caped from Spain at the end of the Civil War, Saila, Sender’s alter ego, observes that nature is composed of an infinite number of spheres or spheroids. This is true in the infinitely small (atoms), and in the infinitely large (planets, suns, the entire universe). By analogy with observable physical phenomena, Saila imagines that moral life is likewise “spheri-cal,” unified but showing two sides or two faces. As day is the other side of night and sound the other side of silence, so hate is the other side of the hate-love sphere, good the other side of evil; even death is only the complementary side of life. Thus, Saila reasons, death does not exist, and this idea becomes the fundamental thesis of the book.
To support his thesis of the nonexistence of death, Sender elaborated in The Sphere—
and in other works as early as La noche de las cien cabezas (the night of one hundred heads), for example—his theory of hombría and the “persona.” The “persona” is the human mask, the individualization of one’s personality, which begins at birth, or soon thereafter, and grows throughout life—human self-consciousness. It is temporal and fears
death. On the other hand, hombría, or “man-ness,” is a mystical essence that endows humans with eternal worth; it is a person’s essential self and lives in the unconscious. Upon the death of the individual, it joyfully returns to its source, the Great All or the Great Nothing.
Overladen with metaphysical musings and poetic and symbolic meaning, The Sphere
loses the reader in a labyrinth of levels, dimensions, and meanings to the detriment of nar-208
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rative force and direction. As a novel, it fails if a novel is to be judged by traditional criteria—narrative interest, character creation, sense of place, and so on. Perhaps such criteria should not be applied; nevertheless, The Sphere is notable for its originality and density of ideas, and it is a key work in understanding Sender’s self-made philosophy or what, in all seriousness, amounted to his private religion.
Requiem for a Spanish Peasant
Requiem for a Spanish Peasant (originally titled Mosén Millán) is perhaps the most widely read of Sender’s novels, at least in the Spanish-speaking world, where it has undergone numerous reprintings in Mexico, Argentina, and Spain; an English-Spanish bilin-
gual edition was issued by Las Americas in New York in 1960. A short novel, it is proba-
bly Sender’s most perfectly constructed work.
In an unnamed Aragonese village, Mosén Millán, a priest, waits in the sacristy to per-
form a requiem Mass for Paco, a peasant unjustly executed one year earlier by Nationalist forces in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. This period of waiting while the church bell tolls, calling the villagers to the Mass, lasts about twenty minutes and constitutes the novel’s primary plane of action. On this plane, nothing happens except for the arrival of the three men most responsible for Paco’s execution, the coming and going of the acolyte (who occasionally recites fragments of a ballad recounting Paco’s life and death), the discovery of Paco’s colt in the sanctuary and its subsequent ejection, and in the end the
priest’s moving to the chancel and beginning the Mass—with no one except the acolyte
and the dead man’s chief enemies (all wealthy) present, while the villagers absent them-
selves in mute protest against the priest’s role, ambiguous and unintentional as it may have been, in the events that led to Paco’s execution.
While waiting in vain for people to come to the Mass, the priest in a series of flash-
backs reconstructs the story of Paco—the second plane of action—his baptism, child-
hood, adolescence, marriage, protest against an unjust feudal landholding system, cap-
ture, and execution. Past and present are thus skillfully woven together while the ballad recited by the acolyte and interspersed throughout the narrative comes to create what
Peñuelas calls a third plane, a legendary one beyond the confines of time.
The structure of Requiem for a Spanish Peasant, with the priest and his memories as the focal point, provides it with remarkable unity and compactness; past and present are tightly but unobtrusively interwoven; the classical unities of time, place, and action are almost totally observed; social protest is implicit in the events themselves, related in a sober and objective tone, making such protest all the more effective. Here the author’s realism is at its best, and Paco emerges as both an individual and a symbol of the Spanish masses;
what happened to him in essence happened throughout Spain during the Civil War. At the
same time, Mosén Millán, for whom the events of the narrative constitute a deep personal tragedy, likewise comes to embody the inertia of the Spanish Church and its tragically
misguided intervention in secular affairs and lack of social conscience. The ballad, com-209
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posed anonymously by the villagers, is a projection of the author’s idealistic faith in the cause of a just social order. Noble also is the book’s vivid and memorable portrayal of the life and customs in a Spanish village early in the twentieth century, its humor—the rough humor of country folk—and its psychological realism in the characterization of Mosén
Millán.
Sender was a highly individualistic author who never adhered to any literary move-
ment (nor to any political movement or party, despite some flirtation with the communists in the early 1930’s) but who did not hesitate to take whatever seemed useful to him from any and all literary and philosophical movements (existentialism, for example), absorbing and adapting them to his own peculiar mode of expression. The voluminous totality of his production surprises and impresses not only by its great diversity but also by its amazing consistency and unity in outlook and vision as well as its unmistakable style and manner.
In a sense to be taken with adequate caution, Sender, like other great writers, wrote only one novel, though he wrote it in more than sixty versions, each revealing a different angle or perspective on that reality called life, the enigma of human existence.
Charles L. King
Other major works
short fiction: Novelas ejemplares de Cíbola, 1961 ( Tales of Cibola, 1964); Cabreri-zas Altas, 1965; Las gallinas de Cervantes, y otras narraciones parabólicas, 1967.
poetry: Las imagenes migratorias, 1960; Libro armilar de poesía y memorias
bisiestas, 1974.
nonfiction: Viaje a la aldea del crimen, 1934; Counter-attack in Spain, 1937; Hernán Cortés, 1940; Mexicayotl, 1940; Examen de ingenios: Los noventayochos, 1961; Valle-Inclán y la dificultad de la tragedia, 1965; Ensayos sobre el infringimiento cristiano, 1967; Tres ejemplos de amor y una teoria, 1969; Ensayos del otro mundo, 1970; El futuro comenzó ayer, 1975.
Bibliography
Devlin, John. Spanish Anticlericalism: A Study in Modern Alienation. New York: Las Americas, 1966. Sender is included in this study of anticlerical Spanish literature from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Includes a bibliography.
Eoff, Sherman Hinkle. “Ramón J. Sender: The Sphere (1949) and El lugar del hombre (1939).” In The Modern Spanish Novel: Comparative Essays Examining the Philosophical Impact of Science on Fiction. New York: New York University Press, 1961.
An analysis of two of Sender’s novels, The Sphere and A Man’s Place, is included in this study of Spanish literature.
Hart, Stephen M. Sender: “Réquiem por un campesino español.” Reprint. 1990. London: Grant & Cutler, 1996. A brief guide to Requiem for a Spanish Peasant designed to introduce the novel to graduate and undergraduate students. Includes a revised bibliography.
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King, Charles L. Ramón J. Sender. New York: Twayne, 1974. An introductory overview to Sender’s life, with analysis of his writings. One of the volumes in the Twayne World
Authors series. Includes a bibliography.
Lough, Francis. Politics and Philosophy in the Early Novels of Ramón J. Sender, 1930-1936: The Impossible Revolution. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996. An
analysis of novels published in the early to mid-1930’s, in which Sender expressed his
concern with the historical background of Spain’s social and political problems and
with the morality of the anarchists, communists, and other revolutionaries.
Perriam, Chris, et al., eds. A New History of Spanish Writing, 1939 to the 1990’s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. This history of almost sixty years of Spanish
writing includes a chapter, “Representing Ordinary Histories: Ramón José Sender and
Ignacio Aldecoa,” in which Sender’s work is discussed.
Trippett, Anthony M. Adjusting to Reality: Philosophical and Psychological Ideas in the Post-Civil War Novels of Ramon J. Sender. London: Tamesis Books, 1986. Trippett’s analysis of Sender’s work focuses on three novels: The Affable Hangman, Emen hetan, and Crónica del alba. Includes a bibliography.
211
ANDREI SINYAVSKY
Born: Moscow, Russia, Soviet Union (now in Russia); October 8, 1925
Died: Fontenay-aux-Roses, France; February 25, 1997
Also known as: Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky; Abram Tertz
Principal long fiction
Sad idzie, 1959 (in Polish; in Russian as Sud idyot, 1960; as Abram Tertz; The Trial Begins, 1960)
Lyubimov, 1963 (in Polish; Russian translation, 1964; as Tertz; The Makepeace Experiment, 1965)
Kroshka Tsores, 1980 (novella; Little Jinx, 1992)
Spokoynoy nochi, 1984 ( Goodnight! , 1989)
Other literary forms
Andrei Sinyavsky (sihn-YAHV-skee) is the author of an important book-length essay,
Chto takoe sotsialisticheskii realizm (1959; On Socialist Realism, 1960), published under the pseudonym Abram Tertz, in which he maintains with some humor that realism is not
the proper medium for the mythmaking inherent in a communist society. Because he be-
lieved that the grandiose neoclassicism inherited from eighteenth century Russian literature had also become inadequate, Sinyavsky proposed that the more appropriate genre
would be fantasy, and he himself became a writer of fantasy. His collection Fantas-
ticheskie povesti (1961; Fantastic Stories, 1963; also known as The Icicle, and Other Stories, 1963), including a novella and several short stories, is surrealistic, an excursion into the literature of the absurd. Mysli vrasplokh (1966; as Tertz; Unguarded Thoughts, 1972), a collection of aphorisms, came as a revelation to Sinyavsky’s Western readers, disclosing for the first time his profound faith as a Russian Orthodox believer.
In addition to these works, all of which were signed with the pen name Abram Tertz
and published abroad before his arrest, Sinyavsky has published a number of important
critical studies, including an introductory essay to Boris Pasternak’s Stikhotvoreniya i poemy (1965, 1976; verses and poems); an analysis of the nineteenth century writer Nikolai Gogol, V teni Gogolya (1975; in the shadow of Gogol); and a book on the poet Alexander Pushkin, Progulki s Pushkinym (1975; walks with Pushkin). Sinyavsky’s
Golos iz khora (1973; A Voice from the Chorus, 1976), largely composed of letters that he wrote to his wife during his six years in a labor camp, is in the tradition initiated by Fyodor Dostoevski and continued by such twentieth century writers as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The essay “Literaturnii protess v Rossii” (literary process in Russia), pub-
lished in the dissident journal Kontinent in 1976, is both a savage analysis of the Soviet mind and an extraordinary literary manifesto that transcends its occasion. Finally, Sinyavsky’s Little Jinx, with the Yiddish word tsores in the original title, serves as a re-212
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minder that he identifies with Jews as alienated people outside the normal parameters of Soviet existence.
Achievements
The true identity of the elusive writer Abram Tertz (a pen name taken from the hero of
an underworld ballad) became known to readers in the Soviet Union and the West only af-
ter his arrest in 1965 and subsequent imprisonment. Tertz turned out to be the gifted and sophisticated critic Andrei Sinyavsky. Prior to this catastrophe, Sinyavsky had mastered the extremely difficult task of keeping his two voices, that of the writer Tertz and the critic Sinyavsky, separate. Writing as Tertz, Sinyavsky produced fantastic stories and short novels, as well as the famous essay On Socialist Realism, a devastating critique of officially tolerated literary practice.
So accomplished a writer was Sinyavsky that his achievements were considered far su-
perior to those of his contemporaries, and it was even thought for a time that Tertz might be the brilliant prose writer Yury Olesha, from the 1920’s. Writing during a period when
Russian prose had only just begun to emerge from the stultifying limitations of Socialist Realism, Sinyavsky managed to continue the earlier ornamentalist prose tradition of
Andrey Bely, Alexey Remizov, and, ultimately, Gogol.
The sophistication of Sinyavsky’s worldview is equal to that of his style, for he pres-
ents society with all of its inherent contradictions, limitations, and absurdities, a far cry from the narrow vision peculiar to Socialist Realism and official Soviet ideology. With his stylistic brilliance and metaphysical depth, Sinyavsky has rightly come to be considered one of the finest Russian authors of the post-Stalin period.
Biography
Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky was born in Moscow in 1925 and grew up there. He
served in the Russian army during World War II. After the war, he was a student at the philological faculty of Moscow State University, one of the nation’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. He eventually became a candidate of philological sciences, a degree equivalent to a doctorate in the United States, and he obtained a position as a senior staff member with the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow. Sinyavsky immediately came to be regarded as a gifted critic; his book on postrevolutionary Russian poetry, Poeziya pervykh let revolyutsii, 1917-1920 (1964), coauthored with A. Menshutin, was considered one of the best studies of its time. His interests extended beyond literature to the plastic arts, and he collaborated with I. N. Golomshtok on a work about Pablo Picasso, Pikasso (1960).
Simultaneously with his activities as a critic, Sinyavsky pursued a secret career as a
fantasy writer, using the name Abram Tertz; it was the revelations of de-Stalinization in 1956 that converted him from establishment critic to dissident author. Madame Hélène
Peltier-Zamoyska, daughter of the French naval attaché in Moscow, had become close
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friends with Sinyavsky when they were students together at Moscow State University, and
it was she who arranged for the publication of the works of “Tertz” in the West. In spite of Sinyavsky’s discretion, he was unmasked in 1965. He was tried in February, 1966, with
fellow dissident writer Yuli Daniel, who had achieved fame in the West and notoriety in
the Soviet Union as Nikolay Arzhak. Sinyavsky was sentenced to six years in prison,
spending the time in a labor camp in Mordovia. He left the Soviet Union for France in
1973, thereafter teaching at the Sorbonne. The fine works that he has published since his departure attest Sinyavsky’s continued development as a writer.
Analysis
Any attempt to analyze Andrei Sinyavsky’s fiction must take the essay On Socialist
Realism into account, for the ideas developed in that essay provide the basis for his fictional works. Socialist Realism has been defined in the Soviet Union as a depiction of
“reality in it
s revolutionary development,” the favored official medium being an anemic
descendant of the so-called critical realism of the nineteenth century. This realism,
Sinyavsky believes, is inadequate for expressing the heroic purpose, a purpose essential to the ideology forming the basis for the Soviet state. The neoclassicism of the eighteenth century, normally the ideal vehicle for the purpose of the autocratic state, could not be used for contemporary Soviet literature; the debunking of the Stalinist myth and absence of a figure of similar stature robbed the Russians of anyone or anything to glorify. The only remaining method possible is one based on hypothesis instead of purpose, and that
method has to be fantasy. It is with this premise in mind that Sinyavsky has approached the novel.
The Trial Begins
Sinyavsky’s first novel, The Trial Begins, is set in Moscow during the last days of Joseph Stalin. It is ostensibly a realistic novel dealing with such well-known phenomena of the time as the “doctors’ plot,” which resulted in the stepped-up persecution of the Jews, the terrifying inner workings of the secret police, and the mass panic immediately following the death of Stalin. Sinyavsky’s principal characters include the public prosecutor
Vladimir Petrovich Globov, his idealistic son, Seryozha, and Seryozha’s friend, Katya.
Globov’s second wife, Marina, and Yuri Karlinsky, a defending attorney, eventually man-
age to become lovers behind Globov’s back. Globov’s former mother-in-law, Yekaterina
Petrovna, is an old Bolshevik idealist.
Globov is scheduled to prosecute the gynecologist S. Y. Rabinovich, who performed
an illegal abortion, but the woman in question is Globov’s beautiful and sexy but soulless wife, Marina. Rabinovich is Jewish, and his predicament is a transparent reference to Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign in the 1950’s. Globov’s life is complicated further by the fact that his adolescent son, Seryozha, has written a notebook calling for a new Communist society that will be free of the corruption that has stained the old one, a society in which those 214
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