Andrei Sinyavsky; Dissident Russian Writer

Andrei Sinyavsky, the Russian writer whose 1966 imprisonment for anti-state activity marked the foundation of the Soviet dissident movement, has died. He was 71.

Sinyavsky, who wrote under the pseudonym Abram Tertz, died Tuesday of cancer in Paris, where he had lived since 1973.

Publishing satirical novels in France, Sinyavsky established his reputation as a writer in the West during the brief period of liberalization under Nikita Khrushchev.

But he was arrested for those “anti-Soviet works,” along with fellow writer Yuli Daniel, in September 1965. Their trial, which was closed to all but senior Communist Party and KGB officials, caused world outcry. Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years of hard labor, Daniel to five.

The trial was widely seen as a landmark in the campaign of cultural isolation and repression carried out under Leonid Brezhnev as well as the starting point of the Soviet dissident movement that produced luminaries such as Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky.

Sinyavsky was born in Moscow on Oct. 8, 1925, and his early career bore all the signs of a success story within the Soviet system. He fought in World War II before writing a dissertation on Maxim Gorky in 1952. He was appointed assistant professor at the Institute of World Literature at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, where he wrote his first novel, “The Circus,” in 1955.

But it was his access to publishing houses abroad, gained through French friends he made during his time at Moscow University, that brought him to the authorities’ attention.

Sinyavsky was well aware of the risks he was taking. In an essay published after his trial and incarceration, he described himself as living in an “infinitely dangerous and unreal situation, subject to tough measures aimed at punishing and destroying” him.

After his release from prison camp, Sinyavsky moved to Paris with his wife, Maria Rozanova, and their son and became a professor of Russian literature at the Sorbonne. He and his wife founded Sintaksis, a literary review, in 1978.

In France, he released his Potma labor camp memoirs, “A Voice From the Chorus,” in 1973 and another work written during his imprisonment, “Walks in Pushkin,” in 1976.

His most famous work, “Good Night,” a novel loosely based on his life, was published in 1984.

His last book was “Ivan the Simple-Minded” about Russian folklore, published in 1991.