# Andrei Sinyavsky Soviet writer and critic (1925–1997) who published fiction and criticism in the West under the pen name **Abram Tertz**, starting in 1959 with the essay *On Socialist Realism* and the novella *The Trial Begins*. In September 1965 he and fellow writer Yuli Daniel were arrested. In February 1966 they were convicted of "anti-Soviet agitation" in the first Soviet trial of writers for their literary work, and Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years of hard labor. He served his time in Dubravlag, a camp of the [[Gulag]] system in Mordovia, and was released in 1971. In 1973 he emigrated to France, where he taught Russian literature at the Sorbonne. In 1978 he and his wife, Maria Rozanova, founded the Russian-language journal *Sintaksis*, which argued for pluralism in art and politics. His books include *A Voice from the Chorus* (1973), drawn from his letters to his wife from the camp, and the autobiographical novel *Goodnight!* (1984). He died near Paris on February 25, 1997. ## Why it's on the map Sinyavsky and Daniel refused to plead guilty at a time when Soviet political defendants were expected to confess, and that refusal helped spark the Soviet human-rights movement. He looks back on the trial, the camp and the émigré world that followed in his 1982 essay *[[Dissent as a Personal Experience]]*, which Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer draw on in *[[On Courage]]* (2026). > [!note] Stub > This is a short entry that hasn't been fully written yet. ## Related pages - [[Dissent as a Personal Experience]] · [[On Courage]] - [[Samizdat]] · [[Show Trials]] · [[Gulag]]