A voice from the chorus

Format:

Book

Title:

A voice from the chorus

Uniform Title:

Golos iz khora. English

Author:

Tert͡s, Abram, 1925-1997.

ISBN:

9780374285005

Edition:

1st ed.

Publication Information:

New York : Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976.

Physical Description:

xxiii, 328 pages ; 22 cm

General Note:

Translation of Golos iz khora.

Summary:

Andrei Sinyavsky, who writes under the pseudonym of Abram Tertz, has been called by Saul Bellow "one of the most intelligent, most original, and most brilliant of contemporary writers". A noted Russian dissident, he was incarcerated from 1966 to 1971 in Soviet forced labor camps for allowing some of his most satirical writings to be smuggled out of Russia and published in the West. This extraordinary literary work is Sinyavsky's prison memoir. Based on letters to his wife, the diary includes Sinyavsky's meditations on religion, sex, art, literature, and myths - the inner world to which he removed himself to escape from the degradation of prison. Interjected into these thoughts, however, are random snatches of prisoners' conversations - a "chorus" of their tales, legends, songs, and curses that evoke the horror and spiritual desolation of their existence. The result is at once an oblique evocation of prison life, a celebration of literature and art, and a tribute to the endurance of the human spirit. Originally published in 1976, A Voice from the Chorus is now available with a new preface from the author.

Personal Subject:

Tert͡s, Abram, 1925-1997.

Tert͡s, Abram, 1925-1997-Diaries.

Tert͡s, Abram, 1925-1997-Imprisonment.

Subject(s):

Russian literature -- Translations into English.

Authors, Russian -- 20th century -- Biography.

Dissenters -- Soviet Union -- Biography.

Political persecution -- Soviet Union.

Forced labor -- Soviet Union.

Geographic Term:

Soviet Union

Genre:

collective biographies.

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Salem Main Library	891.78 Terts 1976	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

Based on the letters Sinyavsky wrote to his wife during his incarceration in a succession of forced-labor camps, A Voice from the Chorus ranks with the famous testimonies Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn dispatched from their ""houses of the dead."" Though by no means as painful in its depiction of prison life, this ""writer's diary"" has a haunting, totally affecting quality, holding the reader with the astuteness of its comments on art and character and the exemplary, strangely serene spirit with which Sinyavsky accepted his terrible fate. Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years in Siberia for having secretly published ""dissident"" works in the West under the pseudonym Abram Tertz. His ""revenge"" here is to say nothing whatever about his oppressors, but everything about the humanist and religious culture their regime denies him and his countrymen. With lucidity and compression (there is a matchless three-page summary of Hamlet), Sinyavsky ranges from Russian fairy tales to Matisse, from Rembrandt to Poe and Pushkin, from church architecture to the Apollo Belvedere. A memorable and unique document. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.