Goodnight! by Andrei Sinyavsky

First published:Spokoinoi nochi, 1984, in France (English translation, 1989)

Type of work: Phantasmagoric memoir-novel

Time of work: The 1940’s through 1971

Locale: Moscow

Principal Characters:

• Andrei Donatevich Sinyavsky, a Soviet literary scholar who becomes a dissident writer under the pseudonym Abram Tertz,
• Maria, his wife
• Donat Evgenievich Sinyavsky, his father
• Seryozha (also known as “S.”), Sinyavsky’s childhood friend and mentor who betrays him to the KGB
• Helene, a French diplomat’s daughter who becomes Sinyavsky’s secret courier

The Novel

Spokoinoi nochi is a highly fragmented, phantasmagoric memoir-novel about Andrei Sinyavsky’s life as a Soviet intellectual and secret dissident writer (under the name Abram Tertz), his betrayal, trial, and years in a labor camp. Written after his emigration to France, it is an attempt to understand his life and to trace the development of his worldview as man and artist. Reared an orthodox Communist, Sinyavsky evolved into a sophisticated, paradoxical artist and thinker who came to believe that “reality” is phantasmagoric and understandable only in such terms. Spokoinoi nochi uses the phantasmagoric aesthetic to probe the harrowing story of Sinyavsky’s life as Abram Tertz. Although this technique is aesthetically effective, it yields a chaotic, impressionistic narrative that is fully accessible only if the reader is already familiar with the historical context and the basic outlines of Sinyavsky’s life.

The last years before the death of Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin in 1953 were a nightmare of paranoiac despotism. Millions were in labor camps. The arts were reduced to primitive propaganda under the rubric “Socialist Realism.” Andrei Sinyavsky was a young scholar specializing in twentieth century Russian literature at the prestigious Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow. Like many of his friends, he was deeply disturbed by the official revelation in 1956 of the crimes of Stalin, which resonated with certain of his own unpleasant experiences. The fear of a possible return of Stalinism led the young critic, under the pseudonym Abram Tertz, to write two works which were smuggled to the West, where they were published to great acclaim. One of these, the essay Chto takoe sotsialisticheskii realizm (1959; On Socialist Realism, 1960), attacked the state-imposed literary doctrine and argued for a freer, speculative, “phantasmagoric” fiction. The essay’s principles were exemplified in a short novel, Sudidyot (1959; The Trial Begins, 1960), which painted a surreal picture of Soviet life in the last months of Stalin’s life. Sinyavsky continued his double life until 1965, when he was betrayed to the KGB, receiving the maximum sentence of seven years at hard labor for “anti-Soviet propaganda.” Released in 1971, he and his wife were permitted to emigrate two years later.

The ironically titled Spokoinoi nochi (the Russian for wishing someone a sound night’s sleep—usually rendered in English as “good night” but more precisely rendered as “[have] a good night”) is loosely structured around five widely separated “nights,” both real and metaphorical, which stand as nightmarish nuclei in the author’s life. Each “night” is a chapter. The first, “Turncoat,” recounts his arrest. Whisked to the KGB’s dreaded Lubyanka prison, he meets his interrogator, Lieutenant Colonel Pakhomov, who will be almost his sole human contact for several months. The trial itself is a travesty in which the audience applauds his conviction and which the author compares to an imperial Roman gladiatorial fest. Here, as throughout the narrative, the biographical facts serve as points of departure for meditations often only remotely and metaphorically related to actual events. In addition to these “digressions,” Sinyavsky incorporates grotesque set pieces, fictional vignettes, which further illuminate the absurdity of events.

Soviet camps allow brief annual conjugal visits in special quarters set aside within the camp. The second “night” centers on a visit by Sinyavsky’s wife, Maria. Much of the night in the bugged room is taken up with an exchange of written (and promptly destroyed) notes speculating how the narrator came to be detected. The prisoner relives in memory his secret life: the first word that his work had appeared in the West; the speculation about the identity of “Abram Tertz”; the sense of a net tightening around him.

The third “night” revolves around Sinyavsky’s father and his own childhood. A former member of the privileged classes, Sinyavsky’s father was a non-Bolshevik radical who ardently embraced the Revolution only to find himself a suspect outsider. In the darkest night of Stalinism in 1951, he is arrested for supposed espionage for the Americans during famine relief work thirty years earlier. Released from interrogation before his exile, he takes a last walk with Andrei and talks, quite rationally, of the tiny radio transmitter implanted in his brain.

March 5, 1953, the date of Stalin’s death, is the fourth “night” of Spokoinoi nochi, and the dictator’s ghost is the focal point of a wide-ranging conceptual montage. Sinyavsky spends much of the day reading an old account of Russia’s Time of Troubles, a bloody interregnum during the seventeenth century. Seizing upon parallels between present and past, Sinyavsky weaves a strange verbal tapestry incorporating ghostly images of Stalin.

Sinyavsky’s final nightmare, “In the Belly of the Whale,” is a portrait of two friends who played crucial roles in his life. The first, Seryozha, a friend from Sinyavsky’s childhood until his arrest, betrays him (and others) to the KGB. The second is Helene, the French naval attache’s daughter, who meets Sinyavsky while the two were fellow students at Moscow University in 1947 and introduces him to Western culture. Learning of the friendship, the KGB unsuccessfully pressures Sinyavsky to entrap her. It is Helene who later serves as the courier who takes the works of “Abram Tertz” to the West. In their opposing ways, Seryozha and Helene lead to the creation of Abram Tertz and the events chronicled in Spokoinoi nochi.

The Characters

Reality, in the traditional sense of events and people, plays a very secondary role in Sinyavsky’s autobiographical tale. Characters are not, for the most part, realistically developed, nor, apart from the narrator, do they have continuing roles throughout the narrative. Each major figure serves as the focal point of one of the “nights,” but their images are sometimes very diffuse. In “The House of Meetings,” in which Sinyavsky’s beloved wife visits him in the camp, she remains shadowy and remote for the reader. Helene, who plays an enormous role in Sinyavsky’s personal and moral development, is equally abstract: a symbol of purity, a damsel in distress, but not a living person.

Sinyavsky-Tertz, whose consciousness holds the whole together, is the only fully developed character. The narrative takes Sinyavsky’s life as the illegal Abram Tertz as its subject: how Sinyavsky became Tertz, who, incidentally, is listed as the sole author of the original Russian edition. Tertz is Sinyavsky’s Doppelganger, his fantasy double. Sinyavsky, physically unimpressive, walleyed, describes himself as “an honest intellectual, given to compromise and the solitary contemplation of life.” In contrast, Abram Tertz is the legendary hero of an underworld ballad about the thieves’ quarter in the Jewish section of Odessa, a criminal world with its own incorruptible code of honor. Tertz is everything Sinyavsky is not: thief, gambler, a cool, calculating figure only too willing to slip a knife into someone’s side. Sinyavsky’s use of the Tertz figure as his double has thematic resonance: the inherently dissident (criminal) nature of real art. Even more to the point is that the Sinyavsky/Tertz relationship mirrors the theme of the interpenetration of reality and fantasy that is central to the book.

Two other characters stand out: Sinyavsky’s father and Seryozha. As the aging narrator sits in his Paris apartment, he reflects on various episodes from his father’s unhappy life and his growing sense of identity with his father. First arrested for political activities in czarist times, Donat Evgenievich felt betrayed by the duplicity of the Communist government. An impractical idealist, he moved from wretched job to job, but nevertheless strove to instill his sense of ideals and honor in his son. It is his arrest that sows doubt in the mind of his orthodox son, and his madness that prompts the narrator’s seminal reflections on the murky relationship between delusion and reality.

The most enigmatic character is Seryozha. A brilliantly gifted aesthete, Seryozha started Sinyavsky on the intellectual odyssey that led to the speculative artist-thinker and modernist. Other aspects of their relationship had equally important but more dire consequences. Episodes from Seryozha’s life reflect a curious, disinterested viciousness. Eventually he denounces two young and innocent historians, and, perhaps, even Sinyavsky, to the KGB. These acts are not politically motivated, for Seryozha is as apolitical as he is amoral. Sinyavsky is fascinated by the personality of his longtime friend, who plays such a double-edged role in his life. In some sense, Sinyavsky sees elements of himself in Seryozha.

Critical Context

Andrei Sinyavsky is the godfather of the post-Stalin renaissance in Russian literature. Although the arid, official policy of Socialist Realism has been relaxed in the Soviet Union, almost all intellectually provocative and stylistically innovative Russian literature has come from underground or emigre artists. This new writing has picked up and continued the two major strands of the Russian literary tradition that were broken off around 1930 with the introduction of Socialist Realism: the “critical realism” tradition represented by such figures as Leo Tolstoy, and the more aesthetically oriented modernist, antirealist tradition represented by figures such as Andrey Bely. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his followers have resurrected the older tradition. Sinyavsky has continued and developed the techniques of the earlier avant-garde and pointed the way for younger Russian writers. Both Vassily Aksyonov, the most important younger writer to emerge in the 1960’s, and Sasha Sokolov, the leading stylist of the 1970’s and 1980’s, follow the path of “phantasmagoric art” advocated by Sinyavsky in his seminal 1956 essay, On Socialist Realism.

Sinyavsky has continued to contribute to his artistic vision since his emigration. In addition to teaching at the Sorbonne, he has established his own publishing house and journal under the name Sintaksis. His irreverent and idiosyncratic critical studies of such icons of Russian literature as Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol have been extremely controversial among Russian readers. Noteworthy among his nonscholarly works is Golos iz khora (1973; A Voice from the Chorus, 1976), a collection of meditations, quotations, and aphorisms culled from his labor-camp letters to his wife. His many stories are stylistically akin to what will probably remain Sinyavsky’s major contribution to Russian literature, Spokoinoi nochi.

Sources for Further Study

Fanger, Donald. “A Change of Venue: Russian Journals of the Emigration,” in The Times Literary Supplement. November 21, 1986, p. 1321.

Fanger, Donald. “Conflicting Imperatives in the Model of the Russian Writer: The Case of Tertz/Sinyavsky,” in Literature and History: Theoretical Problems and Russian Case Studies, 1986. Edited by Gary S. Morson.

Hayward, Max. “Sinyavsky’s A Voice from the Chorus,” in Writers in Russia: 1917-1978, 1983.

Hingley, Ronald. “Arresting Episodes,” in The Times Literary Supplement. February 15, 1985, p. 178.

Labedz, Leopald, and Max Hayward. On Trial: The Case of Sinyavsky (Tertz) and Daniel (Arzhak): Documents, 1967.

Lourie, Richard. Letters to the Future: An Approach to Sinyavsky-Tertz, 1975.

Library Journal. CXIV, October 15, 1989, p.84.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. December 3, 1989, p.3.

The New Republic. CCII, January 1, 1990, p.34.

The New York Times Book Review. XCIV, December 17, 1989, p.1.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXVI, October 6, 1989, p.82.

Time. CXXXIV, December 25, 1989, p.76.

The Washington Post Book World. XIX, December 24, 1989, p.3.

Wigwag. I, December, 1989, p.78.