A Death Sentence
When the Russian writers Sinyavsky and Daniel were sentenced to seven arid five years’ forced labour they were forty-one years old. At the time I too was forty-one years old and I thought to myself about all the things I would miss if had to go to prison for so many years. I was not thinking only of what one might call the private joys of life not only of happy girls and not only of drinking wine with friends and not only of swimming in the sea; above all I was thinking of my work, of my work in the widest sense of the word, to be sure. I pictured in my mind; seven, or even just five years without intellectual conversation, without being allowed to read what one wants to read, and to crown it all, of course, without writing a single line. I have been writing for more than twenty years, I write almost every day, and whenever, because of laziness or sickness or travelling or for whatever reason, I do not write anything for days or even weeks, then I feel wretched, and certainly not at all in a merely moral sense, but psycologically and even physically. And now I imagined the state I would get into if I were not allowed to write for seven years or even for only five. And I felt that not being allowed to write for years on end is fatal for a writer. The Soviet judiciary has passed on Siniavsky and Daniel what is in effect a death sentence.
Now, when the two writers have been behind bars for some years, I have just been re-reading their books, and once again I wonder; just why did they sentence Sinyavsky and Daniel to death, this death within not only a living body but within a mind which is also lust as living? What did they do? Well, they wrote stories, stories about people, about people with their faults and fears and virtues, with their peculiarities and their joys, and also they have recaptured the great tradition of Gogol and Dostoiewsky and brought it back to life in a radically changed world in which however one thing has remained completely unchanged: the human heart. And this heart is what they write about. Not of course under the conditions of the world of Tolstoy or even Pushkin but under the conditions of the convrete Soviet Russian present.
Thus one can read in the stories of these two authors a criticism of this, their environment — just as one can in Leskow and Balzac and Mark Twain and Thomas Mann in fact in any true writer. For what does the writer show in his works? Certainty never anything but the triumphs and adversities of the fundamentally immutable human race in conflict with its specific surroundings. A story might be about an adultress or a wandering knight or an orphan boy: basically it will always be quite simply about the fact that human beings — to quote Hemingway — “might well be destroyed but can never be conquered.”
It follows that some stories by these writers present man’s eternal struggle for self-respect not in tsarist Russia or in capitalist America or in a neutral world of phantasy, but in present day Soviet Russia. That is why the Public Prosecutor took action and brought charges, under Paragraph 70 of the Legal code, of “anti-Soviet propaganda” — without, moreover, defining what is really meant by the term. There was a deal of vague talk of pornography, of defamation of the Russian people, of slander against Lenin and similar crimes, some of which do not even exist. In fact, just the opposite: at least in the writing of Sinyavsky there speaks out from every line an admittedly painful but profound love of his people and of his nation, a love totally unfamiliar to Böll or Enzenberger. These German writers, or in Austria Thomas Bernhard wallow in evil (or in what they like to call evil), whilst Sinyavsky and Daniel suffer from the evil and therefore attempt, by representing it in words, at least, to overcome it. In his much-praised novel “Verstörung” (“Distraction”) Thomas Bernhard says: “He has already grown accustomed to being a victim of a thoroughly sick nation, inclined violence and madness” — and in the nation here referred to, Austria, not a single person and of course not a single Public Prosecutor has seen fit to bring legal action against Bernhard, Sinyavsky and Daniel on the other hand were locked away for years although they have not uttered anything approaching this foolish slander. And other critical writers, like Helmut Qualtinger and Carl Merz, not only enjoy perfect freedom but are also highly esteemed.
Certainly the sentence on Sinyavsky and Daniel can also be seen as a reaction on the part of communist puritanism, which deems that “nothing can be which may not be”. It bears testimony to a poverty into which even the most decadent west has never allowed itself to sink. But it is precisely the fear which dictated this sentence which confirms the truth of everything which Sinyavsky and Daniel have written. Their crime was in no way political: it consisted only in regaining the metaphysical dimension, respectively, in their satirical stories, in the defence against false transcendency. With a certain amount of good will — in dubio pro reo — one could interpret their stories as attempts to stake out the boundaries of socialism so that within these boundaries it can develop without external irritations to what it considers to be its highest level. In a certain sense the sentence of Sinyavsky and Daniel was a condemnation of democratic socialism as preached by Stalin.
But as already indicated, one can also read Sinyavsky and Daniel entirely without political afterthoughts; for what they tell us about the threat to mankind posed by abstraction is something we must fear at all times and in all places, independent of the political concretisation of that illusion which, according to Saint Exupery places ideas above people. Their books are essentially humanistic. But when a soviet Russian Court classes these books as anti-Soviet then it condemns the Soviet Union eo ipso as anti-humanistic, confirms therefore what the authors ostensibly maintained. This state has probably never displayed its brute strength more vividly.
And it is not only the state which has suffered from this sentence but also the people. For in Sinyavsky and Daniel they have sentenced to silence two human beings who skilfully and therefore authoritatively expressed the silent choughts of the people. In his novel “Lobimov” Sinyavsky says: “I am concerned with writing. Where then can I hide from my artistic object?” For this most noble, for this uniquely responsible patriotism the two writers were banished from the society of their fellow-countrymen to the confines of a labour camp. Through this action the whole of Russia has become poorer. And with the whole of Russia, the whole of the world.
Here I sit in Vienna — it just happens to be Vienna, it could also be London or Florence or Rio or Calcutta or Tokyo — and read these books and know more about myself than I knew before and cannot help but think that these months, which have taught me about myself, have been condemned to silence for years or who knows, for ever; and I am sad. And I leaf on through these books and I imagine myself sitting there like Sinyavsky and Daniel in prison and I feel their suffering — and am suddenly immensely proud that I am a human being, a member of the race which “might welt be destroyed but can never be conquered.” The physical persons of Sinyavsky and Daniel are secured behind prison walls: what they have spoken, however, gives them a freedom, the possibility of which is beyond the comprehension of their gaolers. It is the freedom to be brave.
What Sinyavsky — under the pseudonym Abram Terz — and Daniel — under the pseudonym Nikolei Arschak — have published: the former the novel “Lubimov” and the collection of “Fantastic Stories” and the latter the volume of stories “Moscow speaking,” is worth reading. And what they have done is worth living for.
Translated by Keith Hamnett
Page(s) 28-29
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