SINYAVSKY, Andrey (Donatovich)

(1925-)

   Russian dissident writer and literary critic who published the manuscripts he smuggled into the West in the late 1950s and early 1960s under the name Abram Tertz. His identity became known when the Soviet authorities arrested him in 1966 and subjected him, along with his friend and fellow dissident Yuli DANIEL (who wrote as Nikolai Arzhak), to a show trial; both were imprisoned and subsequently exiled. Several of AS's "fantastic stories" are of sf interest, most being assembled inFantasticheskiye Povesti (coll 1961 Paris; trans Max Hayward and R. Hingley as The Icicle and Other Stories 1963 UK; vt Fantastic Stories 1963 US), though the most striking of all, "Pkhentz" (trans 1966; Russian text in Fantasticheski Mir Abrama Tertza, coll 1967 US), was only later smuggled to the West. In this story an ALIEN spaceship crashes in Russia leaving only one survivor, who is forced to exist for years in a desperate limbo under a false identity, passing for an ordinary citizen. "The Icicle" (1961) features a man of whose clairvoyant powers the state makesdestructive use in its attempts to control the future. AS's finest novel, Lyubimov (Washington 1964; trans Manya Harari as The Makepeace Experiment1965 UK), tells with warmth and power of the transformation of a small Russian village through the ability of one man to broadcast his will hypnotically through space; when he loses this power, robot tanks regain the village and he flees. The satirical implications of this allegorical recasting of the triumph of communism in Russia are obvious. At the same time, AS's satirical effects are mediated through an imagination deeply Russian in its metaphysical, fundamentally religious, Slavophile bent; hissf stories are slashing moral fables rather than political diatribes.

   JC

   Other work: For Freedom of Imagination (coll trans Laszlo Tikos and Murray Peppard 1971 US) contains speculations on the nature of sf.About the author: On Trial: The Case of Sinyavsky (Tertz) and Daniel (Arzhak) (1967) ed Leopold Lebedz and Max Hayward deals largely with AS, anddiscusses his work in literary as well as political terms.

   See also: TABOOS.