The Trial Begins by Andrei Sinyavsky

First published:Sad idzie, 1959 (English translation, 1960)

Type of work: Phantasmagoric fiction

Time of work: September, 1952, to March, 1953; epilogue in 1956

Locale: Moscow, with an epilogue in a Siberian prison camp

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, a young Russian writer
• Vladimir Petrovich Globov, the hero, a public prosecutor and true believer in Stalinism
• Seryozha, age seventeen, Globov’s idealistic son by a previous marriage
• Marina, Globov’s beautiful second wife
• Yury Karlinsky, a brilliant, cynical defense attorney and Marina’s lover
• Katya, Seryozha’s schoolgirl coconspirator
• Ekaterina Petrovna, Globov’s former mother-in-law, a principled Communist
• Dr. S. Y. Rabinovich, the gynecologist who aborts Marina’s baby

The Novel

The Trial Begins is a tale of Soviet life in the last few months before the death of Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin. The novella’s historical backdrop is the paranoid dictator’s last purge, the “doctors’ plot,” of an alleged cabal of physicians (mostly Jewish) who planned to assassinate high Party officials. The plot, hatched by Stalin’s security services and exposed as fraudulent after his death, was in fact a campaign against Soviet Jews, euphemistically labeled “rootless cosmopolitans.”

As the novella opens, the writer-narrator sits in his room reflecting upon the recent visit of two plainclothesmen who searched his room. They presage the supernatural visitation of the Master (Stalin), a huge phantasmagoric figure who looms over the Moscow dawn and points out to the narrator the figure of his “beloved and faithful servant,” Prosecutor Vladimir Petrovich Globov: “Follow him,...defend him with your life. Exalt him!” The story that follows is the narrator’s unsuccessful attempt to celebrate Globov.

Globov is preparing his case against Dr. Rabinovich, an abortionist. Meanwhile, Globov’s wife, Marina, is meeting her suitor, Yury Karlinsky. Condemned to spend the day alone, Globov talks with his son by an earlier marriage, Seryozha, who has attracted undesirable attention at school with questions about “just” and “unjust” wars and other moral issues. Globov brushes aside the boy’s concerns, saying “The aim sanctifies the means, it justifies every sort of sacrifice.”

A few days later, a nude Marina does her morning exercises before the mirror and narcissistically admires her beauty, which is unspoiled by childbearing. That evening at her birthday party, a guest offers a toast to Marina’s future daughter, a thought that elates Globov. The party ends badly when Globov, incensed by Karlinsky’s intimacy with Marina as they dance, “accidentally” knocks over the record player. The couple has a bitter fight, in which Marina gloatingly tells Globov that she has just had an abortion.

Embittered by his wife and troubled by his son’s dangerous unorthodoxy, Globov prepares for the Rabinovich trial by making an imaginary speech in the empty nocturnal courtroom. Rabinovich is guilty not merely of abortion; he is undermining the Soviet state. Wandering the empty court building Globov finds graffiti in the women’s cloakroom. Unlike his hero, the narrator is enchanted with the beauty of these simple human words. As he muses, the ethereal voice of his Master sternly corrects him: “A word can only be an accusation.” All humanity is on trial, and the trial is called “history.”

Seryozha has decided that only world revolution can bring about universal justice, and he attempts to rally his school friends to form a secret society. Only Katya turns up at the meeting at the Moscow Zoo, however, where they are observed by two plainclothesmen. Meanwhile, Karlinsky continues his seduction while visiting an art museum with Marina. Globov simultaneously dreams of their assignation, but his dream segues into a guided tour of the museum led by Rabinovich, who shows him a great pulsing brain which produces “only great ideas and supreme purposes.” These, Rabinovich says, give rise to the dialects of history. The doctor-guide then shows how “supreme purposes” (ends) have invariably been perverted by the ill means used to attain them: Christianity was subverted by the Inquisition; the Renaissance’s creative individualism ended in cutthroat capitalism; and Communism was corrupted by what? The answer, Stalinism, is only implied.

Seryozha is soon arrested. During questioning, his interrogator shows him the masses of ordinary people on the street below. They are on trial, but Seryozha is already condemned. Globov, over the protests of Ekaterina Petrovna, Seryozha’s maternal grandmother, has abandoned the boy to his fate. In a drunken rage, the teetotaler Globov smashes up his apartment with a sword, stopping only at a bust of Stalin, to whom he makes his speech of summation: “Master, the enemies are in flight. They have killed my [unborn] daughter and seized my son. My wife has betrayed me.... But I stand before you, wounded and forsaken as I am, and say: Our goal is reached.”

It is the day of Stalin’s funeral. Globov finds himself caught in the huge crowd gathered to view Stalin’s body. A giant hand seizes Globov and uses him to cudgel the crowd, and Katya falls under a truck. The crowd turns on Globov, crying out; “Where’s the Public Prosecutor? They ought to be tried, people like that.”

In the epilogue, some three years later, the narrator, Seryozha, and Rabinovich find themselves in the same prison camp. The narrator has been imprisoned for maliciously presenting his “positive heroes” (the Globovs and Karlinsky) “in their least typical aspects” and for giving away state secrets. He has failed to carry out his late Master’s charge. While digging a ditch, Rabinovich finds a rusted dagger with a crucifix-like handle. He muses that God, formerly the point, the purpose, has become the handle, the means. Ends and means have once again been reversed. Holding the dagger to the sky, the half-mad doctor rants: “In the name of God! With the help of God! In the place of God! Against God.... And now there is no God, only dialectics. Forge a new dagger for the new Purpose at once!”

The Characters

The nameless, faceless narrator charged with exalting Prosecutor Globov foreshadows the fate of his creator, Andrei Sinyavsky: Both are authors who are arrested, tried, and sentenced to a labor camp. The differences between them, however, are crucial. The narrator tries to carry out his divinely imposed mission but fails, in part because of his inadvertent awareness of the conflict between ends and means that he sees in his assigned characters. He believes in the end (Communism) but, against his own will, is distressed by the subversion and displacement of that goal by corrupting means (Stalinism). He is not a dissident. Andrei Sinyavsky, on the other hand, by virtue of writing The Trial Begins and smuggling it out for publication in the West, is condemning the Soviet system.

Globov, Marina, and Karlinsky constitute a triangle in more than a romantic sense. Globov is a typical Soviet bureaucrat of peasant background. Superficially cultured, he is devoid of moral insight. He is a true believer, and the Master’s dictates are not to be questioned. Karlinsky is a much more interesting (and despicable) character. Cultivated, urbane, witty, he sees the primitive nature of the Stalinist state and society and finds solace in mockery, seduction, and careerism. Marina is completely absorbed in her own beauty and the amusements and comforts it can bring her. The three represent different responses to the moral abyss of Stalinism.

Seryozha and the doomed Katya are the only positive characters. Seryozha naively sets out to right the world’s wrongs (although he too would not be above shooting the recalcitrant in his perfected society). Katya, also troubled by injustice, is even more interested in Seryozha, who is too committed (or naive) to recognize this aspect of their relationship. Ironically, it is Katya’s attempt to save Seryozha that leads to his arrest and, indirectly, to her accidental death at the hands of his father. Seryozha’s grandmother, Ekaterina Petrovna, is an “Old Bolshevik,” one of the idealists who made the Revolution. Although retaining their humanity, these idealists are too blinded by the radiant future to realize what has happened to their dream. Ekaterina’s idealism is one of the elements that motivates Seryozha.

Dr. Rabinovich, part pathos and part joke, is, with his theory of history and argument about means and ends, the primary spokesman for Sinyavsky: part pathos, because of the historic plight of Russian Jews—of which the “doctors’ plot” was a manifestation; part joke, because one Rabinovich (a common Russian Jewish name) is the hero (or butt) of endless Soviet anecdotes. The slightly unsavory depiction of Rabinovich has led to unjustified charges of anti-Semitism. Sinyavsky, an ethnic Russian, chose his Jewish pseudonym, Abram Tertz, partially as a sign of his identification with a persecuted minority, perpetual outsiders.

Critical Context

The last years of Stalin were a nightmare of paranoid despotism. Millions were in labor camps, and the arts had been degraded to the level of primitive propaganda under the banner of “Socialist Realism.” With Stalin’s death, the first of a series of “thaws” began. A moribund literature began to revive but was impeded by recurrent “freezes.” Socialist Realism continued to be the only approved form of literature. Many feared a return of Stalinism. A young literary scholar and friend of Boris Pasternak (whose publication in the West of Doctor Zhivago in 1957, with its English translation in 1958, had brought him both a Nobel Prize for Literature and government vilification), Andrei Sinyavsky decided to risk sending his work abroad. Using the pseudonym Abram Tertz, Sinyavsky smuggled out two works: a theoretical essay, On Socialist Realism (1960), decrying the sterility of Socialist Realism and calling for a new “phantasmagoric” literature; and a novella, The Trial Begins, which illustrated his literary argument and was a powerful indictment of Stalinism. Sinyavsky’s works created a sensation and endless speculation about the identify of their author. The author’s double life continued until he was betrayed and sentenced to a labor camp. After serving his sentence, Sinyavsky was permitted to emigrate to France, where he has lived since 1973. The story of his life as Abram Tertz and of his prison camp years is told in involute, ornate form in his stunning 1984 novel-memoir Spokoinoi nochi (good night). Sinyavsky’s The Trial Begins is one of the foundation works in the post-Stalin rebirth of Russian literature.

Bibliography

Browning, Deming. Soviet Russian Literature Since Stalin, 1978.

Dalton, Margaret. Andrei Siniavskii and Julii Daniel’: Two Soviet “Heretical” Writers, 1973.

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

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

Mihajlov, Mihajlo. “Flight from the Test Tube,” in Russian Themes, 1968.