Andrei Sinyavsky

Andrei Donato Malevich Sinyavsky (Russian: Андрей Донатович Синявский, scientific transliteration Andrej Donatovič Siniavski; born October 8, 1925 in Moscow, † February 25, 1997 in Fontenay -aux -Roses near Paris ) was a Russian writer, literary historian and literary critic, and in the Soviet Union political prisoner.

Life

Immediately after his graduation, he was drafted into the Army in 1943 and served in World War II as a radio technician in the Air Force. After demobilization in 1946 he studied until 1949 at the Philological Faculty of Moscow State University in Moscow, where he worked among others about Mayakovsky. He taught at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute, where he was dismissed in 1957, when it came to so-called cleansing in cultural activities by the foreign publication of the novel Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. Sinyavsky came under at the Moscow Theatre School and was one of the leading literary critics of the magazine Novy Mir (New World ), edited by Alexander Twardowski, in the early 1960s one of the most liberal newspapers in the Soviet Union.

Since 1955, he wrote his own prose, but could not publish his texts. Abroad, he has published so some system- critical texts under the pseudonym Abram third ( Абрам Терц ). His pseudonym he declared such: " Sinyavsky is a critic, is Professor Sinyavsky ... third is pure artist - Abram third is outrageous and sassy, a thief ." - The historical " Abram third " was a Russian-Jewish bandit.

Published in 1959 under the author's name third item What is Socialist Realism? he analyzed the official Soviet literature and diagnosed the low-conflict, focused on policies of the party practice of so-called socialist realism as the main cause for the poor quality of Soviet literature. He called instead for the return of the Fantastic in the tradition of Gogol. In his own works, he followed this requirement and worked with fantastic and supernatural elements ( story collection Fantastic Tales).

When the KGB had found out who was behind the name third, Sinyavsky was arrested. In 1966 he was sentenced in Moscow in a sensational show trial " for production of books " to seven years in a labor camp. The accused also writer Yuli Daniel (1925-1988) was sentenced to five years in a labor camp. Due to the refusal of a guilty plea, the two authors solved not only an international protest flood, was more important in a letter to party leader Brezhnev Soviet artists ( including Marlen Chutziew, Maya Plisetskaya, Mikhail Romm, Innokenty Smoktunowski, Konstantin Paustovsky and Korney Chukovsky ) and scientists ( as Lew Arzimowitsch, Pyotr Kapitsa, Andrei Sakharov and Igor Tamm ) on the return to Stalinist methods criticism, which is judged by historians as the initial spark of the Soviet dissident movement.

Although the KGB no return Sinjawskis from prison wished and had therefore arranged to divide the writer only to the heaviest physical labor, he survived the labor camps. 1973 Sinyavsky was allowed with his family to leave for Paris. There he was a lecturer at the Sorbonne, where he taught Russian literature. Together with his wife Maria Rosanowa he founded the magazine syntaxis, which appeared in 37 editions 1978-2001. He died at the age of 71 years to cancer.

Works

• Fantastic Stories: All stories Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna / Hamburg 1967.
• Promenades with Pushkin
• Good night
• What is the meaning of socialist realism
• In the shadow of Gogol
• Small Zores, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1982, ISBN 3-10-074402-0.
• The dream of a new man or the Soviet civilization, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-10-074406-3.
• Ivan the fool: the Russian folklore, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-10-074412-8.
• The procedure works: the works of Abram third to 1965, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-10-074113-7.
• A Voice in the Choir, The works of Abraham third, Volume 2, from the Russian by Svetlana Geier; Edited and with an afterword by Taja Gut S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-10-074436-4.