Conversations in Exile- Sinyavsky

Glad, John Ed. Conversations in Exile. Translated by Richard and Joanna Robin. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1993.

Conducted 1983

Interview w/ Sinyavsky

how discovered his identity

AS: "Keep in mind that we first started sending manuscripts to the West in 1956. They were published in 1959. That wasn't our fault. The person who smuggled out the manuscripts and had them published help them up so as to first clear the way for Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago." 


"Helene Zamoiskaya, an old French friend, whom I had met back in the years I was a student. I met her in 1947 at Moscow State University. And we're still friends to this day.

After it was published the KGB began an investigation, and I was given some idea as to their progress. For instance, I learned that the Soviet ambassador to France asked the publisher where he got the material, who gave it to him, how it was gotten out, and so on and so on. So they were on the lookout.

...

It was the courier they had to identity. They had to find hte route being used. There were attempts to bribe some foreigners, particularly French and American, to establish the route. They had to establish the courier's contacts in Russia, and usually the contacts of a person like that are limited to a small at Mosxow State University. The rest was easy. Our rooms were bugged, Daniel's and mine, for at least six months and I think it was more like nine months." (G, 152)

Post- arrest:

"I think too that in a situation like this it's important to be true to yourself. And for me it would have been a lie to admit some sort of guilt for art. Moreover (I learned thins only later) ours was the first public political trial--with the possible exception of the Penkovsky trial--since the Stalin era. So you can see, deep down in my consciousness were the show trials of the thirties where the accused were always repented. And I loathed all of that. So it would been stupid if I had repented. It would have been stupid if I had repented. It would have been unnatural.

What this is natural. I really am a proponent of pure art. Even if I have political motives, I don't believe you can try a writer for that. In the interrogations everything was reduced to long and sometimes ludicrous theoretical arguments. I might have read a short story to someone. That counted as agitation and propaganda, as "distribution" of material. (G, 155)

Radio in prison:

"And they all knew about me before I arrived. They practically lifted me up onto their shoulders! They realize that the more a person is criticized in the Soviet press, the better a person he must be. Because the papers said that I wasn't remorseful, the other prisoners realized that I wasn't an informer or provocateur. They were impressed that I was writer. Of course, they had never read any of my books. They probably would have been horrified if they had. But a writer who was imprisoned because of his books must have been writing the truth. So they treated me very well. " (G, 157)