Abram Tertz, from Novy Mir critic to symbol of the Soviet dissident movement
At his February 1966 trial, Sinyavsky pleaded not guilty — rare in a Soviet political trial. Historian Fred Coleman called this moment "the birth of the modern Soviet dissident movement."
Soviet literary scholar, critic, and writer. A Candidate of Philological Sciences (1952), he worked at the Gorky Institute of World Literature and taught at Moscow State University and the Moscow Art Theatre School. He became a leading critic at Aleksandr Tvardovsky's Novy Mir, then the most liberal legal Soviet publication, while publishing satirical fiction and the essay "On Socialist Realism" (1959) in the West as Abram Tertz. In 1966, he and Yuli Daniel became the first Soviet writers convicted for fiction alone; their show trial is seen as the birth of the modern Soviet dissident movement. After six years in Dubravlag labour camp, he emigrated to France in 1973 and became professor of Russian literature at the Sorbonne, co-founding the journal Sintaksis.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1949Graduated from Moscow State University, philology
- 1952Candidate of Philological Sciences; joined IMLI
- 1955–1965Published fiction and essays in the West as Abram Tertz
- 1950년대 말–1965Leading literary critic, Novy Mir
- 1960Admitted to Union of Soviet Writers
- 1966Sentenced to 7 years for anti-Soviet agitation; imprisoned at Dubravlag
- 1971Released early
- 1973–1997Professor of Russian literature, Sorbonne; co-founded Sintaksis
Related historical events
Paris exile and the founding of Sintaksis
Pardoned on 8 June 1971, Sinyavsky went to France in 1973 at the invitation of Professor Claude Frioux and taught Russian literature at Paris IV (the Sorbonne), and with his wife Maria Rozanova he founded the Russian-language journal Sintaksis. Works assembled from the letters he wrote to his wife from the camp appeared in the West in succession, including A Voice from the Chorus, Strolls with Pushkin, and In Gogol's Shadow, alongside lecture-based books such as Fallen Leaves of V. V. Rozanov (1982), the study of folk belief Ivan the Fool (1991), and the autobiographical novel Goodnight! (1983). Most of his prose still appeared as Abram Tertz, while he published scholarship and criticism under his own name, a double signature that now became settled practice.
In exile Sinyavsky combined retrospective writing on Soviet literature and culture with conflict inside émigré society over its own authoritarian tendencies. He attacked Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for trying to install a "new uniformity of thought" as the émigré community's leading authority; when Solzhenitsyn's counterattack led émigré journals to stop printing Tertz, Sinyavsky's wife, Maria Rozanova, proposed their own journal, and Sintaksis was launched. It served as a platform for plural émigré dissident voices, with its first issues dedicated to Aleksandr Ginzburg. After a heart attack and a diagnosis of lung cancer in 1996, Sinyavsky died in Fontenay-aux-Roses near Paris on 25 February 1997. Earlier, on 17 October 1991, Izvestia reported the review of the convictions of Sinyavsky, Daniel and other prominent figures, two months before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.