1. In the 1950s Andrei Siniavskii, a senior research fellow at the Gor’kii Institute of World Literature, began to issue essays and fiction under the pseudonym (and, as he insists, through the alternative being) of Abram Terts, the persona of a highly unorthodox artist and critic connected to the criminal underworld by name (that of a Jewish hero in an Odessa thieves’ ballad) and, frequently, by attitude and focus. The works by Terts, deliberately and systematically published abroad, eventually led to Siniavskii’s arrest and incarceration (along with his friend and fellow writer, lulii Daniel’) in 1965. The public trial of Siniavskii and Daniel’, at which the defendants argued their innocence, established both men as living symbols of the Soviet writer’s fate—authors persecuted for their pursuit and defense of artistic freedom. After serving six years in a labor camp, Siniavskii emigrated with his family to Paris in 1973. Even under these less repressive circumstances, he has not relinquished the separate writing persona of Terts; Terts continues to stir up controversy in the emigration with his provocative analysis and evocation of art. The epigraph is from “Siniavskii o sebe,” in The Third Wave: Russian Literature in Emigration, ed. Matich, Olga with Heim, Michael (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1984), 109 Google Scholar.

2. Terts, Abram (Andrei Siniavskii), “The Literary Process in Russia,” Kontinent, 1 (1974), 79.Google Scholar All subsequent quotes are taken from this translation and will be referred to as “Literary Process.” The Russian original appears in the Russian-language Kontinent, 1 (1974), 143-190.

3. Olga Matich remarks that Siniavskii-Terts created a model of the Soviet Russian writer’s possible action and probable fate. “Russian Literature in Emigration: A Historical Perspective on the 1970s,” in Third Wave, ed. Matich, 17-18.

4. For his further elaboration of Stalin as artist, see Siniavskii’s essay “Stalin—geroi i khudozhnik stalinskoi epokhi,” Sintaksis 19 (1987), 106-125. See also Grois, Boris’s interesting article on Stalin’s artistic achievement—”Stalinizm kak esteticheskii fenomen,” Sintaksis 17 (1987), 98–110.Google Scholar

5. Terts, Abram, The Trial Begins and On Socialist Realism , trans. Dennis, George and Miłosz, intro. Czesław (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 218 Google Scholar.

6. On the general consonance of the critical and creative views of Siniavskii-Terts, see Fanger, Donald’s “Conflicting Imperatives in the Model of the Russian Writer: The Case of Tertz/Sinyavsky,” in Literature and History: Theoretical Problems and Russian Case Studies, ed. Morson, Gary Saul (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1986), 114 Google Scholar.

7. See, for example, his characterization of the monograph Progulki s Pushkinym as “a kind of confession” and his description of V teni Gogolia as “an attempt at a spiritual autobiography,” “Siniavskii o sebe,” in The Third Wave, ed. Matich, 107; interview with Pomerantsev, K., Times Literary Supplement, 23 May 1975, 560 Google Scholar. Natalia Rubinshtein’s summation of the siuzhet of Progulki s Pushkinym —the movement of the artist towards absolute freedom—could easily apply to all of Terts’s work. See her “Abram Terts i Aleksandr Pushkin,” Vremia i my, no. 9 (1976), 130.

8. On the protagonists’ efforts to transcend such restrictions, see Durkin, Andrew R.’s “Narrator, Metaphor, and Theme in Sinjavskij’s Fantastic Tales ,“ Slavic and East European Journal 24, no. 2 (Summer 1980): 142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. See Glad, John’s interview of Siniavskii and his wife, Mariia Rozanova, in which Siniavskii claims that the labor camp exerts a formative influence on all Soviet culture. Vremia i my, 88 (1986): 144–167.Google Scholar

10. See Brombert, Victor, The Romantic Prison: The French Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 3–4 Google Scholar, 9. Marcus Levitt, in a paper delivered at the 1987 national convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, “Sinyavsky ‘s Alternative Model of the Self in A Voice from the Chorus, “ shows how Terts’s conception of the camp is related to a wide variety of traditions: the Bible, nineteenth century French and Russian literature, and contemporary works on the Gulag experience.

11. Terts, Abram, A Voice from the Chorus, trans. Fitzlyon, Kyrii and Hayward, Max, and intro. Hayward, Max (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976), 273, 279Google Scholar. All subsequent quotations are taken from this English translation and will be referred to as Voice. The original appears as Golos iz khora, (London: Stenvalley Press, 1973).

12. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, trans. Iswolsky, Helene, and foreword Pomorska, Krystyna (Cambridge and London: M.I.T. Press, 1968), 10 Google Scholar. For further discussion of Terts’s possible correspondence with Bakhtin, see Fanger, Donald and Cohen, Gordon, “Abram Terts: Dissidence, Diffidence, and Russian Literary Tradition,” in Soviet Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Vera S. Dunham, ed. Thompson, Terry L. and Sheldon, Richard (Boulder, Colo., and London: Westview, 1988), 169–170 Google Scholar.

13. Terts, Abram, Mysli vrasplokh, with an interpretive essay on the literary art of Abram Tertz by Field, Andrew (New York: Rausen Language Division, 1966), 86 Google Scholar. In his ideal of self-renunciation (an imitation of Chrisťs kenosis) and his combining of the spiritual with the material, Terts echoes tenets which seem inherent in Russian Orthodoxy. See Fedotov, G. P., The Russian Religious Mind. 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946) 1:128–129 Google Scholar, 2:355-356. For one of many examples concerning the prerequisites for the artist, see Terts’s definition of the writer as someone who must be “absolutely empty,” who “knows nothing, remembers nothing, can do nothing” Voice, 234.

14. Aucouturier, Michel, “Writer and Text in the Works of Abram Terc (An ontology of writing and a poetics of prose),” in Fiction and Drama in Eastern and Southeastern Europe: Evolution and Experiment in the Postwar Period, ed. Birnbaum, Henrik and Eekman, Thomas (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1980), 9 Google Scholar. In his reading of Voice, Levitt seconds Aucouturier’s observation, characterizing the author of the text as a “divine, collective self,” in “Sinyavsky’s Alternative Model,” 17.

15. Aucouturier, “Writer and Text,” 3.

16. Matich, Olga carefully categorizes Goodnight! as a bildungsroman combined “with the traditional plot of spiritual conversion as treated in the Confessions of St. Augustine” in “Spokojnoj noči: Andrej Sinjavskij’s Rebirth as Abram Terc,” Slavic and East European Journal 33, no. 1, (Spring 1989): 51.Google Scholar

17. This scene is staged at the conclusion of Siniavskii’s trial. Siniavskii is stunned by his persecutors” absurd cruelty (they are applauding his “guilty” verdict) and Terts cynically responds: “Feast your eyes on it.’ This is what you were searching for, getting ready for—to go under for the last time. You conjured it all up and brought it down on yourself with all the fantasy in those stories of yours!” (Goodnight!, 12) Ail quotations taken from Abram Terts [Andrei Siniavskii], Goodnight!, trans. Richard Lourie, (New York: Viking, 1989). See also Matich, who notes how the sketched portraits of these two personae (the respectable, ordinary Siniavskii and the clever, rakish Terts) reinforce their distinctive roles, in “Spokojnoj noči,” 50.

18. During his ten years in exile, Siniavskii-Terts, while maintaining his double existence, also has complicated the relationship between his two writing personas. See Donald Fänger and Gordon Cohen, “Abram Terts,” 173. Goodnight! contains his most explicit elaboration of the latest stage of this relationship—that is, between the character-author Terts who serves as artistic and creative mentor to the character-narrator Siniavskii. While taking note here of this complex arrangement, I will refer to the narrating protagonist in Goodnight! as Siniavskii.

19. Matich also observes the basic focus of Goodnight! on Siniavskii’s Stalinist past; his life in emigration serves as vantage point, not subject; Matich, “Spokojnoj noci,” 52.

20. In lieu of changing ink color, the English-language version of Goodnight! renders these set pieces in different typeset.

21. Terts draws this connection perhaps most explicitly in the second chapter: “I catch myself feeling that, for the most part, I’m at ease in my skin here. Not just as a person who has grown used to the life around him, but as a writer who has at last found himself in his work. ... I am happy to be in a camp” (Goodnight!, 138).

22. During this search, Siniavskii’s mother hastens to assure him that the police have come for his father and not for him. As they examine his old course notebooks, the secret police help Siniavskii conceptualize a future crime by demanding to know why he appended the epithet “official” to his copied definition of socialist realism, as if he presumed that an unofficial version existed (Goodnight!, 195-196).

23. The real-life counterpart of S seems to be one Sergei Khmel’nitskii, although he is never explicitly identified in the text. It is intriguing that this Khmel’nitskii (who was known to have informed on others and was suspected of aiding in the arrest of Siniavskii and Daniel’) has cast a maliciously false (albeit fascinating) shadow over Goodnight! by protesting his “slanderous” representation in the novel and implicating Siniavskii as an agent of the Soviet secret police. See his strange attack in the émigré journal Dvadtsať dva 22, no. 48 (1986): 151-187. While one must dismiss (and many have done so vehemently and publicly) the damaging charges Khmel’nitskii lays at Siniavskii’s door, this postpublication scandal actually serves to re inforce the novel’s important connection with its real author and his evidenced sense of culpability in the text. For the outraged response of Siniavskii and others, see Kontinent 49 (1986): 337-342.

24. Siniavskii also portrays his beloved wife as landscape in “The Public House” (87).

25. It is intriguing that in his first version of the novel, Terts concludes with Hélène’s meaningful refrain (“Leťs get out of here”) and does not include this section, thereby sparing himself any further censure for his forced cooperation with the MVD. The addition of this last episode is all the more provocative (and, I would argue, artistically effective) for its final disclosure. I am grateful to Donald Fanger for access to the first version of Goodnight!

26. George Nivat refers to a passage in Mysli vrasplokh in which Terts asks for this whistle as proof that God exists, “chtoby prevozmoch’ otchaianie i odinochestvo,” Russkaia mysl’, no. 3546, 6 December 1984, 10.

27. One specific scene Siniavskii describes—of falling asleep outside under the stars—evokes Levin’s night in a haystack in Lev Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina and Afanasii Feťs “Na stoge sena noch’iu iuzhnoi,” in which the watcher finds himself helplessly “sinking” into the night.

28. Terts, Abram, V leni Gogolia (Paris: Sintaksis, 1981), 550–553 Google Scholar.