Notes From The Underground

By R.Z. Sheppard

GOODNIGHT! by Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky)

Translated by Richard Lourie; Viking; 364 pages; $22.95

Communism continues to lend new meaning to the term "in the red." But while the West gloats, let us not forget to give credit where credit is due. Despite its dismal economic record, Communism was responsible for much of the best writing of the century. This was especially true in the Soviet Union, where revolution brought out the best in Boris Pasternak. Vladimir Nabokov said that had it not been for the Bolsheviks, he would have remained in Russia to become an obscure entomologist. Stalin inspired some of Osip Mandelstam's best lines, including the one that hastened the poet's downfall: "He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries."

The list is long; the space is short. So is memory. The end of the cold war means that it will be even easier to forget that both Czars and commissars took literature seriously enough to imprison writers. Andrei Sinyavsky's understanding of this singular honor surpasses irony. Twenty-five years ago, he and his close friend Yuli Daniel were convicted of smuggling their dissident writings to the West. Daniel, who spent five years in a labor camp, died after a stroke last year in Moscow. Sinyavsky served nearly six years behind the barbed wire. In 1973 the author and his wife immigrated to Paris where, he notes, he resides while still "living" in the Soviet Union.

Goodnight! is his proof, a rich digressionary story of crime, punishment, betrayal and resurrection. Aesthetically, as well as politically, the book is a celebration of release from conventional narrative and the miasma of the Soviet past. Translator Richard Lourie, currently at work on an oral history of the Soviet Union since the 1917 Revolution, succeeds in preserving a tone and rhythm he calls a "Slavic jazz solo on sax." Sinyavsky does riffs on himself as a student, critic, son, husband and public enemy who, when he was a dissident living in the Soviet Union, signed his underground fictions "Abram Tertz."

By writing Goodnight! under his old pseudonym, Sinyavsky suggests that he harbors a residual defiance; by calling the book a novel, he reveals his belief that fiction is the best way to convey his homeland's surreal sprawl and his own headlong rush through history. At one point he compares himself to a waterfall, "falling from its precipitous height like a demon devoid of any faith."

Not quite. As a good old-fashioned modernist, Sinyavsky believes in the artist's need to break old molds. His innovation in this autobiography-as- novel is to turn the stream of consciousness into a cataract.

The energy is impressive. So is the tone, varying between the fatalism of Hamlet and the idealism of Don Quixote. "It turns out that we are born for prison," writes Sinyavsky. "And yet all we think of is freedom, escape . . . Escape, even if it fails, is a component part of any poem. And if we take a large view, it is part of any human creation. Escape is our crowning glory."

Readers not familiar with Sinyavsky's style or the content of his life may have difficulty with the half-submerged facts. He was born into an affluent family in 1925. His father, who appears in the book as a brilliant though ineffectual figure out of a Chekhov play, was a revolutionary but not a Bolshevik. He was individualistic and something of an eccentric pragmatist. While waiting to be drafted during World War I, he practiced writing with his left hand in case he lost his right.

The younger Sinyavsky's preparations for an uncertain future were plodding by comparison. After World War II, he studied Russian literature at Moscow State University. During the early '50s he held a research job at the Gorky Institute of World Literature. But then, in 1956, the scholar-critic secretly wrote his fanciful Tertz stories, which were published abroad in 1959. It took five more years before the authorities discovered Tertz's real identity, arrested Sinyavsky and made him the first Soviet writer imprisoned for expressing opinions through fictional characters.

These and other episodes are presented out of order because, writes Sinyavsky, "the past cannot be grasped in sequence." Realism, too, is all thumbs. In order to re-create the bizarre atmosphere of his KGB interrogation, the author restages the experience as a one-act farce. Karl could have been one of the Marx Brothers. Some typical dialogue between writer and inquisitor:

"I: You don't beat people any more. You used to, you know. And not just beatings -- torture . . .

HE: Used to when?

I: Well, under Stalin.

HE: What Stalin was that?"

The dictator's toxic phantom pervades the book, which is the literary incarnation of Sinyavsky's public and private life. He admits that in 1948 he was asked by agents of the KGB to woo a fellow student, the daughter of a French naval attache. He complied without knowing their purpose or even the extent of his own motives. Years later, Sinyavsky put the intrigue to good use by enlisting the Frenchwoman to help smuggle his writings to the West.

Now, bootlegging facts in the diplomatic pouch of fiction, Sinyavsky demonstrates the range of his virtuosity and literary cunning by echoing some Russian masters: Gogol of the satiric Dead Souls, Dostoyevsky of the subversive Notes from Underground, Turgenev of the pastoral Fathers and Sons, Nabokov of the evocative Speak, Memory. It is a special tradition, one in which publish or perish could have just as easily meant publish and perish.