The Trial Begins

"Andrei Sinyavsky was a writer in the post-Stalin period. He was actually a friend of Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana (who we’ll come to: there are some internal connections in my choices). Sinyavsky got in trouble for his writing and was put on trial in the mid-1960s for publishing abroad without permission. The novella is set just before Stalin’s death. It’s at the height of the Stalin cult, which is all around. It’s fascinating, but it’s quite an unpleasant piece of work. All the adult characters are corrupt in their different ways. There’s a prosecutor and his horrible, on-the-make wife, Marina. Then there are two young people who take communism seriously, but the trouble is that they then draw conclusions that are not acceptable to the regime. One of them, Seryozha, is the son of the prosecutor and finds himself arrested and under interrogation for his views, which he tries to explain. There is a magnificent moment in the book when the prosecutor is talking to the young, idealistic boy, and Seryozha refers to himself as being under investigation. And the prosecutor takes him to the window and says, ‘Look out there, those people on the street. Those are the people who are under investigation. You have been convicted.’ The whole point is that the judicial process is a farce. So I chose this book in part because it fits with my theme of the death of Stalin, but also because of this quality of… it alienates you. The language is spare. You read it and you have difficulty identifying with anybody because, other than the two young people, they’re all so unpleasant. This is a considerable literary work, but not one that you would take to bed and read for a pleasant experience. Perhaps I shouldn’t say that if I’m recommending it for people to read! The Doctors’ Plot is in there. It’s hard to reproduce the convoluted plot, but the prosecutor’s wife, Marina, has gotten pregnant when she didn’t want to. She only cares about her looks and her attractiveness, so she has an illegal abortion. Simultaneously, the prosecutor is prosecuting a doctor, who is strongly identified as Jewish in the way he’s presented, for performing illegal abortions. It doesn’t say, ‘This is about the Doctors’ Plot,’ but we have a Jewish doctor accused of doing this thing that, if not the prosecutor, at least his wife has connived in. So that’s how it fits in. Sinyavsky wasn’t identified as a dissident. He was a member of the Union of Soviet Writers and was working in the Institute of World Literature. But reading what he writes, you cannot feel that he was a happy Soviet citizen who was looking forward to the advent of socialism. No, you must feel that, privately, he wasn’t too happy. He probably got angrier and more hostile as a result of being prosecuted. But I think he had to have been, at the very least, a very cynical member of the Union of Writers. That’s a privileged status. It both acknowledges you’re a writer and admits you to elite privileges."