State of Madness by Michael Reich

Author:Michael Reich [Reich, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061782664
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2009-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

CREATIVE MADNESS: THE CASE OF ANDREI SINIAVSKII

In his 1974 essay “The Literary Process in Russia,” the writer Andrei Siniavskii recalled a prison-cell exchange from the months leading up to his 1966 trial for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. Assuming the voice of his alter ego Abram Terts, Siniavskii noted parenthetically: “A cell-mate at the Lubianka—a stool pigeon—once told me frankly, ‘All you writers should be put in madhouses.’ And in some lofty, metaphysical sense, he was right.” The cellmate’s comment was proof, the author concluded, that “all writing, regardless of its attitude toward power, is forbidden, objectionable, and it is precisely in that lawlessness that all of the joy and all of the essence of writing lies.”1 The “lawless” or criminal nature of art was crucial to Siniavskii’s understanding of the writer’s place in society.2 Yet so was the notion that, in Soviet society specifically, what the writer had conceived as a voluntary “crime” against political or aesthetic norms might well be dismissed as involuntary. By the post-Stalin period, the cultural association between unsanctioned creativity and insanity had become so entrenched that even self-stylized literary “criminals” ran the risk of being declared mad.

Born in 1925, Siniavskii was a literary critic who taught at the Gor’kii Institute of World Literature and other respected institutions while publishing his scholarship in leading Soviet journals. But over the 1950s and early 1960s, he also produced more inflammatory works of fiction and nonfiction that he surreptitiously sent abroad to be published in tamizdat under the pseudonym Abram Terts.3 In September 1965, he was arrested along with the writer Iulii Daniel’, whose works had appeared in tamizdat under the pseudonym Nikolai Arzhak. The two authors were tried in February 1966 and sentenced to seven years’ hard labor and five years’ internal exile, in the case of Siniavskii, and five years’ labor and three years’ exile, in the case of Daniel’. In the months preceding the trial, physicians at the V. P. Serbskii Institute for Forensic Psychiatry declared both authors “imputable,” that is, able to evaluate and control their actions and therefore capable of standing trial. Yet when Siniavskii insisted during the trial itself that artistic expression should not be prosecuted, the court, its experts, and many critics and reporters accused him both implicitly and explicitly of simulating “nonimputability.” Siniavskii was perfectly sane, the argument went, but by clouding his hostile political agenda in arcane literary discourse that mimicked pathological states, and by claiming that even such literary discourse was irreducible to the adjudicating language of law, he was seeking to evade punishment like a common criminal who feigned insanity in order to sidestep prosecution.

The trial represented a turning point in Siniavskii’s life. Yet it also chimed with a major theme of his pretrial work. Under Joseph Stalin, Siniavskii suggested in his writings, the state had harnessed the Russian people’s natural artistry to promote a fantastically idealized vision of reality that accorded with Socialist Realist aesthetic doctrine. The result was what this chapter designates “creative madness”: a pathological tendency to perceive and represent life itself as if it were a malleable work of art.

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