A Voice from the Chorus

A Voice from the Chorus by Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky). hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780374285005.

"A Voice from the Chorus" is an extraordinary literary work produced by an important Russian dissident during the years (1966-1971) he was held in a succession of Soviet forced-labor camps. Andrei Sinyavsky had been convicted of "distributing anti-Soviet propaganda," i.e., allowing his articles and Picasso-esque stories and novellas to be published in the West under the pseudonym Abram Tertz, which he also uses for this book. Based on letters written to his wife, "A Voice from the Chorus" is a writer’s diary. There are day-to-day jottings, mostly meditative, on religion, sex, art, literature, myths, and folklore, interspersed with the prisoners’ conversation, often no more than a sentence or two – their tales, legends, songs, even their curses are recorded. There are long passages on writers and artists and their work. But these letters contained nothing the prison-camp censors could specifically object to – no complaints about prison life, and nothing political - and so were passed, mailed, and preserved by Mrs. Sinyavsky. [Translated from the Russian by Kyril FitzLyon and Max Hayward]