Prisoner in Fantasy

...After recognizing his place in the Gogolian tradition, I would note that the closest analogue to Tertz is the American writer Nathanael West...

...The sheets are marked "feet" at one end so that the head won't touch that portion...

...His only real crime, however, is that, very much like Nathanel West, he has a sceptical and even cynical view of our world...

...The first chapter of Tertz-Sinyavsky's writing career appears to have been closed by Soviet authorities, but not before one more manuscript, an extraordinary short story entitled "Pkhentz," reached the West...

...But the jungle that is Tertz's Andrei is tightly constricted by his assumed human form, and his soul is bruised and dying...

...Sologub's vision, though no less "trivial," is disturbing in its tranquility, suggesting a real prescience of an alternate existence to which life as we know it is merely a vulgar and inexplicable intermezzo...

...The Kedrina screed, worthy of a place beside Andrei Zhdanov's 1946 attack on Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova, brands TertzSinyavsky a Fascist and also accuses him of having stolen themes and devices from such writers as Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Sologub...

...Tertz's Andrei begins by observing that "one must observe the rules of the land into which you have happened to fall," progresses to a plaintive cry: "Oh God...

...West's parents were immigrants from Russia, and West was extremely well-read in Russian literature, so the juxtaposition is not far-fetched...

...Andrei has a landlady whose excrement reeks of eau de cologne, and the Pkhentzen nourishes himself by pouring water over his body, an ablution of the body's ever-soiled surface...

...One thinks also-because Tertz's narrator is not only (or perhaps not at all) a visitor from another world, but also a madman-of Gogol's classic psychotic fantasy, Notes of a Madman, in which the protagonist retreats not to another planet, but to a delusional kingship of Spain...

...There is no clearly given reality in "Pkhentz"-the narrator, Andrei, is a hunchback, a form he has "chosen" so that disgusting humans will leave him alone, but he is engaged in following another hunchback who is very probably his double...

...Maoo-Maoo...

...Sologub and his art seem tranquilly balanced between Gogolian absurdity (often much more explicitly ominous than in Gogol) and an other-worldly, Buddhist-like calm expectation...

...He is the promise of Russian Literature...

...He is also one of the best, and he has, painfully, jarringly, carried Soviet literature back into the 20th century...

...and he has a terrifying fleeting vision of an unshaven man's head with bared teeth between her legs...

...Hardly...

...Sologub's imaginary planet is not, of course, science fiction, but rather a mythical, Schopenhauerian exaltation of non-existence "where unborn souls rest in peace" and a corresponding abjuration of life...

...But Gogol, Sologub, and Tertz have distinctly individualistic real and imaginary worlds...

...We can only guess as to how well Gogol comprehended his own frivolous nightmares...

...The theme of a distant planet wholly different and far more beautiful than earth, is perhaps best known in Russian literature in the poetry of Fyodor Sologub, who sang hypnotic incantations of the star Mair and its planet Oile: "On distant, beautiful Oile,/is all my love and all my soul...

...Andrei TertzSinyavsky does not suffer in comparison with either West or the young Dostoevsky...

...When Poprishchin shamefully locks himself in his room to convert his coat into a "royal mantle,' he is symbolically performing a sexual act-and, more important, attempting to alter reality to correspond to his fantasy...

...The exploration of latent homosexuality plays an important role in both West and Tertz (before "Pkhentz," this was most evident in "You and I"), but there is a radical difference in the basic approach of the two writers to the problem...

...The multiple, inchoate personalities of "Pkhentz" and especially the vegetablelike Pkhentzen himself, sent me back to Miss Lonelyhearts: "Under the skin of man is a wondrous jungle where veins like lush tropical growths hang along overripe organs [and] flitting from rock-gray lungs to golden intestines lives a bird called the soul...

...Now Andrei Tertz-Sinyavsky is a Soviet prisoner...

...Is all this, in West's phrase, "A Sargasso of the imagination...

...Guten abend, Tuzheroskip...

...Homosexuality in West's novels is, to a large degree, shown through the suffering or aggressiveness of female characters...

...Let me become a man...

...The sharp fragmentation of personality in "Pkhentz" nonetheless forms a coherent artistic structure which, if anything, goes beyond "personality" (as well as "action") to outline abstruse but firm artistic and psychological themes...

...It is the first time he has ever seen a naked woman (" I came across a handbook of anatomy which discussed the matter hazily and quickly, so that no one could understand it...

...It has just been published in a Polish translation by Kultura in Paris, and tentative plans have been made for its publication in the original Russian in this country...

...He admires himself from all angles with them...

...This, needless to say, is an almost stereotyped symbol of castration fear, but it seems to me that, owing to his more generalized treatment of the problem of sexuality...

...Pokharchin, The Landlady and Netochka Nezvanova...

...Pkhentz...

...Hunchbacks, Andrei explains, are usually fastidiously clean because they don't wish to cause people "added disgust," but his double is both filthy and self-complacent...

...And in fact, the creator of the absurd and pathetic Peredonov and the wildly passionate Ludmila was scarcely ever observed to display any emotion...

...BuBu-Bu...

...There is no violence in the story, indeed almost no action as such, but there is, all the same, terror and despair...

...The importance of smells in "Pkhentz" reminds one of the poet's Odyssey along a horse's intestines in West's The Dream Life of Balso Snell...

...Tertz-Sinyavsky's vision is, if anything, starker than either Gogol's or Sologub's, precisely because he offers no hope of "altering reality," and "Pkhentz," the "other world" which he presents has been hopelessly and forever lost...

...And, as the story ends, he is hopelessly and incoherently baying at his lost Pkhentz: "Bon jour...

...The hunchback Andrei in "Pkhentz" is pursued by a girl named Veronika who lives in his building and is trapped by accident in her bedroom where she bares herself to him...

...Kedrina's contention that Tertz-Sinyavsky's art is boring is belied by the venom and fury of her response to it, but I can concur with her on at least one point: Tertz-Sinyavsky is indeed one of the most complex and "difficult" Russian writers of this century...

...The hints given in Tertz's previous, quasi-confessional work, "Thought Unaware" (NL, July 19, 1965), point rather to a keen and highly sophisticated understanding of the human personality...

...Nor is there any record of anyone ever having seen him smile...

...Not merely a sexual study, "Pkhentz" is an exploration of individual isolation and of the way in which we are held prisoner both from within and without...

...West is in a certain sense a minor figure, appealing primarily to a sophisticated audience, but there are many who consider him one of the outstanding American writers of our time, and the one who has had the most profound influence on the newest generation of artists...

...Thus a certain Zoya Kedrina (alumna of the distinguished Stalinist journal Oktyabr and occasional contributor to the slightly less noteworthy foreign language journal Soviet Literature) presented her impressions of the works of Abram Tertz, allegedly Andrei Sinyavsky, in an article entitled "The Heirs of Smerdyakov," in the Moscow Literary Gazette of January 22...

...ON ABRAM TERTZ'S LATEST STORY Prisoner in Fantasy By Andrew Field "Even if one disregards everything that disturbs one as a Soviet person, it is unpleasant and boring to read them-sometimes because of their primitive narrative forward movement and their artistic cachexy, at other times because of their intentional confusion of narrative development, their accretion of every possible allegorical mode of expression so that often it begins to seem that one is reading disjointed mumbling...

...The opening scene in "Pkhentz" shows the one hunchback watching the other in a laundry, and it gives a detailed account of the laundry items and how they are soiled...

...Pkhentz" (the title refers to a far-off planet, the home of the story's narrator) is a grotesque and somber study of the individual isolated from society and, finally, even from himself...

...When he was sent to Siberia, Dostoevsky had written only Poor Folk, The Double, Mr...

...Tertz-Sinyavsky can less justly be termed a Freudian writer than can West, for the very simple reason that most of West's images can be neatly "solved" with textbook in hand, while in a story such as "Pkhentz" the primal urges are continually in a process of mutation, and each has its own "double.' West, too, has a hunchback, and it is significant to note that while West's hump is a grotesque "pregnancy," Tertz's is a more generalized symbol of the repulsiveness of all flesh...

...and at different times, we are told by the narrator that he has no children, two (Pkhentzian) children, and many surrogate "cactus children.' When locked up alone in his room, he takes off his human disguise and literally opens out like a palm tree with many tentacle arms and eyes...

...Andrei will not allow Veronika to touch him, nor will he shake hands with anyone, and when he confronts his hunchbacked double, the double taunts him with his heterosexual prowess, pointing out in addition that he is much more deformed...

...Gogol's is a phantasmagoria of petty absurdities-dogs sniff each other shamelessly, and one feels the implicit interchangeability of the canine and the human, all of which is obscured for Gogol's Poprischin by concern with social status and propriety...