MAX HAYWARD
heroes.... The statements by Sinyavsky and Daniel that the
author is not identical with his heroes were irrelevant. The
court proved beyond any shadow of doubt that the anti-Soviet
utterances of the heroes are in this instance exactly the same as
those of the authors.
From the reports it is clear that the prosecution "proved" this
assertion by the same method employed before the trial by Eremin and
Kedrina, namely by persistently quoting out of context. The Italian
newspaper
Il Giorno
published on February 24 what appears to be an
authentic, though garbled and shortened, version of Sinyavsky's final
plea to the court.
1
(This plea was not published in the S.oviet press and
he was asked to make it without warning, two days before he ex–
pected to. According to the
Il Giorno
text he apologized in advance for
the resulting incoherence.) He talks despairingly of how he and his
fellow accused were beating their heads against a brick wall in trying
to establish the legitimacy, without which literature would be impos–
sible, of an author's creating a wide range of characters with whom he
is not necessarily
to
be identified either in character or sentiment.
It
was
as though Shakespeare were to be identified with Macbeth, or Dosto–
evsky with his "man from the underground." In
The Trial Begins,
his
very unpleasant character, the Public Prosecutor, Globov, who is in–
volved in the anti-Semitic campaign of the last years of Stalin's life,
says such things as: "Rabinovich is a scoundrel, like all Jews." This
was evidently produced by the prosecution at the trial as irrefutable
evidence that Sinyavsky was an anti-Semite himself. A passage at the
end of
The Makepeace Experiment
was quoted to prove that he was
against mothers. In fact, when read in context, the passage is a moving
defense of mothers. In the last chapter of the novel, when the city of
Lyubimov has been devastated by its lunatic dictator, it
is
the old
women who come
to
pray for the souls of the fathers and of the sons,
of the living and of the dead. Since they are ancient and wizened they
are compared to "old worm-eaten forest mushrooms." In the eyes of
the prosecution this image was a slander on mothers and motherhood in
general.
The third unusual feature of the trial is that the accused did not
plead guilty. This evidently took the prosecution by surprise and may
partly explain the very maladroit handling of the trial, and the gingerly
way in which it was reported by
Pravda.
According to Tass, the two
had admitted their guilt during the preliminary investigation, but they
withdrew this confession of guilt in court.
Of
course this would never
1.
Its authenticity is now fully borne out
by
the full text of the transcript.
