TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/122589/12258900.049

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 5.6 KB | 111 lines

BOOKS, Page 76

Notes from the Underground

By R.Z. Sheppard


    GOODNIGHT!
    by Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky)
    Translated by Richard Lourie; Viking; 364 pages; $22.95

    Communism continues to lend new meaning to the term "in the
red." But while the West gloats, let us not forget to give credit
where credit is due. Despite its dismal economic record, Communism
was responsible for much of the best writing of the century. This
was especially true in the Soviet Union, where revolution brought
out the best in Boris Pasternak. Vladimir Nabokov said that had it
not been for the Bolsheviks, he would have remained in Russia to
become an obscure entomologist. Stalin inspired some of Osip
Mandelstam's best lines, including the one that hastened the poet's
downfall: "He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries."

    The list is long; the space is short. So is memory. The end of
the cold war means that it will be even easier to forget that both
Czars and commissars took literature seriously enough to imprison
writers. Andrei Sinyavsky's understanding of this singular honor
surpasses irony. Twenty-five years ago, he and his close friend
Yuli Daniel were convicted of smuggling their dissident writings
to the West. Daniel, who spent five years in a labor camp, died
after a stroke last year in Moscow. Sinyavsky served nearly six
years behind the barbed wire. In 1973 the author and his wife
immigrated to Paris where, he notes, he resides while still
"living" in the Soviet Union.

    Goodnight! is his proof, a rich digressionary story of crime,
punishment, betrayal and resurrection. Aesthetically, as well as
politically, the book is a celebration of release from conventional
narrative and the miasma of the Soviet past. Translator Richard
Lourie, currently at work on an oral history of the Soviet Union
since the 1917 Revolution, succeeds in preserving a tone and rhythm
he calls a "Slavic jazz solo on sax." Sinyavsky does riffs on
himself as a student, critic, son, husband and public enemy who,
when he was a dissident living in the Soviet Union, signed his
underground fictions "Abram Tertz."

    By writing Goodnight! under his old pseudonym, Sinyavsky
suggests that he harbors a residual defiance; by calling the book
a novel, he reveals his belief that fiction is the best way to
convey his homeland's surreal sprawl and his own headlong rush
through history. At one point he compares himself to a waterfall,
"falling from its precipitous height like a demon devoid of any
faith."

    Not quite. As a good old-fashioned modernist, Sinyavsky
believes in the artist's need to break old molds. His innovation
in this autobiography-as-novel is to turn the stream of
consciousness into a cataract.

    The energy is impressive. So is the tone, varying between the
fatalism of Hamlet and the idealism of Don Quixote. "It turns out
that we are born for prison," writes Sinyavsky. "And yet all we
think of is freedom, escape . . . Escape, even if it fails, is a
component part of any poem. And if we take a large view, it is part
of any human creation. Escape is our crowning glory."

    Readers not familiar with Sinyavsky's style or the content of
his life may have difficulty with the half-submerged facts. He was
born into an affluent family in 1925. His father, who appears in
the book as a brilliant though ineffectual figure out of a Chekhov
play, was a revolutionary but not a Bolshevik. He was
individualistic and something of an eccentric pragmatist. While
waiting to be drafted during World War I, he practiced writing with
his left hand in case he lost his right.

    The younger Sinyavsky's preparations for an uncertain future
were plodding by comparison. After World War II, he studied Russian
literature at Moscow State University. During the early '50s he
held a research job at the Gorky Institute of World Literature. But
then, in 1956, the scholar-critic secretly wrote his fanciful Tertz
stories, which were published abroad in 1959. It took five more
years before the authorities discovered Tertz's real identity,
arrested Sinyavsky and made him the first Soviet writer imprisoned
for expressing opinions through fictional characters.

    These and other episodes are presented out of order because,
writes Sinyavsky, "the past cannot be grasped in sequence."
Realism, too, is all thumbs. In order to re-create the bizarre
atmosphere of his KGB interrogation, the author restages the
experience as a one-act farce. Karl could have been one of the Marx
Brothers. Some typical dialogue between writer and inquisitor:

    "I: You don't beat people any more. You used to, you know. And
not just beatings -- torture . . .

    HE: Used to when?

    I: Well, under Stalin.

    HE: What Stalin was that?"

    The dictator's toxic phantom pervades the book, which is the
literary incarnation of Sinyavsky's public and private life. He
admits that in 1948 he was asked by agents of the KGB to woo a
fellow student, the daughter of a French naval attache. He complied
without knowing their purpose or even the extent of his own
motives. Years later, Sinyavsky put the intrigue to good use by
enlisting the Frenchwoman to help smuggle his writings to the West.

    Now, bootlegging facts in the diplomatic pouch of fiction,
Sinyavsky demonstrates the range of his virtuosity and literary
cunning by echoing some Russian masters: Gogol of the satiric Dead
Souls, Dostoyevsky of the subversive Notes from Underground,
Turgenev of the pastoral Fathers and Sons, Nabokov of the evocative
Speak, Memory. It is a special tradition, one in which publish or
perish could have just as easily meant publish and perish.