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PARTISAN REVIEW
Golden Age when all was everything. A fragment of metamorphosis."
Still, Siniavsky knows what he is talking about and therefore not only
finds the way into that maze of fascinating paradoxes which is the
essence of art but is also at home in it. A believer in the moral
seriousness of art, he will also say: "Getting up to every imaginable
trick, writing about everything on earth, art is in fact concerned solely
with its own appearance, with admiring its self-portrait." A fanatic of
truth in art, Siniavsky will occasionally suggest that art is mere make–
believe and illusion after all. There are some aphorisms which present
the artist as "the man with subtle sleight of hand," yet without a doubt
Siniavsky a lso pelieves in the ultimate supremacy of religious art.
Siniavsky is fascinated by fairy tales "as a manifestation of pure
art, perhaps the very first instance of art detaching itself from real life. "
On the other hand, he admits that he cannot overcome an inclination
"to
regard fairy tales as information about something real": he seems to
believe in Jungian archetypes, mankind's collective memory, and,
altogether, he is rather fond of anthropological speculation, for
instance, the discourse on effigies and mummies. Yet all of Siniavsky's
aphorisms on art seem to have this common denominator: "Art is not
the representation, but the transfiguration of life." Ironically, the
theory and practice of Socialist Realism, which Siniavsky has com–
bated not onl y in his classic "On Socialist Realism" (1959) and the
piece discussed here, but even in many of his reviews and essays
published lega ll y in the Soviet Union, fall within this definition, for
do not Socialist-Realist critics fulminate against bourgeois "pseudo–
objectivism" and advocate an art which will "transform life"?
In
a way,
this is the famous Dobroliubov-Dostoevsky controversy all over again.
Both sides believe that their particular transfiguration of reality has
prophetic power. Like Dostoevsky, Siniavsky is an avowed idealist and
mystic. He believes that "absoluteness is the only criterion of a writer's
word," yet will never relinquish art's claim to involvement and leader–
ship in the affairs of the world. Socialist Realism, as Dobroliubov
before, does the reverse: it will take its cue from whatever political end
it must serve, then claim the status of "art" for its product. Both will
have their cake, and eat it, too.
Next to art, time is perhaps Siniavsky's main subject. Life in a
prison camp produces some puzzling perspectives. "Time goes more
slowly here," so slowly that it is perceived in the same way as space:
"You seem to be walking through it."
It
seems
to
be precisely this
fusion of space and time which eventually causes Siniavsky to chal –
lenge the authority of
chronos
(historical time) and to break through
