H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Russia@h-net.msu.edu (March, 1999)


Andrei Sinyavsky.  _The Russian Intelligentsia_.  Trans. Lynn
Visson.  The Harriman Lectures.  New York:  Columbia
University Press, 1997.  x + 98 pp. Notes and index.  $19.95
(cloth).  ISBN: 0-231-10726-9.

Reviewed for H-Russia by Alan Kimball
<KIMBALL@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>, University of
Oregon


        Less about the Intelligentsia than by an Intelligent

As a contribution to the still ongoing scholarly debate on the
Russian intelligentsia, Andrei Sinyavsky's little booklet might
warrant little serious attention.  It is built from three lectures
sponsored by the W. Averell Harriman family and delivered at
Columbia University in New York City not long before Sinyavsky's
death.  The Russian intelligentsia is the subject of endless inquiry,
and we might not expect much gain from three lectures titled
"The Intelligentsia and the People", "The Intelligentsia and
Bread", and "The Intelligentsia and Democracy", running
only 82 pages.

Lynn Visson's translation from the Russian seems quite good.
I had considerable experience with Sinyavsky's Russian during
his appointment as Lindholm Professor at the University of Oregon
in 1994.  Sinyavsky's Russian was deceptively clear.  His
narrative moved along in a familiar colloquial pattern, yet glowed
with complex and striking ideas and images.  The glow
comes through Visson's Englishing of this great Russian writer.

A good "Index" guides readers to key words in the text and in the
notes. Not all publishers have the strength of character required
to index notes as well as text.  Three cheers for Columbia University
Press, despite the fact that some editor made the bad decision to
spell "Russian" on the title page with a reversed capital "R".  We
have grown used to this as a cartoon suggestion that Russians
don't know how to write very well.  Their "R's", like so many
other facets of their lives, are backward.

Some thoughtful person appended ten pages of "Notes" to the
text which help define some but far from all proper nouns and
to identify some but far from all quotes and literary references.
Some of the easy ID's are in the footnotes, Kaganovich for
example.  Many readers will feel the need to have ID's for Petr
Boborykin, Andrei Chernov, Kornei Chukovskii, Efim Etkind,
and Dmitrii Furman, to name a few.

Mark von Hagen, Director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia
University, introduced the lectures with a solid, brief outline of
Sinyavsky's important place in Russian letters.  One might fault
von Hagen only for not positioning Sinyavsky more solidly in the
Paris-based Russian emigre community and in the new
relationship to his homeland that Gorbachev's perestroika
allowed.  His and Mariia Vasil'evna Rosanova's apartment was a
destination point for many Russians coming abroad for the first
time in the late Gorbachev and early Yeltsin years.  Von Hagen
paid homage to the bibliography of Sinyavsky's fiction, but
neglected to inform his audience of Sinyavsky's role in the journal
_Sintaksis: Publitsistika, kritika, polemika_ (edited by his wife
Rozanova and published in Paris) and his participation in the
debates on Yeltsin's Russia in the Russian press since 1993.

Readers need also know that Sinyavsky and his wife traveled
several times back to Moscow beginning in 1992, visiting friends,
arguing, testing the old neighborhoods for good pirozhoks and
signs of change.  "During the last few years", he said in the
lectures, "my wife and I have spent a good deal of time in the
Lubyanka Prison archives reading through the files on my
case" (p. 78).  He overheard a fellow at a nearby table shout
out, "I didn't sign that!  I didn't sign that!"  Officials still would
not release key documents to Sinyavsky.

Sinyavsky's lectures cannot be understood without knowing
more about _Sintaksis_.  A good portion of the citations in the
lectures came from this journal.  For several years _Sintaksis_
provided a forum unavailable back home, not unlike the emigre
Alexander Herzen's _Golosa iz Rossii_ in the previous century.
The index to Sinyavsky's Columbia University lectures lists one
reference to the journal, but there are three of some importance
(pp. 9, 55, 70).  No footnote identifies the journal.

The article "1937" appeared earlier in _Sintaksis_. [1]  Compiled
by Sinyavsky with his friend and partner Efim Etkind, page after
page of photocopied text from Soviet newspapers were devoted
to this bloody year. Sinyavsky revealed that he and Etkind "noted
with sadness that all our writers had disgraced themselves.
Literally everyone.  Irate articles and articles with artistic twists,
by Olesha, Platonov, Zoshchenko, Iashvili, Babel, Tynianov, and
so forth, called for the destruction of the vermin, the enemies of
the people.  The letters signed collectively and published next
to these articles also included Zoshchenko, Paustovsky,
Antokolsky, and Pasternak among the slew of signatories"
(pp. 7-8).  Etkind was shocked as he went through clippings.
He briefly considered leaving some out, but most went in.
Sinyavsky identified one exception:  "Jewish poet Perets Markish
and his gory verses".  Sinyavsky said, "We felt sorry for his son,
Simon Markish, a friend from university days who is now a
professor at the University of Geneva" (p. 9).  There is no
footnote identifying Markish or son.

It would be unfortunate if a failure of footnotes or the editor's
introduction caused David Remnick in _New York Review of
Books_ (April 9, 1998) to offer the misinformed opinion that
Sinyavsky's lectures presented "deeply flawed judgments
based on surprisingly erratic observation", judgments "curiously
incomplete", and "analysis based on emotion, conspicuous
omission, disorientation, and anecdote".  Not everyone
understands how connected with the homeland this famous
exiled writer of fantastic fiction had become in his last years.
But, of course, he remained Sinyavsky/Tertz.  He did not
become Robert Kaiser or Hedrick Smith.

All that said, the book on its own still does not make a very big
splash in the sea of intelligentsia studies.  But the book should
not be taken this way, for two central reasons.  First, the author
is Andrei Sinyavsky and, second, the book is not really about
the Russian intelligentsia.

Sinyavsky was the author of famous works of fantasy, but he
was also the author of _Soviet Civilization_. [2]  In fact, certain
passages in the lectures (e.g., p. 60) are repeats of passages
found in _Soviet Civilization_ (p. 71).  Should we judge Sinyavsky
among the scholars of Russian cultural history?  I think not.
What should catch our attention here is the place of Sinyavsky
along that long skein of Russian thinkers who have agitated
themselves about "the intelligentsia and the people" because
they lived the problem, not because it was a subject that
interested them academically or journalistically.  Sinyavsky's
contribution here is not to the secondary literature on the
intelligentsia but to the primary documentation illustrative of
the tense relationship of the Russian intellectual elite and the
great mass of "half-educated" Russians. These late words of
Sinyavsky should be put in context, for example, with those of
Dostoyevsky at the Pushkin commemoration or of Blok in the
revolutionary year 1918.

In his lectures as Lindholm Professor at Oregon, he repeated
time and again, often provoking lively debate, that he did not
like civilization.  He considered it the enemy of "culture".  It
became clear that he was working with something like Wladimir
Weidle's notion of horizontal (folk) and vertical (elite) cultures.
He felt that Stalin had torn down the vertical and unleashed the
horizontal cultures.  In 1994 he repeated his somewhat arch
judgments on the working people earlier expressed in _Soviet
Civilization_, the section titled "The role and place of the
Intelligentsia" (pp. 134-42).  He observed that Party leadership
and those writers who supported them in the Stalin era were
"themselves mostly intellectuals.  But intellectuals who ... moved
over to the camp of the victorious class, from where they criticize
and denounce the intelligentsia" (p. 134).  Notice how at this point
he referred to "victorious class" rather than "victorious state".
He meant the working class, and to nail down his point he wrapped
up this chapter with a section titled "The Man of the Masses"
(pp. 142-52).

These passages ring with Ortega y Gasset's disgust for the
"revolt of the masses".  He characterized the simple working
person, the "new Soviet man" as a half-educated, assertive,
complacent, impudent, and arrogant ignoramus or "self-satisfied
slave" (p. 145).  The proletariat does not understand the
complexities and subtleties of life.  At least Lenin understood that
if the "lady cook" were to run the state, she would have to learn
how to govern. The lady cook would have to "transform herself
into a new-style intellectual capable of fielding complex
political questions" (p. 152).  Stalin was happy to encircle
himself with uncouth thugs.

The meaning of Yeltsin's attack on parliament and the reaction
of the "lady cooks" of the post-Soviet world pressured
Sinyavsky to resolve the tension lurking in all his thought on
these matters.  He loved the arcana of a highly educated literary
elite, but he also loved the simplicity of everyday folks.  He loved
Pushkin, but mainly in that everyday life way of just walking
around the block, shooting the breeze.  Now he saw that the
intelligentsia, even the "almost sacred" Dmitrii Likhachev,
could support Yeltsin's politics.  Was this because Yeltsin was
shooting at the people, not at the intelligentsia?  Was this
because Yeltsin was the designated creator of a new and better
purpose in Russian life?

In his first famous piece, "On Socialist Realism", Sinyavsky
wrote about the so-called  "superfluous man" and the threat
he posed to power and dominant concepts of "Purpose".
"He [the superfluous man] is neither for the Purpose nor
against the Purpose-he is outside the Purpose.  Now this
simply cannot be; it is a fiction, a blasphemy.  While the whole
world, having defined itself with regard to the Purpose, is
divided into two antagonistic camps, he feigns not to
understand this and keeps mingling his colors in vague and
ambiguous schemes.  [I take these last few words to be an
example of Sinyavsky's direct but glowing prose.]  He
proclaims that there are no Reds and no Whites but simply
people, poor, unfortunate, superfluous people...." [3]

If the lectures at Columbia were not really about the
intelligentsia, then what?  Perhaps they represent a movement
toward the "poor, unfortunate, superfluous people" as he sought
to resolve the tension in the phrase inherited from Aleksandr
Blok's 1908 essay "Narod i intelligentsia".  The lectures were
a reflection on the impact of a military attack on an elected
parliament.  After Yeltsin ordered the shelling of the "White House"
in October of 1993, a large portion of the intellectual elite of
Russia (and for that matter of the U.S. as well) applauded him.
(Remnick's newspaper suggested that Yeltsin attacked
parliament to defend democracy.)  This served to draw
Sinyavsky's attention to the massive deception and
exploitation carried out by Yeltsin and his supporters.  This
served to shed light on the pathos of Russian everyday life
observable both in the press and on several personal visits
home.

The authentic subject of the lectures is something like this,
 "A great emigre author returns to his native land in a time of
his erstwhile tormentors' comeuppance, but he is saddened by
what he sees".  The fullest articulation of his topic comes on
page 66:  "When I speak about the lust for power of today's
intelligentsia and of its guilt before the people, I am referring
only to the privileged part of the intelligentsia, what I call the
court and government intelligentsia: people who are well known."
These have been called "subcontractors to the authorities" (p. 68).
Sinyavsky quoted with approval Russian journalist Gleb
Pavlovskii's assertion that "Yeltsin" is a "collective
pseudonym" behind which what might be called Russia's
true "hard liners", these subcontractors, hide their mischievous
ways, protected by those great powers that support "Yeltsin"
with their own rather than Russia's interests at heart (p.77).
Pavlovskii is not identified in a footnote.

Many "Western" commentators could benefit from serious
further reflection along one line of thought suggested in the
lectures.  Sinyavsky was struck by the profound confusion of
democracy and market economics in the Russia of Gaidar,
Sachs and Aslund (pp. 29-31).  Sinyavsky's voice, here and
elsewhere, harmonizes with the choir of dissent in Yeltsin's
Russia, a choir which the U.S. readership does not often hear.
The Moscow reformer and critic of the intelligentsia, Boris
Kagarlitsky, has been very much in tune with Sinyavsky over
these years.

Two dramatic trans-personal events stunned Sinyavsky and
shaped his personal life.  First, Khrushchev's expose of Stalin
in 1956 revealed certain truths that set Sinyavsky on the path
of thought and action that soon produced his "On Socialist
Realism" and led to exile.  He had still a full life ahead of him.

The second event was Yeltsin's attack on parliament which
revealed certain truths about the intellectual elite of Russia and
the nature of the emerging post-Soviet "Civilization".  Where
was Sinyavsky headed after this second dramatic event?  We
cannot be sure, because he had only four more years of
life as Yeltsin mobilized his special forces against parliament
and famous intellectuals cheered him on.


Notes

[1]  _Sintaksis_, no. 19 (1987), pp.140-86.

[2]  Andrei Sinyavsky, _Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History_
(New York: Arcade Publishing, 1988).

[3] Andrei Sinyavsky/Abram Tertz, _"The Trial Begins" and "On
Socialist Realism"_  (Berkeley CA:1982), p. 190.

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