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PARTISAN REVIEW
lective farm in the Arctic Circle, ostensibly as a cure for "parasitism" but
actually for circulation of poems which declared their independence from
the official canon. Collecting Brodsky's poems and circulating them in
typed or hectographed copies became a cause for further trials and exiles
stretching on into the 1970s, from Gabriel Superfin to Efim Etkind. The
Siniavsky trial assumed a special importance, however, because a young
writer named Aleksandr Ginsburg managed to make stenographic notes
of the proceedings later circulated in
samizdat
and published abroad.
Siniavsky argued eloquently in his own defense for the integrity and
autonomy of a work of art, and although he lost his court case, the ar–
gument was nevertheless made successfully to a small but intensely atten–
tive public.
After completing his sentence, Siniavsky was allowed, even pushed, to
go abroad where, in Paris, he founded the still-interesting and important
journal
Sintaksis.
Unlike Solzhenitsyn, Siniavsky had no plan or determi–
nation to "save Russia," no claim to spiritual privilege other than that
implied in an affirmation of the importance of art and the significance of
its autonomy. A deeply religious man, he nevertheless questioned the link
between Orthodoxy and Russianness. His journal and the Solzhenitsyn–
oriented
Kontinent
were involved in frequent literary clashes. His own
book about the experience of the gulag,
A Voice from the Chorus,
makes
no claim to moral authority and neither offers a political message nor
displays the ambition of a comprehensive historicity. It is merely a
collection of "voices," of overheard fragments, and some of the author's
responsive musmgs.
I have mentioned Joseph Brodsky. As one of the most important
samizdat
poets of the 1960s, he served as well as a sort of "saving rem–
nant" of the major traditions of Russian poetry and of the modern Rus–
sian culture that had begun to emerge before the First World War. At a
crucial point in his life, he met Anna Akhmatova, who befriended him,
and he became one of a small group of Leningrad poets known as
"Akhmatova's orphans." She was not so much a direct poetic influence–
his sensibility and style were radically different from hers - as she was a
teacher, guide, and custodian of a cosmopolitan culture, an exemplar of
courage in isolation and adversity. Although he left Russia reluctantly,
and with the exile's fear of losing touch with what was vital in his lan–
guage, Brodsky was by temperament and stance a born exile. It gave his
poetic style a mordant objectivity and reinforced his artistic autonomy
and his resistance to being politically co-opted by any cause.
I cannot end without mentioning Andrei Amalrik, a gifted and
prophetic writer now too easily forgotten. In 1968 he wrote a small
book called,
Will the Soviet Uniol1 SUYlJive Until
1984?, which circulated
