Goodnight! - Hardcover

Abram Tertz; Richard Lourie; Andrei Sinyavsky

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670801658 ISBN 13: 9780670801657

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1989

Synopsis

The persecuted Soviet author presents his latest novel--an autobiographical attempt to explain his 1965 trial and prosecution for writing fiction under a pseudonym--as a powerful indictment of the Soviet state

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Reviews

Soviet dissident Sinyavsky first published in the W e st as Tertz ( The Trial Begins ; A Voice from the Chorus ). For sending his fiction outside Russia for publication, he was tried and sentenced, in 1966, to prison camp and exile. He has lived in Paris since 1973, and is both an outspoken critic of Solzhenitsyn, calling him "the founder of a new conformity of ideas," and a cynic about perestroika , which "can be halted or overturned at any moment." This novel is a chronicle of the events that led to his trial, and as such it is a terrifying account of the surreal nature of Soviet justice. The writing has a persistent edge that survives translation intact. Thrown into a cell in Potma Transit Prison, the narrator notes that the single light bulb overhead "seemed not to dispel the darkness but to reveal it." The book contains intense dialogues between an interrogator and a prisoner that are macabre and Kafkaesque in their inexorable logic. Why this is called a novel is unclear, although the absence of some pertinent details reveals the author's concern about protecting individuals still inside the U.S.S.R. Whether read as fiction or recent history, this is an important addition to literature of the gulag, a shrill cry that must be heard.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Its title rich in ironies, this fictionalized autobiography is a collaboration between sober, scholarly Sinyavsky (the narrator) and alter ego Tertz, "author" of phantasmagoric-grotesque fiction in the style he describes in his important essay, "On Socialist Realism" (1960) as the only adequate way of encapsulating the Soviet experience. Here Sinyavsky analyzes seminal periods of his life--in particular, his father's arrest in 1951, his own duel with the KGB to avoid entrapping a French friend, and finally his arrest in 1965 and six-year term at hard labor for publishing Tertz's work abroad. Tertz puts his own expressionistic spin on this material. The result is a deeply felt, funny, and, yes, grotesque book, a solidly rooted work that has much to tell us about the complexities and contradictions of the human condition.
- Mary F. Zirin, Altadena, Cal.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670801658
• ISBN 13: 9780670801657
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464