Sinyavsky's Mission

MATHEWSON, RUTH

Writers & Writing SINYAVSKY'S MISSION BY RUTH MATHEWSON It is easy to describe A Voice from the Chorus (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 328 pp., $10.00) by Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky) as a...

...A As an artist, however, Sinyavsky does seek to lay bare the Holy Fool's "gap...
...A Voice is the only record we have that was written during an actual camp experience, but it is not a documentary account...
...If a man is "cut down to size...
...as the first of his works to reach us since his release in 1971...
...Yet it is hard to convey the quality of this odd and ultimately moving book because it engenders so many contradictory responses...
...It has weight...
...And for Sinyavsky himself, A Voice is a departure: He has chosen to speak in neither the brilliantly ironic voice of the first Tertz essay, "On Socialist Realism" (1959), nor in the tones of despair heard in Unguarded Thoughts, published as "Thoughts Unaware" (NL, July 19, 1965) just before he was arrested for "manufacturing" anti-Soviet works and smuggling them to the West...
...strikingly original, some strands of his thinking had troubled me, and I approached the new book with mixed expectations...
...The tension, of course, is between this play of freedom and the confinement of the setting, but the contrasts are not at all obvious...
...his mind creates an inner landscape...
...Most often we hear understated misery: "My wife is angry at my long sentence...
...Seeing this (less thau maturgically) as the true mission of all writers, I can at last turn my attention to the literary properties of A Voice from the Chorus...
...Their murky eccentricities made me wary of encountering a Holy Fool, a traditional Russian personality I consider only "good for upsetting certain persons whose nerves aren't too strong anyway," as the father in Tolstoy's Childhood says of the visiting pilgrim who wore 70 pounds of chains under his rags...
...When all is said and done," Sinyavsky reflects on his first day at home, "six years is not so bad...
...A camp gives a feeling of maximum freedom...
...On the other hand, the last resort of several of the most knowledgeable scholars of Russian literature—to say, "He is a Russian"—is perilously close to the unrewarding "Russian soul" approach they have devoted their careers to combating...
...The final image is again Sinyavsky's: the prison as a monastery...
...in theory (in the Spirit) the Kingdom of God on earth...
...Concerning sex, I find his notion that it may be "a diabolical way of reaching the gates of paradise, a poisoned ersatz for what we have lost" only slightly less dismaying than his earlier picture of it as "a festival in the cesspool...
...While I found his essay on Soviet literary doctrine a forceful argument, his Fantastic Tales always interesting, and the story "Pkhentz"—a kind of supernatural science fiction...
...Yet there is an embarrassment in the need to distinguish between thought and meditation, between profundity and solemnity, in an author who has moved from ironic and satiric questioning to religious certainty and serenity...
...My fears were confirmed in the matter of what might be called Sinyavsky's democracy of humiliation...
...speculations on language, magic, myth...
...Certainly it has—but we hear him with a start, because our prevailing sense has been of the weightlessness the author has been able to achieve in the house of the dead...
...As for the Holy Fool, except as the foregoing may suggest the bizarre, my wariness was unnecessary...
...The Tsar, as God's agent," he says, "never needed to argue his case: being slaves, all men were as equal in his sight as they are in God's...
...I did not look forward to an elaboration of earlier views on parliamentary democracy, or want to confront again the cloacal vision of sex and the human body found in Unguarded Thoughts...
...It is difficult, too, because of its singularity: It is unlike any other literature from the Gulag...
...Perhaps from a practical view...
...The voices, the other prisoners, give us a third vantage, as they interrupt the author's thoughts with salty, often poignant comment...
...Here Sinyavsky has provided a superabundance of impressions by incorporating talcs, songs and prayers collected from other prisoners...
...We are not outcasts or prisoners, but reservoirs...
...still, the effect is cumulative and the rapid shifts in perspective provide a more sustained pleasure than the excitement of the random...
...notes on an astonishing range of reading...
...Because of this I was in real trouble...
...Writers & Writing SINYAVSKY'S MISSION BY RUTH MATHEWSON It is easy to describe A Voice from the Chorus (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 328 pp., $10.00) by Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky) as a collection of excerpts from letters the author wrote to his wife during six years of imprisonment in a Soviet labor camp...
...Although the effect is of an unsystematic arrangement, we realize we have been given four separate pictures of the prison...
...Sinyavsky's own fondness for mystical interpretations of the national character only compounds this problem, and here I have long felt the need to qualify my admiration for his work...
...People, though fearing them, do not believe in the reality of their existence . . . ." The otherworldliness becomes predictable, yet it can be ironically fused with the practical...
...it is, but for the Spirit it is perfectly acceptable (more so than the West's cosy attachment to form and law...
...Sinyavsky's change of voice is only partly attributable to the presence of the prison censor, who could have sent him to the punishment cells for outspokenness...
...Already I have noticed in reviewers of A Voice from the Chorus a tendency to overlook half-baked ideas, vast generalizations and naive insularities they would question in, say, Solzhenitsyn's recent writings...
...and as having an indispensable introduction by Max Hayward, who translated from the Russian with Kyril FitzLyon...
...On the eve of her interrogation, a woman prisoner dreams that two Old Believer Saints prepare her by asking "Raissa, do you remember the words, 'I don't know?'" A passage beginning with a bland reference to nature goes on, "When a wife says to her husband about a prisoner on the run 'If you turn him in...
...I'll leave you!' we realize that the good . . . rules over us invisibly...
...It's for Negroes...
...He has put on a mask—the pseudonym Abram Tertz—simply because, as he said at his trial, "I tried everything possible to express my real thoughts as Sinyavsky...
...Another reservation was based on nothing more substantial than an impression of some of the contributors to Kontinent, the emigre magazine Sinyavsky was once associated with...
...A natural urge to "place" Sinyavsky risks assimilating him into literary and philosophical traditions he is tangentially or not at all related to—thus, for example, the haste of some to absorb him in Western phenomenology or existentialism...
...is such a substantial entity [spiritually]" that it must be "hedged around by safeguards—by censorship," suggests a paradox: The Tertz persona provided a secular model for the cause of freedom that Sinyavsky's religious vision seems to find irrelevant...
...Not men but . . . deep pools of meaning...
...Hayward informs us that the author was "in the core of his being invulnerable to the ordeal ahead" as a result of embracing Russian Orthodox Christianity before entering the camp...
...Inevitably, the entries are uneven—the literary conceits are sometimes strained...
...The first, from Hayward's introduction, is of Dubrovlag...
...The critics' seem to me to have been careless in other respects...
...The letters are not so much letters as occasions for addressing the world, although unlike many prison writings, these do not envisage the audience as an appeals court...
...Their talk has a timeless quality (perhaps reinforced in English by the translators' decision to give them a generally uneducated speech instead of the slang that would have suggested a very different environment...
...Sinyavsky adopts none of the disguises—madness, sinfulness, stupidity—used by the old Russian holy man to shock the community into recognition of the gap between the world and God's order...
...The reader cannot fail to respect his quiet courage...
...as covering a wide range of subjects and employing a variety of styles...
...a 15camp complex 300 miles east of Moscow, on a railroad that takes furniture from the convict industry to the city and returns with prisoners from the feeder jails...
...Guards are "spectres...
...It is seldom topical or political, with some interesting exceptions: "those that like to eat and those that like to sleep...
...In practice this meant arbitrary rule...
...The second is based on Sinyavsky's incidental details: a noisy barracks, assignment to chair-making, earning a pair of boots, hearing the voices of the chorus...
...Is this bad...
...from each according to his ability...
...Nor can I dismiss as purely whimsical his theory that a wife's physical being is gradually replaced by her husband's molecules...
...Incidentally, his observation in the present work that for Russia "the Word...
...and a guard tells a work party (apropos of the Declaration of Human Rights), "It's not for you...
...There is a brilliant essay, recalling Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, on the beautiful when it borders on the monstrous in the Irish Cuchulainn legend...
...The man who appears in these pages is impersonal, self-effacing on religious, esthetic and temperamental grounds...

Vol. 59 • September 1976 • No. 18


 
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