on November 22 in Paris at the Hotel Lutetia...

...A retraction was issued a week later...

...The New York Sunday Times Magazine recently provided an equally ironic exhibit...

...His significant critical study, co-authored with A. N. Menshutin, Poetry in the First Years of the Revolution, was said to be hack work because of a propagandistic illustration on the dust jacket...

...One imagines that the Soviet prosecutor will present a similarly distorting collection of quotations out of context when Sinyavsky is brought to trial...

...Yet the 14 paragraph account, under a misleading political headline ("two said to confess anti-soviet writing"), averaged more than one mistake per paragraph...

...And when some incident brings us face to face with this contradiction we tend to explain it away as a purely political matter...

...But above all we must read the "accused...

...In the six years since Tertz' work first appeared, the serious discussions of him in print in the West can be counted on the fingers of one hand...

...A mediocre poet and a practiced bureaucrat, Surkov went on to say of Sinyavsky, "I don't know in what he is so great...

...At the present time writers like Sinyavsky, Daniel, Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn, Okudzhava, Akhmadulina and Kazakov can receive the artistic recognition they deserve only in the West, and that recognition will in the end be their sole defense against political repression at home...

...The failure of the Western press and of Western intellectuals to report or strongly criticize the present Soviet campaign against writers who are esthetes, not politicians, no doubt can be traced to concern about thus endangering the progress that has been made in the USSR over the last several years...

...Indeed, it was he who wrote the remarkable preface to the new Pasternak volume recently published in Moscow...

...For our seeming refusal to inform ourselves and to challenge the Soviets cannot but harm those genuine artists we claim we want to help...

...The conference afforded an opportunity to meet and question representative Soviet writers visiting France, to challenge the cynical Surkov, and to hear Alexander Tvardovsky, editor of the liberal Novy Mir, who was visibly shaken and gave the first really reliable information that Sinyavsky had been arrested...

...But it has the unfortunate effect of allowing the Soviet government to continue its campaign against Russian writers seeking creative freedom at the same time that a "loosening up" of controls is being heralded in the West...

...The Tribune reported on December 10 that Sholokhov had spoken about Sinyavsky at a news conference in Stockholm...

...But no reporter, apparently had found this out...

...Against this background rumors fly in all directions: On November 21, the London Sunday Times published a dispatch saying that Sinyavsky and Daniel had been freed...

...One must not fabricate 'classic writers' on the basis of tendentious principles...