Goodnight! [antikvár]

Introduction I n an unreal time, autobiography is necessarily fiction. And no epoch was more bizarrely unreal and all-too-brutally real than that of Joseph Stalin. His reign began sometime in the late twenties and came to an end sometime in early March 1953. Ambiguity clings to both Stalin's rise and his demise, appropriate for a man who, as an up-and-coming revolutionary, was once described as a "gray blur." Andrei Sinyavsky is a son of the Stalin years. He was born in 1925, the year after the death of Lenin, when Stalin was already busy ensuring his own ultimate succession. By the time Andrei was four, Stalin was securely in power; his fiftieth birthday was celebrated with megalomaniacal splendor, launching the cult of the personality. Sinyavsky's childhood and youth coincided with collectivization and the great terror, both of which are echoed in this book. He came to manhood and the crisis that made him an artist during the final flowering of Stalinism. As that growth withered in a final, poisonous bloom, the key events in Sinyavsky's hfe took place. The first shock came in 1948, when the secret police began summoning Sinyavsky, seeking to enlist his aid "as a good Soviet" in a plot against a friend of his, Hélene Peltier-Zamoyska, the daughter of the French naval attaché in Moscow. Sinyavsky says that this "may have been the most serious crisis in my life, after