Max Hayward
THE MOSCOW TRIAL
The Defendants
Both are aged about forty, both are married with children,
both are veterans of Wprld War II. Andrei Donatyevich Sinyavsky is a
Russian; Yuli Markovich Daniel is a Jew-probably the son of the
Yiddish short-story writer Mark Daniel-Meerovich, who died in 1940.
Sinyavsky has a considerable public reputation in Moscow intellec–
tual circles as a teacher, scholar and critic. He is a person of unusually
wide literary culture with a special interest in the history of art. His
hobby is traveling in the north of Russia to look at the old wooden
churches there. His major work is a book on the poetry of the early
revolutionary years. The French scholar Michel Aucouturier reports
(Tribune de Geneve,
February 8, 1966) that Sinyavsky once told
him
that, for him, "destalinization" meant above all a return
to
the creative
vigor unleashed by the Revolution. In his first work published abroad
under the pseudonym Abram Tertz he wrote: "The image of the
Revolution is as sacred, both to those who took part in it and
to
those
who were born after it, as the image of a dead mother." His views are
certainly nonconformist, but there is nothing in his published work
to
suggest that he is anti-Soviet or "counter-revolutionary" in any reason–
able definition of these terms. He is not a Marxist and, in his final plea
at the trial, he said that he wrote from an "idealist" (in the philosophical
sense) point of view. Nonacceptance of Marxism or materialism is not
a crime in the Soviet Union. Belief in Marxism, or lip service to it, is in–
cumbant on Party members, and is urged in other citizens, but that is all.
In his general philosophy Sinyavsky is close to Pasternak and in his
Note:
This article is based on a lecture given at the State University of New
York, Stoneybrook, L.I. It was written before I had seen the transcript of the
trial, published in the
N. Y. Tim'es Magazine,
April 17, 1966.
