Writer Andrei Sinyavsky: biography, creativity and interesting facts. Writer Andrei Sinyavsky: biography, creativity and interesting facts Pioneer of the dissident movement

Andrey Donatovich Sinyavsky(literary pseudonym - Abram Tertz) - Russian literary scholar, writer, literary critic, editor, political prisoner, political emigrant.

Andrei Sinyavsky was born on October 8, 1925 in Moscow. Father - Donat Evgenievich Sinyavsky (1895-1960), from a noble family, who went into the revolution from his student years, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, was expelled from the Mining Institute (St. Petersburg) in 1913 for active participation in the student revolutionary movement, Until 1917 he served exile in the town of Ozerki. After the revolution - a member of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, head of the Syzran district department of public education, from November 1921 to February 1922 - director of the local representative office of the Russian-American Committee for Relief to Starving Children. In 1924 he was arrested on false charges and was soon released without consequences, moved to Moscow and began literary activities. Mother - Evdokia Ivanovna, from peasants, studied at the Bestuzhev courses, worked in the library named after. Lenin.

With the beginning of the Patriotic War, the family was evacuated to Syzran, where Andrei Sinyavsky graduated from school in 1943 and was drafted into the army in the same year. He served as a radio mechanic at the airfield.

In 1945 he entered the correspondence department of the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University, and after demobilization in 1946 he switched to full-time study. In the same year, he married Inna Gilman, whom he had been passionate about since his school years. At the university I attended a special seminar dedicated to the work of V.V. Mayakovsky. In 1949 he graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University and entered graduate school. In 1950 - the first publications: a work on Mayakovsky’s work in the “Bulletin of Moscow State University” and in the magazine “Znamya”.

On December 21, 1950, as part of a campaign to identify surviving Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, D.E. was arrested again. Sinyavsky, sentenced to exile, which he served in the village. Rameno, Kuibyshev region, was amnestied after Stalin’s death, and then rehabilitated.

In 1952, Andrei Sinyavsky successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis and began working as a research assistant at the Institute of World Literature. M. Gorky (IMLI), taught at Moscow State University at the Faculty of Journalism, in 1957-1958 he led a seminar on Russian poetry of the 20th century at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University, and since 1957 he also taught at the Moscow Art Theater School.

In the late 1950s - first half of the 1960s. Sinyavsky was one of the leading literary critics of the New World magazine, whose editor-in-chief was Alexander Tvardovsky. In the early 1960s, the magazine was considered the most liberal in the USSR. Sinyavsky is the author of literary works on the works of M. Gorky, B. Pasternak, A. Akhmatova, O. Berggolts.

In those same years, several articles authored by Sinyavsky were published in the three-volume “History of Russian Soviet Literature” and in the first two volumes of the “Brief Literary Encyclopedia”; co-authored monographs “Picasso” (co-author - Igor Golomshtok, 1960) and “Poetry” were also published. the first years of the revolution: 1917-1920" (co-author - Andrei Menshutin, 1964).

In 1963, changes occur in the family life of Andrei Sinyavsky: he breaks up with his first wife Inna Gilman and marries Maria Rozanova, with whom he will live for the rest of his life. In 1964, their son Yegor was born.

In the mid-1950s, Sinyavsky began writing fiction. But the scope of his creative interests, not as a critic or literary critic, but as a prose writer, extended beyond the limits of publication in the USSR. Stylistically, his stories, novellas and essays were too different from everything that appeared on the pages of the official Soviet press, but Sinyavsky did not want to write “on the table” and, with the help of the daughter of a French diplomat, Helen Zamoyska, began to transfer his works abroad. In 1959, the essay “What is Socialist Realism?” was published in Paris, then the stories “At the Circus”, “You and Me”, “Tenants”, “Graphomaniacs”, the stories “The Trial is Coming”, “Icy Ice” and “Lyubimov” were published ", essay "Thoughts by surprise". Under all these texts was the name “Abram Tertz”, taken by Sinyavsky from an Odessa criminal song ( “Abrashka Tertz, a pickpocket known to everyone...”).

The highest achievement of Sinyavsky, a literary critic in the Soviet period of his work, according to most experts, was the publication of the introductory article to the fundamental publication published in the summer of 1965 in the “Poet's Library” series - the collection “Poems and Poems”, brought out of oblivion and actually rehabilitated during the “ Thaw" by Boris Pasternak.

But already in the fall of the same 1965, Sinyavsky was arrested: the KGB authorities learned who was hiding under the pseudonym Abram Tertz. At the same time as Sinyavsky, the writer Julius Daniel was arrested, who also published his works abroad under the pseudonym Nikolai Arzhak and was also identified by the state security authorities.

There are different versions of how the KGB managed to uncover the pseudonyms of Sinyavsky and Daniel, but none of them can be considered proven. “It is still unknown exactly how the KGB found out who Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak were, but the leak of information certainly occurred outside the USSR: during interrogation, Y. Daniel was shown a copy of his story “Redemption”, corrected by his hand "which could only be found abroad", writes Alexander Daniel.

The writers were accused of writing and transmitting works for publication abroad, “defaming the Soviet state and social system”. Daniel was accused of writing the stories “Moscow Speaks” and “Atonement” and the stories “Hands” and “The Man from MINAP”. Sinyavsky was accused of writing the stories “The Trial is Coming” and “Lyubimov”, the article “What is Socialist Realism”, and also of sending Daniel’s works abroad.

In February 1966, a trial took place: A. Sinyavsky was sentenced to 7 years, Y. Daniel - to 5 years of imprisonment in a strict regime correctional labor colony under Article 70 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” The trial of the writers, known as the “Sinyavsky-Daniel Trial,” was accompanied by biased press coverage and was intended as a propaganda show with revelations and repentance, but neither Sinyavsky nor Daniel pleaded guilty. Many writers circulated open letters in support of convicted writers. The Sinyavsky-Daniel trial is associated with the beginning of the second period of the democratic (dissident) movement in the USSR.

Published just shortly before Sinyavsky’s arrest, Pasternak’s collection “Poems and Poems” instantly became a rarity, since in most of the circulation Sinyavsky’s introductory article was cut out.

In a special regime camp, Sinyavsky worked as a loader. As he later recalled, “I was never a sharashka, a camp jerk, or a foreman. On my file, from the KGB, from Moscow, it was written: “to be used only for physically difficult work,” which was fulfilled.”. However, there was an opportunity to correspond with his wife, and Sinyavsky in these letters sent her fragments of future books. Maria Rozanova recalled: “Sinyavsky sent his epistles on the 5th and 20th of every month... During the camp years I received from A.S. 127 letters..."“Walking with Pushkin”, “Voice from the Choir”, “In the Shadow of Gogol” were compiled from letters to his wife, which were also published abroad for the first time, but after the writer’s release and emigration.

Under pressure from the public - primarily from the world - Sinyavsky was released from prison early: on June 8, 1971, he was pardoned by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR.

In 1973, at the invitation of French Slavists from the Sorbonne and with the permission of the Soviet authorities, he emigrated to France with his wife and eight-year-old son. “Why did I emigrate?- explained Andrei Donatovich. - For one reason only: I wanted to remain myself, Abram Tertz, and continue to write. And they told me: if you don’t leave, that means you’ll go back to the camp...”

Andrei Sinyavsky settled with his family in the suburbs of Paris - Fontenay-aux-Roses, and since 1973 he taught Russian literature at the Sorbonne. In 1973-1975 Emigrant publishing houses published three books written during the period of imprisonment: “Voice from the Choir”, “Walking with Pushkin”, “In the Shadow of Gogol”. On the cover of each of them was the name Abram Tertz. And in subsequent publications, Sinyavsky, despite his new status as a political emigrant and professor at the Sorbonne, continues to use this pseudonym. “He is much younger than me. High Hood. Mustache, cap. Walks with his hands in his trousers, with a swaying gait. At any moment I’m ready to slash not with a knife, but with a sharp word, an inverted commonplace, a comparison... The case with Tertz is more complicated than just the history of a pseudonym... Tertz is my materialized style, this is what its bearer would look like.” This creative division into two images, into two literary hypostases will persist until the end of his life: Sinyavsky is an armchair scholar-philologist, and only articles in the genre of “strict literary criticism”, a number of journalistic articles, as well as monographs written in exile, to Abram Tertz are signed with his name belongs to all the prose and the main body of literary essays.

During 1974-75 gt. Sinyavsky's materials regularly appeared in the magazine "Continent", but disagreements with its editor V. Maksimov and A. Solzhenitsyn, who had a tangible influence on the policy of the magazine, led to Sinyavsky ending his cooperation with "Continent" and in 1978 he began publishing together with Maria Rozanova own magazine - "Syntax".

Based on lectures given at the Sorbonne in the 1970s-1980s, Andrei Sinyavsky wrote “Fallen Leaves of V.V. Rozanov”, “Foundations of Soviet Civilization”, “Ivan the Fool”; The autobiographical novel “Good Night”, the stories “Little Tsores” and “The Golden Lace” were published under the authorship of Abram Tertz. All these works were published abroad for the first time.

With the beginning of perestroika in the USSR, along with the declared glasnost and the increasing democratization of social and cultural life, the works of emigrant writers gradually began to return to the domestic reader. Since 1989, Andrei Sinyavsky has also been published in his homeland again - first in periodicals (reprints of articles published abroad, book fragments, numerous interviews), and then in book publications. In 1992, the Start publishing house published a two-volume book in which almost all of Abram Tertz’s works were published. In subsequent years, Russian publishing houses published the remaining works of Sinyavsky.

In 1991, the political rehabilitation of Andrei Sinyavsky also took place: on October 17, 1991, a message appeared in Izvestia about the review of the case of Sinyavsky and Daniel due to the lack of corpus delicti in their actions.

Andrei Sinyavsky was a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, an honorary doctor of Harvard University (1991), an honorary doctor of the Russian State University for the Humanities (1992), a member of the international editorial board of the magazine “Arbor mundi. World tree." Winner of the Writer in Exile Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (1988).

The novel “Cat's House,” written at the end of his life, was published by the magazine “Znamya” after the writer’s death - like all of his works of art, under the pseudonym Abram Tertz.

Before emigrating, Sinyavsky published a number of literary works in the Soviet periodicals, including an article on science fiction “Without discounts (On the modern science fiction novel),” 1960 (an abbreviated version was published under the title “Realism of Fantasy”).

In his artistic prose, Andrei Sinyavsky seems to reincarnate into the author-character he invented, Abram Tertz, a hoaxer, an out-and-out modernist who does not disdain banter, deadly irony, and swear words. Under the name of Abram Tertz, he wrote several fantastic stories (“At the Circus”, “You and Me”, “Tenants”, “Graphomaniacs”, “Phents”, “Little Tsores”), grotesque satirical stories “The Trial Is Coming”, “Icy Ice” ", "Lyubimov".

The dystopia “Lyubimov” is the most voluminous work of the “early” Tertz. Bicycle master Lenya Tikhomirov, suddenly endowed with supernatural powers, decides to build communism in one, separate city - Lyubimov, without resorting to violence. The idea of ​​the story clearly echoes Plato’s “Pit.”

In the story “Phents”, a living creature from another planet pretends to be a human, and in “Little Tsores” Sinyavsky-Tertz goes even further along the fantastic path: in this nightmare fairy tale there is even a magical passage to the other world, as in Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” .

Graduated from the university in 1949.

Sinyavsky was one of the leading literary critics of the New World magazine, whose editor-in-chief was Alexander Tvardovsky. In the early 1960s, the magazine was considered the most liberal in the USSR.

Creation

Sinyavsky is the author of literary works on the works of M. Gorky, B. Pasternak, I. Babel, A. Akhmatova. In 1955 he began writing prose works.

Letters from writers

After the trial, A. N. Anastasyev, A. A. Anikst, L. A. Anninsky, P. G. Antokolsky, B. A. Akhmadulina, S. E. petitioned for the release of Sinyavsky and Daniel (“letter of 63”). Babenysheva, V. D. Berestov, K. P. Bogatyrev, Z. B. Boguslavskaya, Yu. B. Borev, V. N. Voinovich, Yu. O. Dombrovsky, E. Ya. Dorosh, A. V. Zhigulin, A. G. Zak, L. A. Zonina, L. G. Zorin, N. M. Zorkaya, T. V. Ivanova, L. R. Kabo, V. A. Kaverin, Ts. I. Kin, L. Z. Kopelev, V. K. Kornilov, I. N. Krupnik, I. K. Kuznetsov, Yu. D. Levitansky, L. A. Levitsky, S. L. Lungin, L. Z. Lungina, S. P. Markish, V. Z. Mass, O. N. Mikhailov, Yu. P. Moritz, Yu. M. Nagibin, I. I. Nusinov, V. F. Ognev, B. Sh. Okudzhava, R. D. Orlova, L. S. Ospovat, N. V. Panchenko, M. A. Popovsky, L. E. Pinsky, S. B. Rassadin, N. V. Reformatskaya, V. M. Rossels, D. S. Samoilov, B. M. Sarnov, F. G. Svetov, A. Ya. Sergeev, R. S. Sef, L. I. Slavin, I. N. Solovyova, A. A. Tarkovsky, A. M. Turkov, I. Yu. Tynyanova, G. S. Fish, K. I. Chukovsky, L. K. Chukovskaya, M. F. Shatrov, V. B. Shklovsky, I. G. Erenburg (“Literary Newspaper”, 11/19, 1966 ) .

In the response article, the Secretariat of the Union of Soviet Writers - K. A. Fedin, N. S. Tikhonov, K. M. Simonov, K. V. Voronkov, V. A. Smirnov, L. S. Sobolev, S. V. Mikhalkov, A. A. Surkov - spoke out against Sinyavsky and Daniel.

Nobel Prize winner in literature Mikhail Sholokhov also spoke out in a harsh tone against Daniel and Sinyavsky.

Glasnost rally

On December 5, 1965 (Constitution Day), a Glasnost Rally was held on Pushkin Square in support of Daniel and Sinyavsky. The participants included Alexander Yesenin-Volpin, Valery Nikolsky (-), Yuri Titov, Yuri Galanskov, Vladimir Bukovsky. The protesters demanded that the trial of Daniel and Sinyavsky be held publicly and openly, in accordance with the provisions of the USSR Constitution. A. Yesenin-Volpin, Yu. Galanskov, A. Shukht and others were taken straight from the square for interrogation. The interrogation lasted two hours, and the participants were subsequently released.

Samizdat about the case of Sinyavsky and Daniel

Captivity

Emigration

Soon after his release in 1973, he went to work in France at the invitation of the University of Paris.

Since 1973 - Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Paris IV - Sorbonne.

In exile, Andrei Sinyavsky wrote: “The Fallen Leaves of V.V. Rozanov”, the autobiographical novel “Good Night”, “Ivan the Fool”.

He died on February 25, 1997, and was buried in Fontenay-aux-Roses near Paris.

Views in exile

The book by Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz) “Walking with Pushkin” caused a wide reaction.

Sinyavsky wrote several articles about freedom of opinion and freedom of speech among emigrants. Solzhenitsyn - “an undereducated patriot” (as Sinyavsky put it) - by that time was already the ruler of the thoughts of the emigration and its leader. Solzhenitsyn attacked Sinyavsky with condemnations, which were echoed by the refusal of emigrant magazines to publish Abram Tertz... It was then that Sinyavsky’s wife Maria Rozanova had the idea of ​​her own magazine, which became “Syntax” (the first issues are dedicated to A. Ginzburg). This magazine has become a “different opinion”...

Rumors of connections with the KGB

A number of Sinyavsky’s ideological opponents from the dissident and emigrant environment are still disseminating information that both before and after his arrest Sinyavsky collaborated with the KGB of the USSR. In particular, dissident Sergei Grigoryants regards the departure of Sinyavsky and Rozanova to France as an operation of the Soviet secret services with the aim of introducing “agents of influence” into the emigrant community. This information is based on a photocopy of a note by Yu. V. Andropov about Sinyavsky and Daniel, published by Vladimir Bukovsky in the early 1990s in the Israeli newspaper Vesti, sent to the CPSU Central Committee on February 26, 1973. As the examination subsequently confirmed, this text is a compilation of individual glued parts of the mentioned document, from which fragments were excluded that indicated Sinyavsky’s non-involvement in cooperation with the KGB of the USSR. Moreover: from the cut out parts of the text it follows that discrediting Sinyavsky as an “agent of influence of the KGB” among emigrant dissidents was the main task of the KGB when he left for the West.

Rehabilitation

Works

The author of most of the works is Abram Tertz, since Sinyavsky himself is an armchair scholar-philologist, and only articles in the genre of “strict literary criticism” and a number of journalistic articles are signed with his name, while Abram Tertz owns all the prose and the main body of literary essays. In the list, works in which Sinyavsky did not speak on behalf of Tertz are marked.

Prose

• At the Circus (1955)
• Graphomaniacs (From Stories of My Life) (1959)
• Lyubimov
• Black ice
• Phentz (1957)
• The trial is underway
• You and Me (1959)
• The Tenants (1959)
• Little Tsores (1980)
• Good Night (1983)
• Cat house. Long Distance Romance (1998)

Essays

• What is socialist realism
• Thoughts taken aback. Munchen, Echo-Press, s.a.<1972>
• A Voice from a Choir (1966-1971, French Prize for Best Foreign Book)
• Walking with Pushkin (1966-1968), London, OPI - Collins, 1975
• In the Shadow of Gogol (1970-1973)
• Literary process in Russia
• People and animals
• A joke within a joke
• Fatherland. Thieves song
• River and song
• Open letter to A. Solzhenitsyn (Andrei Sinyavsky)
• Solzhenitsyn as the organizer of a new unanimity (Andrei Sinyavsky)
• Reading in hearts (Andrey Sinyavsky)
• In memory of the fallen: Arkady Belinkov
• “Dark Night” (Andrey Sinyavsky)
• The night after the battle (Andrey Sinyavsky)
• Dissidence as a personal experience (Andrey Sinyavsky)
• Dreams for Orthodox Easter (Andrey Sinyavsky)
• Travel to the Black River
• “Fallen Leaves” by V. V. Rozanov (1982)
• The Russian Intelligentsia. (Russian intelligentsia.) NY, Columbia University Press, 1997.
• Andrey Sinyavsky: 127 letters about love. (in 3 volumes) - M.: Agraf, 2004

Dedicated to Andrey Sinyavsky

• Vitaly Dixon “The August Season, or the Book of Russian Kalends: A Romance of Provisions” / Preface. A. Yarovoy; After the words. A. Kobenkova; Artist N. Statnykh. - Irkutsk, Publishing House, 2008. - 1216 pp., illus., photo, audio CD (Print convention l. 75.0)

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Literature and sources

• // Encyclopedia “Around the World”.
• biography on the website “Anthology of Samizdat”.
• Abram Tertz.. - Zakharov, 1999. - 480 p. - ISBN 5-8159-0016-8.
• Andrey Sinyavsky.. // Magazine “Youth” No. 5, 1989.
• (Microsoft Word files in RAR archives)
• in the ImWerden library
• .
• Alexander Bely, Neva magazine, 2008, No. 2
• (PDF)
• Ratkina T. E.. - M.: “Coincidence”, 2010. - 232 p. - ISBN 978-5-9030-6079-5.

Notes

Excerpt characterizing Sinyavsky, Andrei Donatovich

The actions of the Russian and French troops during the return campaign from Moscow to the Neman are similar to a game of blind man's buff, when two players are blindfolded and one occasionally rings a bell to notify the catcher. At first, the one who is caught calls without fear of the enemy, but when he gets into trouble, he, trying to walk silently, runs away from his enemy and often, thinking of running away, goes straight into his arms.
At first, Napoleonic troops still made themselves felt - this was during the first period of movement along the Kaluga road, but then, having got out onto the Smolensk road, they ran, pressing the bell with their hand, and often, thinking that they were leaving, ran straight into the Russians.
Given the speed of the French and the Russians behind them, and as a result of the exhaustion of the horses, the main means of approximate recognition of the position in which the enemy was located - cavalry patrols - did not exist. In addition, due to the frequent and rapid changes in the positions of both armies, the information that was available could not keep up in time. If the news came on the second day that the enemy army was there either on the first day or on the third, when something could have been done, this army had already made two marches and was in a completely different position.
One army fled, the other caught up. From Smolensk the French had many different roads ahead of them; and, it would seem, here, after standing for four days, the French could find out where the enemy is, figure out something advantageous and do something new. But after a four-day stop, the crowds again ran, not to the right, not to the left, but, without any maneuvers or considerations, along the old, worse road, to Krasnoe and Orsha - along the broken trail.
Expecting the enemy from behind rather than in front, the French fled, spread out and separated from each other by a distance of twenty-four hours. The emperor ran ahead of everyone, then the kings, then the dukes. The Russian army, thinking that Napoleon would take the right beyond the Dnieper, which was the only reasonable thing, also moved to the right and reached the high road to Krasnoye. And then, as if in a game of blind man's buff, the French stumbled upon our vanguard. Suddenly seeing the enemy, the French became confused, paused from the surprise of fear, but then ran again, leaving their comrades behind. Here, as if through a formation of Russian troops, three days passed, one after another, separate parts of the French, first the viceroy, then Davout, then Ney. They all abandoned each other, abandoned all their burdens, artillery, half the people and ran away, only at night going around the Russians in semicircles on the right.
Ney, who walked last (because, despite their unfortunate situation or precisely as a result of it, they wanted to beat the floor that had hurt them, he began tearing up the walls of Smolensk that did not interfere with anyone), - who walked last, Ney, with his ten-thousandth corps, came running to Orsha to Napoleon with only a thousand people, abandoning all the people and all the guns and at night, sneaking through the forest through the Dnieper.
From Orsha they ran further along the road to Vilna, playing blind man's buff in the same way with the pursuing army. On the Berezina there was confusion again, many drowned, many surrendered, but those who crossed the river ran on. Their main leader put on a fur coat and, getting into the sleigh, rode off alone, leaving his comrades. Those who could, also left; those who could not, gave up or died.

It would seem that in this campaign of flight of the French, when they did everything they could to destroy themselves; when not a single movement of this crowd, starting from the turn onto the Kaluga road and until the flight of the commander from the army, made the slightest sense - it would seem that during this period of the campaign it is no longer possible for historians, who attribute the actions of the masses to the will of one person, to describe this retreat in their meaning. But no. Mountains of books have been written by historians about this campaign, and everywhere the orders of Napoleon and his profound plans are described - the maneuvers that led the army, and the brilliant orders of his marshals.
The retreat from Maloyaroslavets when he is given the road to an abundant land and when that parallel road along which Kutuzov later pursued him is open to him, the unnecessary retreat along the ruined road is explained to us for various profound reasons. For the same profound reasons, his retreat from Smolensk to Orsha is described. Then his heroism at Krasny is described, where he allegedly prepares to take the battle and command himself, and walks with a birch stick and says:
- J "ai assez fait l" Empereur, il est temps de faire le general, [I’ve already imagined the emperor, now it’s time to be a general.] - and, despite that, immediately after that he runs on, leaving the scattered parts of the army located behind.
Then they describe to us the greatness of the soul of the marshals, especially Ney, the greatness of the soul, which consists in the fact that at night he made his way through the forest bypassing the Dnieper and, without banners and artillery and without nine-tenths of the army, ran to Orsha.
And finally, the last departure of the great emperor from the heroic army seems to us by historians as something great and brilliant. Even this last act of flight, in human language is called the last degree of meanness, which every child learns to be ashamed of, and this act in the language of historians receives justification.
Then, when it is no longer possible to stretch such elastic threads of historical reasoning any further, when an action is already clearly contrary to what all humanity calls good and even justice, the saving concept of greatness appears among historians. Greatness seems to exclude the possibility of measuring good and bad. For the great there is no bad. There is no horror that can be blamed on someone who is great.
- “C"est grand!" [This is majestic!] - say historians, and then there is no longer either good or bad, but there is “grand” and “not grand”. Grand is good, not grand is bad. Grand is a property, according to their concepts, of some kind of special animals they call heroes. And Napoleon, walking home in a warm fur coat from the dying not only of his comrades, but (in his opinion) of the people he brought here, feels que c"est grand, and his soul is at peace.
“Du sublime (he sees something sublime in himself) au ridicule il n"y a qu"un pas,” he says. And the whole world has been repeating for fifty years: “Sublime! Grand! Napoleon le grand! Du sublime au ridicule il n"y a qu"un pas". [majestic... From majestic to ridiculous there is only one step... Majestic! Great! Napoleon the Great! It’s only a step from the majestic to the ridiculous.]
And it will not occur to anyone that recognition of greatness, immeasurable by the measure of good and bad, is only recognition of one’s insignificance and immeasurable smallness.
For us, with the measure of good and bad given to us by Christ, there is nothing immeasurable. And there is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.

Which of the Russian people, reading descriptions of the last period of the campaign of 1812, did not experience a heavy feeling of annoyance, dissatisfaction and uncertainty. Who hasn’t asked himself questions: how they didn’t take and destroy all the French, when all three armies surrounded them in superior numbers, when the frustrated French, starving and freezing, surrendered in droves, and when (as history tells us) the goal of the Russians was precisely that to stop, cut off and take prisoner all the French.
How did that Russian army, which was weaker in number than the French, fight the Battle of Borodino, how did this army, which surrounded the French on three sides and had the goal of taking them away, did not achieve its goal? Do the French really have such a huge advantage over us that we, having surrounded them with superior forces, could not beat them? How could this happen?
History (the one called by this word), answering these questions, says that this happened because Kutuzov, and Tormasov, and Chichagov, and this one, and that one, did not make such and such maneuvers.
But why didn't they do all these maneuvers? Why, if they were to blame for not achieving the intended goal, why were they not tried and executed? But, even if we admit that the failure of the Russians was due to Kutuzov and Chichagov, etc., it is still impossible to understand why and in the conditions in which the Russian troops were located at Krasnoye and near Berezina (in both cases the Russians were in excellent forces), why was the French army with its marshals, kings and emperors not captured, when this was the goal of the Russians?
The explanation of this strange phenomenon by the fact that Kutuzov prevented the attack (as Russian military historians do) is unfounded because we know that Kutuzov’s will could not keep the troops from attacking near Vyazma and near Tarutin.
Why was that Russian army, which with weaker forces won a victory at Borodino over the enemy in all its strength, at Krasnoe and near Berezina with superior forces defeated by frustrated crowds of the French?
If the goal of the Russians was to cut off and capture Napoleon and the marshals, and this goal was not only not achieved, but all attempts to achieve this goal were each time destroyed in the most shameful way, then the last period of the campaign quite rightly seems to be close to the French victories and is completely unfairly presented by Russian historians as victorious.
Russian military historians, to the extent that logic is obligatory for them, involuntarily come to this conclusion and, despite lyrical appeals about courage and devotion, etc., must involuntarily admit that the French retreat from Moscow is a series of victories for Napoleon and defeats for Kutuzov.
But, leaving national pride completely aside, one feels that this conclusion itself contains a contradiction, since a series of victories for the French led them to complete destruction, and a series of defeats for the Russians led them to the complete destruction of the enemy and the purification of their fatherland.
The source of this contradiction lies in the fact that historians who study events from letters of sovereigns and generals, from reports, reports, plans, etc., have assumed a false, never-existent goal for the last period of the war of 1812 - a goal that supposedly consisted of to cut off and catch Napoleon with the marshals and the army.
This goal never existed and could not exist, because it had no meaning, and achieving it was completely impossible.
This goal did not make any sense, firstly, because Napoleon’s frustrated army fled from Russia as quickly as possible, that is, it fulfilled the very thing that every Russian could wish for. Why was it necessary to carry out various operations on the French, who fled as quickly as they could?
Secondly, it was pointless to stand in the way of people who had directed all their energy to escape.
Thirdly, it was pointless to lose their troops to destroy the French armies, which were destroyed without external reasons in such a progression that without any blocking of the path they could not transfer across the border more than what they transferred in the month of December, that is, one hundredth of the entire army.
Fourthly, it was pointless to want to capture the emperor, kings, dukes - people whose captivity would greatly complicate the actions of the Russians, as the most skillful diplomats of that time admitted (J. Maistre and others). Even more senseless was the desire to take the French corps when their troops had melted halfway to Krasny, and convoy divisions had to be separated from the corps of prisoners, and when their soldiers did not always receive full provisions and the already taken prisoners were dying of hunger.
The entire thoughtful plan to cut off and catch Napoleon and his army was similar to the plan of a gardener who, driving cattle out of the garden that had trampled his ridges, would run to the gate and begin to beat this cattle on the head. One thing that could be said to justify the gardener would be that he was very angry. But this could not even be said about the drafters of the project, because they were not the ones who suffered from the trampled ridges.
But, besides the fact that cutting off Napoleon and the army was pointless, it was impossible.
This was impossible, firstly, because, since experience shows that the movement of columns over five miles in one battle never coincides with plans, the likelihood that Chichagov, Kutuzov and Wittgenstein would converge on time at the appointed place was so insignificant , that it amounted to impossibility, as Kutuzov thought, even when he received the plan, he said that sabotage over long distances does not bring the desired results.
Secondly, it was impossible because, in order to paralyze the force of inertia with which Napoleon’s army was moving back, it was necessary to have, without comparison, larger troops than those that the Russians had.
Thirdly, it was impossible because cutting off a military word has no meaning. You can cut off a piece of bread, but not an army. There is no way to cut off an army - to block its path, because there is always a lot of space around where you can go around, and there is night, during which nothing is visible, as military scientists could be convinced of, even from the examples of Krasny and Berezina. It is impossible to take prisoner without the person being taken prisoner agreeing to it, just as it is impossible to catch a swallow, although you can take it when it lands on your hand. You can take prisoner someone who surrenders, like the Germans, according to the rules of strategy and tactics. But the French troops, quite rightly, did not find this convenient, since the same hungry and cold death awaited them on the run and in captivity.
Fourthly, and most importantly, this was impossible because never since the world existed has there been a war under the terrible conditions under which it took place in 1812, and the Russian troops, in pursuit of the French, strained all their strength and did not could have done more without being destroyed themselves.
In the movement of the Russian army from Tarutino to Krasnoye, fifty thousand were left sick and backward, that is, a number equal to the population of a large provincial city. Half the people dropped out of the army without fighting.
And about this period of the campaign, when troops without boots and fur coats, with incomplete provisions, without vodka, spend the night for months in the snow and at fifteen degrees below zero; when there are only seven and eight hours of the day, and the rest is night, during which there can be no influence of discipline; when, not like in a battle, for a few hours only people are introduced into the realm of death, where there is no longer discipline, but when people live for months, every minute struggling with death from hunger and cold; when half the army dies in a month - historians tell us about this and that period of the campaign, how Miloradovich was supposed to make a flank march this way, and Tormasov there that way, and how Chichagov was supposed to move there that way (move above his knees in the snow), and how he knocked over and cut off, etc., etc.

Truth is a fool

Andrey Sinyavsky

Genis A. Ivan Petrovich died. Articles and investigations. - M.: NLO, 1999, p.32-38

Andrei Donatovich was the direct antithesis of Abram Tertz. He is black-moustached, dashing, thievish, with a knife, which, as his author noted with pleasure, is called a “feather” in thieves’ language. Sinyavsky, on the other hand, is small, stooped, with a huge gray beard. He did not laugh, but giggled, did not speak, but sentenced. His eyes looked in different directions, which made it seem as if he was seeing something inaccessible to his interlocutor. Tobacco smoke always hovered around him, and he sat on the chair as if on a stump. I only saw this as a child in a puppet theater. Over the years, Sinyavsky looked more and more like a character from Russian mythology - a goblin, a brownie, a bannik. He cultivated this similarity in himself, and he liked it extremely. "Ivan the Fool", one of his last books, he inscribed: “with lechish greetings.”

It is amazing that a man who was respected by investigators and loved by prisoners could incite such enmity. Meanwhile, Sinyavsky, the only one in the history of domestic dissent, managed to cause a storm of indignation three times.

The first to be offended by him was the Soviet government, which decided that he was overthrowing it. In fact, Sinyavsky was a secret adherent of the revolution, remaining faithful to those of its ideals that everyone else had forgotten about.

For the second time, Sinyavsky was disliked by emigration, who accused him of “kowtowing to the West.” And again - by. Sinyavsky, with the possible exception of Vysotsky alone, whom he also discovered, was the most Russian author of our literature.

The third time Sinyavsky fell into disgrace as a Russophobe. It is characteristic that Pushkin was defended from Abram Tertz by people who never managed to write a single competent sentence.

Defending himself wittily, Sinyavsky carried his cross with dignity. Bakhchanyan, with whom Andrei Donatovich was on first terms, depicted this fight in the form of a duel between a fencer and a rhinoceros.

Our last meeting is connected with this beast. We walked around the New York Museum of Natural History, and Andrei Donatovich recalled that as a child he had one dream - to live in a stuffed rhinoceros.
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The fact that Andrei Sinyavsky is opening a portrait gallery of the latest Russian literature will hardly surprise anyone. His role in the creation of “new” literature, as well as his heroic biography, are well known throughout the world. The perception of Sinyavsky in the West is so closely connected with the history of the Cold War that one can only be surprised that his books still found not a political, but an aesthetic niche in the world literary process. In the eyes of Western critics, literary scholars and Slavists, Sinyavsky managed to break away from his noisy biography, becoming not a dissident writer, but simply a writer. Thus, when a translation of Sinyavsky’s most autobiographical work, “Good Night,” was published in America, the New York Times wrote that he managed to achieve “a rare magical effect in art - he put his own experience into the shell of a myth,” turning Soviet history into surreal novel. The bizarre symbiosis of the real and the fantastic brought to mind the critic the prose of Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie and Vargas Llosa, that is, the authors of the school of “magical realism”. In America, they believe that only people from “difficult” regions—Latin America, Russia, and Eastern Europe—can achieve success in this style of writing. In troubled lands, history teaches the writer to believe in his own cruel miracles. Here naturalism and grotesque, realism and fantasy are mixed in proportions that are painful for life, but fruitful for literature. Having mastered this sad experience, melting it into his fiction and non-fiction prose, Sinyavsky wrote Russian pages into the international history of “magical realism.”

In Russia, however, literature has always been a dangerous occupation. And Sinyavsky’s father, not just of free literature, but of current post-Soviet literature, is made not by persecution by the authorities, but by aesthetic insights. Before others, he understood the nature of Soviet literature and outlined a route to escape from it. Only today, after all the upheavals that marked the decline of Soviet civilization, can one fully appreciate the visionary nature of Sinyavsky’s article “What is Socialist Realism” written almost half a century ago? Having described socialist realism as a historical phenomenon, he outlined clear temporal, formal and substantive boundaries of this phenomenon, but at the same time he himself went beyond its limits.
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Having been almost a generation ahead of contemporary artistic movements, Sinyavsky postulated the foundations of a new aesthetics. He was the first to discover that the place of socialist realism is not in magazines and books and not in the dustbin of history, but in a museum. Accordingly, the attitude towards the theory, which has become an exhibit, has changed. The situation of choice, so important for the thaw years: accept or not, fight or protect, develop or reject, has disappeared. Instead, Sinyavsky outlined another, more fruitful perspective - the aestheticization of this phenomenon. Having stated the demise of socialist realism, he put this artistic method on a par with others, which made it possible to start playing with dead aesthetics.

Sinyavsky gave clear recommendations for the treatment of the deceased even when rumors about his death seemed undoubtedly exaggerated. It was not for nothing that Sinyavsky used the future tense in his article: “For socialist realism, if it really wants... to create its own “Communiad,” there is only one way out - to do away with “realism”, to abandon the pitiful and still fruitless attempts to create a socialist “ Anna Karenina" and the socialist "The Cherry Orchard". When he loses the verisimilitude that is insignificant to him, he will be able to convey the majestic and implausible meaning of our era.”

This task, albeit with a great delay, was completed by the latest movement of Soviet culture - the art of Sots Art. The theoretical “Communiad” from Sinyavsky’s article was embodied in. works of V. Komar and A. Melamid, V. Bakhchanyan, E. Bulatov, I. Kholin, Vs. Nekrasov, D. A. Prigov and many other artists, writers and poets who reconstructed the socialist realist ideal, bringing it to its logical and comic conclusion.

An entire cultural era passed between Sinyavsky’s article and the practice of social art. Authors from the times of Khrushchev's Thaw, Brezhnev's stagnation, Gorbachev's perestroika for the most part exploited the principles of precisely that aesthetics, the futility of which Sinyavsky warned. From the heights of our time, almost all later Soviet art seems like a misunderstanding, if not a mistake. The grafting of critical realism onto socialist realism, as Sinyavsky predicted, turned out to be unviable. Eclecticism took its revenge on art, giving birth to a special Thaw hybrid, of which all the authors of the best-selling books of perestroika became epigones. There were no new “Anna Karenina” and “The Cherry Orchard”: neither communism nor socialist realism with a human face came out.
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The very fact that Sinyavsky was able to predict this crisis many years before it broke out makes us treat his aesthetic concept with confidence and attention, in anticipation of which he wrote: “We do not know where to go, but, having understood, that there is nothing to do, we begin to think, speculate, assume. Maybe we'll come up with something amazing."

This “amazing” was the aesthetics of Andrei Sinyavsky himself, which he developed, polished and honed in his articles and books over the four decades that passed after his brilliant overture - the article “What is Socialist Realism”.

The main work of Andrei Sinyavsky is Abram Tertz. We are talking here about the split personality of the writer, and one hypostasis does not cancel or replace the other. Both Sinyavsky and Tertz lead independent lives, and it’s fortunate, if this word fits here, that the Soviet court, without understanding it, imprisoned both of them. In any case, Andrei Sinyavsky was in the camp, and Abram Tertz wrote books there.

What is the meaning of this strange symbiosis? Sinyavsky needs Tertz to avoid a direct word. A text belonging to another author becomes obviously alien and, as such, can already be considered as a large quotation, the size of an entire book. Sinyavsky himself, freed from the obligation to answer for his double, leaves himself space for cultural reflection on the works and the personality of Tertz.

The confessional book “Good Night,” written by two authors at once, is dedicated to these complex relationships. Moreover, while one of them was writing a novel, the other was destroying it. In this two-pronged process, the task of Sinyavsky’s aesthetics is revealed - to take the text into a frame, strictly delimiting life from art. Behind this position is a special model of the author, creator, artist, poet, to the study of which Sinyavsky’s entire work is subordinated. In his dictionary, the artist is accompanied by an extremely reduced vocabulary: fool, thief, lazy person, joker, jester, holy fool.

It was this series that infuriated many readers of Walking with Pushkin. Insisting that “emptiness is the content of Pushkin,” Sinyavsky denies the classic the main thing - authorship. He avoids direct recognition in every possible way: Pushkin wrote poetry. Instead, poems were written: “Pushkin untied his hands, let go of the reins, and he was carried away.”
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Sinyavsky exchanges the tension of the author's will for the free will of poetry and the elements. The artist simply surrenders to the muses and does not prevent them from creating through themselves. The poet is a medium at a spiritualistic séance of art. All that is required of him is to be worthy of his ambiguous position. In the case of Pushkin, do not get out of bed. Sinyavsky never tires of admiring the frivolity, superficiality, negligence and laziness of his favorite hero, who could repeat after Socrates: “Idleness is the sister of freedom.” Just remember that Sinyavsky writes about that freedom, the source of which is rooted in chance, fate, fate, in the play of those mysterious forces that accomplish the miraculous transformation of a person into a poet.

In the monograph “Ivan the Fool,” Sinyavsky describes in detail the “philosophy” of his title character, who turns out to be very close to the figure of the ideal poet from the book “Walking with Pushkin.” Explaining why a fairy tale chooses a stupid and lazy hero as its favorite, the author writes: “The purpose of a fool is to prove (more precisely, not to prove, since the Fool does not prove anything and refutes all evidence, but rather to visualize) what is from the human mind, learning , effort, will - nothing depends<...>truth (or reality) appears and reveals itself to a person, at that happy moment when consciousness seems to turn off and the soul is in a special state - receptive passivity.”

The philosophy of the “fool”, which sends the reader to the East, to the religious and philosophical teaching about the Path-Tao, explains the unconscious, extrapersonal, intuitive, instinctive, if you like, “animal” nature of creativity - the poet, immersing himself in art, goes deeper, bypassing his Self The key to success is abandoning yourself in favor of the text: “When you write, you can’t think. You need to turn yourself off. When you write, you get lost, confused, but most importantly, you forget yourself and live without thinking about anything. You’re finally gone, you’re dead... Let’s go into the text.”

All Sinyavsky’s favorite heroes disappear into the text - Pushkin, Gogol, Rozanov, nameless storytellers who dissolve themselves in the anonymous folklore element. At this price they all pay for the metamorphosis of art.

By separating the man from the poet - Sinyavsky from Tertz - he provided the latter with a special literary space. Sinyavsky constantly destroys the canonical forms of the novel, story, literary study, introducing into them an element of introspection and writerly reflection. The confession made in Good Night fits all his works: “This will, in fact, be a book about how it is written. A book about a book."
36

Sinyavsky always wrote not a novel, but a draft of a novel. He inverted the usual pyramid, returning the book to the stage of manuscript, notes, sketches, variants. It is no coincidence that his best works are compiled from diary entries or camp letters. In them, the author surrendered to the power of that special genre, which in his work should be called simply “book”.

The main thing in such a book is the flow of pure literature, namely literature, by which the author understands a collection of words, their mysterious magical connection. Plunging after the author into this river of speech, the reader surrenders to the power of its current, which carries them both wherever he wants. Reading as co-creation involves, according to Sinyavsky, humility, renunciation of one’s self - but not in favor of the author, but in favor of the book, and ultimately - in favor of art itself.

This method of creating text brings Sinyavsky’s prose closer to folklore, which, as he admits, has always served him as an “aesthetic guide.” In a fairy tale, an anecdote, a criminal song, and he wrote a lot about each of these genres, Sinyavsky was captivated by the independent life of a literary work, devoid of an author - after all, a folklore work tells itself.

Weaving of words, play of self-sufficient form, ritual dance, ornamental design, smooth flow of text - these are the prototypes of Sinyavsky’s prose. On the basis of these samples, Sinyavsky built his aesthetic universe. It cannot be considered that art is more important than life. They - art and life - are independent of each other, they cannot be compared, they are disproportionate. In Sinyavsky's cosmogony, art is the source of life, that primary impulse of energy that gives birth to the world.

Creativity, according to Sinyavsky, is the path not forward, but back, to the source. Not the creation of the new, but the recreation of the old. The meaning of art “is in memory - in recognizing the world through its image, distant in the past and flashing in memory.”

It is clear that from this point of view such traditional questions of aesthetics as the relationship between form and content or the problem of “art for art’s sake” become meaningless. According to Sinyavsky, these questions are tautological: form is content, art cannot be anything other than art. Everything else is an obstacle on the way from the past to the present.

Sinyavsky's world literally opens with the saying: “In the beginning was the Word.” This word is intended not to be written, but to be remembered—art.
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Sinyavsky’s aesthetics is a kind of archeology or even paleontology of art: reconstruction of the whole based on the remains that have reached us. The pathos of restoring integrity leads to the purification of art from alien additions. Sinyavsky included logic, psychology, sociality, and considerations of benefit among them. The artist, like an alchemist, is busy producing pure art, without impurities, which has the wonderful property of destroying the boundary between the material and the spiritual, between word and deed: “The word is a thing. The word is the thing itself... A magic spell is the exact knowledge of the name, thanks to which the thing begins to be.”

The poet, whom Sinyavsky constantly likens to a sorcerer, is the one who finds the true names of things. And if he succeeds, he calls them out of oblivion. This is how Sinyavsky himself summoned - called upon - his own fate, describing his arrest before it happened in life. From Sinyavsky’s point of view, there is nothing strange in this - after all, art precedes life, it is older than it.

Sinyavsky decisively and finally broke the connection between art and progress, so inevitable in Soviet literature. Turning culture to face the past, he invited it to admire not the heights of the future kingdom of reason, but that “divine truth that lies not next to or near art in the form of surrounding reality, but behind, in the past, in the sources of the artistic image.”

Sinyavsky’s ahistorical archaism can inspire hope: if art can move forward only by turning back, then its chances of reaching its goal today are no less than always.

Biography before arrest

Beginning of literary activity

Andrei Sinyavsky was born into the family of a former nobleman and left Socialist Revolutionary, not alien to literary interests, Donat Evgenievich Sinyavsky.

In 1945 he entered the correspondence department of the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University, and after demobilization in 1946 he switched to full-time study. He took part in a special seminar by V.D. Duvakin dedicated to the work of Mayakovsky. He graduated from the university in 1949, then completed graduate school there. In 1952 he defended his Ph.D. thesis “M. Gorky’s novel “The Life of Klim Samgin” and the history of Russian social thought of the late 19th - early 20th centuries.” .

Sinyavsky was one of the leading literary critics of the New World magazine, whose editor-in-chief was Alexander Tvardovsky. In the early 1960s, the magazine was considered the most liberal in the USSR.

Creation

Sinyavsky is the author of literary works on the works of M. Gorky, B. Pasternak, I. Babel, A. Akhmatova. In 1955 he began writing prose works.

Arrest

In the fall of 1965, Sinyavsky was arrested along with Yu. Daniel on charges of anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation. In February 1966, he was sentenced by the Supreme Court to seven years in prison. Both writers pleaded not guilty.

Many writers distributed open letters in support of Daniel and Sinyavsky. The trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel is associated with the beginning of the second period of the democratic (dissident) movement in the USSR. In support of Sinyavsky and Daniel were linguist V. Ivanov, critics I. Rodnyanskaya and Y. Burtin, poet-translator A. Yakobson, art critics Y. Gerchuk and I. Golomshtok, restoration artist N. Kishilov, researcher at the USSR Academy of Sciences V. Meniker , writers L. Kopelev, L. Chukovskaya, V. Kornilov, K. Paustovsky.

Letters from writers

After the trial, A. N. Anastasyev, A. A. Anikst, L. A. Anninsky, P. G. Antokolsky, B. A. Akhmadulina, S. E. petitioned for the release of Sinyavsky and Daniel (“letter of 63”). Babenysheva, V. D. Berestov, K. P. Bogatyrev, Z. B. Boguslavskaya, Yu. B. Borev, V. N. Voinovich, Yu. O. Dombrovsky, E. Ya. Dorosh, A. V. Zhigulin, A. G. Zak, L. A. Zonina, L. G. Zorin, N. M. Zorkaya, T. V. Ivanova, L. R. Kabo, V. A. Kaverin, Ts. I. Kin, L. Z. Kopelev, V. N. Kornilov, I. N. Krupnik, I. K. Kuznetsov, Yu. D. Levitansky, L. A. Levitsky, S. L. Lungin, L. Z. Lungina, S. P. Markish, V. Z. Mass, O. N. Mikhailov, Yu. P. Moritz, Yu. M. Nagibin, I. I. Nusinov, V. F. Ognev, B. Sh. Okudzhava, R. D. Orlova, L. S. Ospovat, N. V. Panchenko, M. A. Popovsky, L. E. Pinsky, S. B. Rassadin, N. V. Reformatskaya, V. M. Rossels, D. S. Samoilov, B. M. Sarnov, F. G. Svetov, A. Ya. Sergeev, R. S. Sef, L. I. Slavin, I. N. Solovyova, A. A. Tarkovsky, A. M. Turkov, I. Yu. Tynyanova, G. S. Fish, K. I. Chukovsky, L. K. Chukovskaya, M. F. Shatrov, V. B. Shklovsky, I. G. Erenburg (“Literary Newspaper”, 11/19, 1966 ) .

In the response article, the Secretariat of the Union of Soviet Writers - K. A. Fedin, N. S. Tikhonov, K. M. Simonov, K. V. Voronkov, V. A. Smirnov, L. S. Sobolev, S. V. Mikhalkov, A. A. Surkov - spoke out against Sinyavsky and Daniel.

Nobel Prize winner in literature Mikhail Sholokhov also spoke out in a harsh tone against Daniel and Sinyavsky.

Glasnost rally

On December 5, 1965 (Constitution Day), a Glasnost Rally was held on Pushkin Square in support of Daniel and Sinyavsky. The participants included Alexander Yesenin-Volpin, Valery Nikolsky (-), Yuri Titov, Yuri Galanskov, Vladimir Bukovsky. The protesters demanded that the trial of Daniel and Sinyavsky be held publicly and openly, in accordance with the provisions of the USSR Constitution. A. Yesenin-Volpin, Yu. Galanskov, A. Shukht and others were taken straight from the square for interrogation. The interrogation lasted two hours, and the participants were subsequently released.

Samizdat about the case of Sinyavsky and Daniel

Captivity

On June 8, 1971, he was released early - pardoned on the initiative of Andropov.

Emigration

Soon after his release in 1973, he went at the invitation of a professor Claude Frioud(University Paris VIII) to work in France.

Since 1973 - Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Paris IV - Sorbonne.

In exile, Andrei Sinyavsky wrote: “The Fallen Leaves of V.V. Rozanov”, the autobiographical novel “Good Night”, “Ivan the Fool”. Since 1978, together with his wife Maria Vasilievna Rozanova, he published the magazine “Syntax”. Father of the writer Yegor Gran.

At the beginning of 1996, he was diagnosed with a heart attack, and doctors categorically forbade him to smoke. In September 1996, a diagnosis of lung cancer with metastases to the brain was made. The operation was useless, radiotherapy was carried out every day, but while they were fighting the metastases, it turned out that the liver was damaged.

Andrei Sinyavsky died on February 25, 1997, and was buried in Fontenay-aux-Roses near Paris. His funeral service was performed by Moscow priest Vladimir Vigilyansky. Friends of the Sinyavskys came from Moscow to the funeral - Andrei Voznesensky, Vitaly Tretyakov.

Views in exile

The book by Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz) “Walking with Pushkin” caused a wide reaction.

Sinyavsky wrote several articles about freedom of opinion and freedom of speech among emigrants. Solzhenitsyn - “an undereducated patriot” (as Sinyavsky put it) - by that time was already the ruler of the thoughts of the emigration and its leader. Solzhenitsyn attacked Sinyavsky with condemnations, which resulted in the refusal of emigrant magazines to publish Abram Tertz [ ] . It was then that Sinyavsky’s wife Maria Rozanova came up with the idea of ​​her own magazine, which became “Syntax” (the first issues are dedicated to A. Ginzburg). This magazine became a “different opinion” [ ] .

Rumors of connections with the KGB

A number of Sinyavsky’s ideological opponents from the dissident and emigrant environment are still disseminating information that both before and after his arrest Sinyavsky collaborated with the KGB of the USSR. In particular, dissident Sergei Grigoryants regards the departure of Sinyavsky and Rozanova to France as an operation of the Soviet secret services with the aim of introducing “agents of influence” into the emigrant community. This information is based on a photocopy of a note by Yu. V. Andropov about Sinyavsky and Daniel, published by Vladimir Bukovsky in the early 1990s in the Israeli newspaper Vesti, sent to the CPSU Central Committee on February 26, 1973. As the examination subsequently confirmed, this text is a compilation of separate glued parts of the mentioned document, from which fragments were excluded that indicated Sinyavsky’s non-involvement in cooperation with the KGB of the USSR. Moreover: from the cut out parts of the text it follows that discrediting Sinyavsky as an “agent of influence of the KGB” among emigrant dissidents was the main task of the KGB when he left for the West.

Works

The author of most of the works is Abram Tertz, since Sinyavsky himself is an armchair scholar-philologist, and only articles in the genre of “strict literary criticism” and a number of journalistic articles are signed with his name, while Abram Tertz owns all the prose and the main body of literary essays. In the list, works in which Sinyavsky did not speak on behalf of Tertz are marked.

Prose

• At the Circus (1955)
• Graphomaniacs (From Stories of My Life) (1959)
• Lyubimov
• Black ice
• Phentz (1957)
• The trial is underway
• You and Me (1959)
• The Tenants (1959)
• Little Tsores (1980)
• Good Night (1983)
• Cat house. Long Distance Romance (1998)

Essays

• What is socialist realism
• Thoughts taken aback. Munchen, Echo-Press, s.a.<1972>
• A Voice from a Choir (1966-1971, French Prize for Best Foreign Book)
• Walking with Pushkin (1966-1968), London, OPI - Collins, 1975
• In the Shadow of Gogol (1970-1973)
• Literary process in Russia
• People and animals
• A joke within a joke
• Fatherland. Thieves song
• River and song
• Open letter to A. Solzhenitsyn (Andrei Sinyavsky)
• Solzhenitsyn as the organizer of a new unanimity (Andrei Sinyavsky)
• Reading in hearts (Andrey Sinyavsky)
• In memory of the fallen: Arkady Belinkov
• “Dark Night” (Andrey Sinyavsky)
• The night after the battle (Andrey Sinyavsky)
• Dissidence as a personal experience (Andrey Sinyavsky)
• Dreams for Orthodox Easter (Andrey Sinyavsky)
• Travel to the Black River
• “Fallen Leaves” by V. V. Rozanov (1982)
• Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History. N.Y. Arcade Publ., Little, Brown and Co (1990). (Andrei Sinyavsky)
• Ivan the Fool: Essays on Russian Folk Faith (1991) (Andrei Sinyavsky)

• The Russian Intelligentsia. (Russian intelligentsia.) NY, Columbia University Press, 1997.
• Andrey Sinyavsky: 127 letters about love. (in 3 volumes) - M.: Agraf, 2004

Notes

1. BNF ID: Open Data Platform - 2011.
2. SNAC - 2010.
3. Encyclopædia Britannica
4. German National Library, Berlin State Library, Bavarian State Library, etc. Record #118614665 // General regulatory control (GND) - 2012-2016.
5. Sinyavsky Andrey Donatovich (pseud. - Abram Terts) (1925-1997) on the website “Memories of the Gulag”
6. Polikovskaya L. Sinyavsky, Andrey Donatovich // Encyclopedia “Around the World”.
7. Poet's library. Annotated bibliography (1933-1965). Overall plan. M.-L.: Sov. writer, 1965, p. 132

Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky (literary pseudonym Abram Terts; October 8, 1925, Moscow - February 25, 1997, Paris) - Russian literary scholar, writer, literary critic, political prisoner.

Andrei Sinyavsky was born in Moscow into the family of a nobleman and a left Socialist Revolutionary, not alien to literary interests, Donat Evgenievich Sinyavsky.

With the beginning of the Patriotic War, the family was evacuated to Syzran, where Sinyavsky graduated from school in 1943 and was drafted into the army the same year. He served as a radio technician at the airfield.

In 1945 he entered the correspondence department of the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University, and after demobilization in 1946 he switched to full-time study. Participated in a special seminar dedicated to the work of Mayakovsky. Graduated from the university in 1949.

He worked at the Institute of World Literature, taught at Moscow State University at the Faculty of Journalism and at the Moscow Art Theater School.

Sinyavsky was one of the leading literary critics of the New World magazine, whose editor-in-chief was Alexander Tvardovsky. In the early 1960s, the magazine was considered the most liberal in the USSR.

In the then USSR, due to censorship, his works could not be published, and Sinyavsky, before his emigration, published them in the West under the pseudonym Abram Tertz. The novel “The Judgment is Coming” and the story “Lyubimov” were published, included in the collection of prose “The Fantastic World of Abram Tertz”, as well as the article “What is Socialist Realism?”, which caustically ridiculed Soviet literature.

In the fall of 1965, Sinyavsky was arrested along with Yu. Daniel on charges of anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation. In February 1966, he was sentenced by the Supreme Court to seven years in prison. The trial of the writers, known as the Sinyavsky-Daniel Trial, was accompanied by biased press coverage and was intended as a propaganda show with revelations and repentance, but neither Sinyavsky nor Daniel pleaded guilty.

Many writers distributed open letters in support of Daniel and Sinyavsky. The trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel is associated with the beginning of the second period of the democratic (dissident) movement in the USSR. Literary critic V. Ivanov, critics I. Rodnyanskaya and Y. Burtin, poet-translator A. Yakobson, art critics Y. Gerchuk and I. Golomshtok, art restorer N. Kishilov, and researcher at the USSR Academy of Sciences V. Meniker spoke in support of Sinyavsky and Daniel. , writers L. Kopelev, L. Chukovskaya, V. Kornilov, K. Paustovsky.

On December 5, 1965, (Constitution Day), a Glasnost Rally was held on Pushkin Square in support of Daniel and Sinyavsky. The participants included Alexander Yesenin-Volpin, Valery Nikolsky (1938-1978), Yuri Titov, Yuri Galanskov, Vladimir Bukovsky. The protesters demanded that the trial of Daniel and Sinyavsky be held publicly and openly, in accordance with the provisions of the USSR Constitution. A. Yesenin-Volpin, Yu. Galanskov, A. Shukht and others were taken straight from the square for interrogation. The interrogation lasted two hours, and the participants were subsequently released.

In samizdat, open appeals to figures of science and art were distributed, with descriptions of the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, warning of the danger of a repetition of Stalinist repressions in the event of tacit approval of such processes by society. L.K. Chukovskaya’s open letter to M.A. Sholokhov became widely known.

In the colony, Sinyavsky worked as a loader.

Soon after his release in 1973, he went to work in France at the invitation of the Sorbonne.

Since 1973 - professor of Russian literature at the Sorbonne.

In exile, Andrei Sinyavsky wrote: “The Fallen Leaves of V.V. Rozanov”, the autobiographical novel “Good Night”, “Ivan the Fool”.

Since 1978, he has published the Syntax magazine together with his wife Maria Vasilyevna Rozanova.