Please note: this event will be held in Russian. All discussion, Q&A, and materials will be in Russian and, on this occasion, no translation will be provided.
2025 marks the centenary of the birth of Andrei Sinyavsky, one of the most compelling figures in 20th-century Russian literature. Twenty-eight years have passed since his death in 1997, but he remains an unread and poorly understood writer to this day. Andrei Sinyavsky considered himself a representative of pure art, but he owed his fame in Europe not to his prose, published in the West under the pseudonym Abram Tertz, but to the political trial in which he and fellow writer Yuli Daniel were sentenced to hard labour for their literary activities.
“My differences with the Soviet authorities are purely stylistic” is perhaps Sinyavsky's most famous and frequently-quoted utterance. But do we understand that for a writer like Tertz-Sinyavsky, ‘stylistic differences’ are differences in the composition of blood, and that we are talking about a declared incompatibility?
He dreamed of creating a ‘second literature’, of escaping the state's prohibitions on written texts and with his prose – which earned him seven years in a prison camp – he established and spearheaded this breakout.
Natalia Rubinstein is an independent journalist and literary critic. She worked for the BBC Russian service for thirty years, and lives in London. Her friendship with Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky and his wife, Maria Vasilyevna Rozanova, endured for half a century. She collaborated regularly with them on their magazine Syntaxis as an author and editor.
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