Abram Tertz, one of the most important writers to emerge in the Soviet Union since World War II, came to prominence in 1959 when On Socialist Realism was published in the West. It was the first important critique of the central dogma of Soviet literature. It arrived with a novel. The Trial Begins, which was published in 1960. Other books followed these into the West, until in 1965 a respected literary scholar at the Gorky Institute, Andrei Sinyavsky was arrested, revealed to be Abram Tertz, tried, and sentenced to seven years in a forced labor camp.

The Trial Begins and On Socialist Realism

Literature & Fiction

Abram Tertz

History & Criticism

University of California Press

The persecuted Soviet author presents his latest novel--an autobiographical attempt to explain his 1965 trial and prosecution for writing fiction under a pseudonym--as a powerful indictment of the Soviet state

Goodnight!

Richard Lourie

Andrei Sinyavsky

Viking Adult

Little Jinx is a canny mockery of the Soviet world. Its author, Andrei Sinyavsky, a respectable member of the USSR's Institute for World Literature, was exposed in 1965 as the real author of a series of irreverent essays and fantastic tales that had been circulating under the nom de plume Abram Tertz. After five years in a labor camp he immigrated to Paris. Little Jinx is the tale of a man named Sinyavsky, a literary hack and runt who clumsily survives repression and anti-Semitism but also brings misery to those around him. When this "little jinx" inadvertently causes the death of his five brothers, he is consumed by a guilt that seems universal in his society.

Little Jinx

Contemporary

Northwestern University Press

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Books by Abram Tertz