TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/122589/12258900.049

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                                                                                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.