228
MAX HAYWARD
introduction
to
Pasternak's collected verse, which appeared shortly
before his arrest, he shows his sympathy for the Pasternakian scale of
values. He never concealed his attachment
to
these values, and it was
symbolized by the fact that he was one of pallbearers at Pasternak's
funeral. There could have been no clearer public confession of faith.
In his fiction and essays published abroad-On
Socialist Realism,
The Trial Begins, Fantastic Tales, The Makepeace Experiment, Un–
guarded Thoughts
and
Pkhents-he
takes a stage further some of the
ideas implicit in the work published under his real name in the Soviet
Union. He had demonstrated his interest in modem art in a study of
Picasso (published in Moscow in collaboration with L. Golomoshtok-per–
haps the son of a Yiddish writer of this name-who, according to some
reports, is now under arrest for having refused to testify against Sinyavsky
at the trial) and much of his fiction is a conscious application of the sur–
realist technique to literature. Certainly there is much in his work which
would shock the susceptibilities of "right-minded" Soviet citizens. He
says "bloody" on the stage, and he pokes fun at such august institutions
as the police. But there is nothing seditious in any reasonably defined
legal sense.
Daniel-until his trial-was scarcely known in the Soviet Union,
where he had published nothing except occasional verse translations.
Under the pseudonym Nikolai Arzhak he published abroad four stories:
This is Moscow Speaking, The Hands, The Man from Minap
and
Atonement.
Only the first of these has so far appeared in English. It
is a fantasy rather on the lines of the Italian film
The Tenth Victim,
though the scene is set in the Soviet Union instead of in Western
Europe and America. Arzhak writes in a somber vein and his satire has
a bitterness which is absent from the writing of the more serenely good–
humored Tertz.
Ha.nds
is a particularly gruesome tale about an old
chekist,
and
Atonement
is the harrowing story of a man who goes mad
because he is wrongly suspected of having denounced people to the police
under Stalin.
Prelude
to
the Trial
The two men were 'arrested on September 13, 1965. Rumors of
the arrests began to reach the West at the beginning of October, and
Vigorelli, the Secretary-General of the European Community of Writers,
first raised the question in public, in the presence of Soviet delegates,
at a meeting of the organization in Rome on October 9. For the next
two months, numerous anxious inquiries, both public and private, from
leading Western writers and organizations were addressed
to
Kosygin,
