A Voice from the Chorus by Andrei Sinyavsky

First published:Golos iz Khora, 1973 (English translation, 1976)

Type of work: Letters/meditations

Time of work: 1966-1971 and 1973

Locale: The Soviet Union

Principal Personages:

• Andrei Sinyavsky, a Soviet literary scholar imprisoned in a labor camp
• Maria Sinyavsky, his wife

Form and Content

In September, 1965, a Soviet literary scholar named Andrei Sinyavsky, who was about to celebrate his fortieth birthday, was arrested and charged with subversion. Beginning in 1959, manuscripts of several works by Sinyavsky had been smuggled to the West, where they were published under the pseudonym Abram Tertz. These works included a literary manifesto, Chto takoe sotsialisticheskii realizm (1959; On Socialist Realism, 1960); a volume of short fiction, Fantasticheskie povesti (1961; Fantastic Stories, 1963); and two short novels, Sud idyot (1960; The Trial Begins, 1960) and Lyubimov (1964; The Makepeace Experiment, 1965). A small collection of aphorisms and reflections, Mysli vrasplokh (1966; Unguarded Thoughts, 1972), first appeared in the American periodical The New Leader a few months before Sinyavsky’s arrest, under the title “Thought Unaware”; this work was particularly important for its revelation of Sinyavsky’s devout Russian Orthodox faith.

There had been considerable speculation in the West concerning the identity of the mysterious Abram Tertz, and Sinyavsky’s trial, in February, 1966, provoked international protest. (Yuli Daniel, another writer whose works had appeared pseudonymously in the West, was tried at the same time.) Receiving a seven-year sentence, Sinyavsky was sent to Dubrovlag, a complex of labor camps about three hundred miles east of Moscow, where there were sawmills and factories for producing furniture. It was during this time (he served more than six years of his sentence) that Sinyavsky wrote the bulk of A Voice from the Chorus.

The form of the book reflects the circumstances of its composition. In the labor camp Sinyavsky was allowed to write twice a month to his wife, Maria; everything he wrote had to be passed by the camp censor. Instead of allowing these circumstances to discourage him, Sinyavsky turned them to his own advantage. In addition to the meditations that became A Voice from the Chorus, Sinyavsky wrote a good part of a long critical study of Nikolai Gogol, V teni Gogolia (1975; in the shadow of Gogol), and a shorter study of Alexander Pushkin, Progulki s Pushkinym (1975; walks with Pushkin)—all this in the guise of letters to his wife. (As the critic Clarence Brown has remarked, the censor who inspected these letters “must have thought the Sinyavskys the most cerebral couple since the invention of marriage.”)

A Voice from the Chorus (the title is that of a poem by Aleksandr Blok) is an unclassifiable book, one that does not fit in any clearly defined genre. It comprises two sharply contrasting kinds of material. On the one hand, there are Sinyavsky’s meditations, reflections, pensees, aphorisms, ranging in length from a single line to several pages; the average page includes several entries. The subjects of these meditations are richly various, but there is among them a dominant theme: the nature of art. On the other hand, alternating with Sinyavsky’s reflective voice, there is the “chorus”: In these passages, which are italicized to distinguish them from Sinyavsky’s own words, one hears the diverse voices of his fellow prisoners— slangy, pungent, ignorant, pious, mean, whimsical, fatuous, wise. Sometimes Sinyavsky comments on these voices or provides a context for them:

In answer to a question about Christianity and the New Testament—with a hurt expression:

“Why weren’t the apostles Ukrainians?”

On other occasions he presents, without comment, a string of quotations from the chorus on a given topic, or simply a list of colorful expressions.

The book is divided into seven parts. The first six parts (comprising 316 of the book’s 328 pages) correspond to the years of Sinyavsky’s imprisonment, from 1966 to 1971. While most of the entries are not dated, there are a handful of dated entries scattered throughout the book, serving the reader as chronological markers. Similarly, while the text generally resembles a notebook or journal rather than a collection of letters, Sinyavsky has retained a few passages in which he directly addresses his wife, reminding the reader of the personal context of these meditations.

The seventh and final part of the book—by far the shortest—was written after Sinyavsky’s release. (In 1973, he and his wife and son were permitted to emigrate to Paris, where Sinyavsky began teaching at the Sorbonne.) Here, he records some of his thoughts on returning to ordinary life: his sense of disorientation (“the feeling of a dead man appearing at life’s feast”) but also his awareness that the book he has made now has a sovereign existence of its own.

Critical Context

Readers in the West frequently encounter Russian literature in what might be called an artificial environment, in which literary works are detached from their cultural context. This leads to misunderstanding, since the reader is likely to overlook significant differences between Russian and Western perspectives.

Western critics often contrast Sinyavsky with his countryman Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Clearly the two men represent diametrically opposed approaches to literature. Solzhenitsyn the novelist has assembled a vast historical archive to authenticate his fictional re-creation of Russia in the years leading up to the Revolution. Sinyavsky is a creator of fantastic fictions, scornful of the pretensions of realism. Solzhenitsyn is the foremost representative of what has been called the authoritarian-nationalist wing of the Russian emigre community, while Sinyavsky is one of the leading figures of the liberal-democratic wing. Many critics, dismayed by Solzhenitsyn’s apparent contempt for Western institutions, have pointed to the grounding of his political program in his Russian Orthodox faith, which they regard as dangerously archaic.

While there is unquestionably a real basis for the contrast between Solzhenitsyn and Sinyavsky, it is misleading on both sides, particularly with regard to Sinyavsky’s alleged affinities with liberal humanism. In an essay titled “Dissent as a Personal Experience” (Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 1982), Sinyavsky defines his position. As a writer, he says, he is in opposition to not only the Soviet government but also his fellow emigres: “I am an enemy—an enemy as such— metaphysically, in principle.” He rejects Solzhenitsyn’s mixture of religion and authoritarian politics, but also—in A Voice from the Chorus as in Unguarded Thoughts—he rejects such dearly held Western notions as “freedom of choice,” “human dignity,” and “the inviolability of the person,” dismissing them as nothing more than cant. In Unguarded Thoughts he writes that truly Christian attitudes and actions are “abnormal,” against human nature; in A Voice from the Chorus, he describes the process of writing as equally abnormal and paradoxical. In some ways, from the viewpoint of secular Western society, Sinyavsky may be more “extreme” than Solzhenitsyn.

Bibliography

Brown, Clarence, ed. The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader, 1985.

Brown, Deming. “The Art of Andrei Sinyavsky,” in Slavic Review. XXIX (December, 1970), pp. 663-681.

Fanger, Donald. “A Change of Venue: Russian Journals of the Emigration,” in The Times Literary Supplement. November 21, 1986, pp. 1321-1322.

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. Writers in Russia: 1917-1978, 1983.

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.