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MAX HAYWARD
Madame Kedrina's interpretation of the passage in question, why did
the prosecution not demand the maximum sentence for Arzhak? In
fact it was the other way around. The maximum sentence of seven years
was demanded and given
to
Tertz, in whose work there is no element,
discoverable by Kedrina or anybody else, of sedition in the legal sense.
Arzhak received a lesser sentence of five years.
The rest of Kedrina's article is concerned not with proving moral
or criminal delinquency (except for a new charge of anti-Semitism
against Tertz-this is backed up by attributing to the author the anti–
Semitic remarks he put into the mouths of anti-Semitic characters),
but with demonstrating that the two authors are no good anyway. Their
work is described as primitive and boring, and Sinyavsky in particular
is dismissed as a fourth-rate hack whose work is heavily influenced by
certain pre-revolutionary pornographers. He has also allegedly plagiarized
Kafka, Saltykov and Sollogub. We need not bother to take issue with
Madame Kedrina on the literary merit of Tertz, but it should be noted
that she attacks him in a way which is clearly calculated to alienate
the sympathies of Soviet writers who know Sinyavsky as a critic of dis–
tinction. The language of her attack is offensive and she describes both
writers as heirs of Smerdyakov, one of the vilest creations in all of Rus–
sian literature.
The Trw
The trial opened on February 10, 1966, and went on for four
days.
There were several unusual features about it and in one respect
it was unprecedented-it was the first time in the history of the Soviet
Union that writers had been put on trial
for what they had written.
Many Soviet writers had been imprisoned, banished, executed or driven
to silence, but never after a trial in which the only evidence against
them was their literary work. The poet Gumilev was shot for taking
part in a revolutionary conspiracy. Boris Pilnyak was publicly denounced
for publishing a work abroad in the late twenties, but he was not tried,
and when he eventually was arrested and disappeared in 1937 no charges
were ever specified. Isaac Babel was arrested in 1939, not apparently
for anything he had written- he had written scarcely anything for a num–
ber of years-but presumably for nonliterary reasons which were never
revealed. Akhmatova and Zoshchenko were denounced in 1946 for writ–
ing in an anti-Soviet spirit, but they were never tried or subjected to
any administrative sanctions. Boris Pasternak, who published
Dr. Zhivago
abroad as a deliberate act of defiance, was attacked and hounded, and
