Goodnight!

Goodnight! (1989) is a novel by Soviet writer and undercover political dissident Andrei Sinyavsky. Sometimes alternatively published under the pseudonym Abram Tertz, which Sinyavsky used to protect his identity, the novel is based on his betrayal, prosecution, and prison sentence, which brought him to a Soviet labor camp. Written after his emancipation and emigration to France, the novel traces his intellectual and artistic development as a response to Europe’s changing political conditions during the Cold War.

Goodnight! begins in the last years of the regime of Soviet autocrat Joseph Stalin. It was then that Sinyavsky took on the pseudonym Tertz, while studying 20th-century Russian literature at Moscow’s Gorky Institute of World Literature. Russian society was plagued with a crippling paranoia. Millions of people, many innocent, toiled in the labor camps, and the Stalinist government was at work eroding Russia’s cultural and artistic institutions, allowing only Stalin’s state-approved genre of “socialist realism.” It was not until 1956, three years after Stalin’s death, that his oppressive policies started to be realized in public consciousness. Responding to fears that a new Stalin would replace the old, Sinyavsky, as Tertz, published two works in the West, which were met with critical acclaim. His 1960 essay, “On Socialist Realism,” attacked the still-surviving genre, arguing for an opposing, freer mode of art-making that might expand what was possible politically in Russia. An accompanying novel brought this philosophy into practice in an alternate, surreal Stalinist regime, depicting him in the last few months of his life while he wielded his political power to influence art.

In 1965, a KGB informant betrayed Sinyavsky. His charges were merely for speaking out against the Soviet regime, a category of speech with no protections in Russia. Sinyavsky was put through a deeply unfair trial in which many accusations were set against him—many of which were outrageously false, but which he was nevertheless unable to defend. He was sentenced to seven years of labor in the notorious Lubyanka gulag. He acknowledges that his descriptions of the gulag are just as countless other artists and writers recounted before him. More interesting to him were the psychological conditions of the camps, which fostered a dependency, even love, for his captors, resembling the classic Stockholm syndrome that would later be coined in the 1970s. For the first few months, his only human contact was with a single man, Lieutenant Colonel Pakhomov. Eventually, he was permitted conjugal visits with his wife, Maria. Because his room was bugged, he could only express his true thoughts through writing and had to destroy what he wrote before each time the guards checked in on him.



Sinyavsky states that his experiences in prison gave him deep insight into human nature at its worst extremes. Ironically, the suffering he endured gave him a profound sense of freedom. After his release in 1971, he and his wife were allowed to leave Russia. They made their way to France and never returned. Sinyavsky ends his novel with an account of two of his most impactful friends. The first, a childhood friend named Seryozha, became the man who betrayed him to the KGB along with a handful of others. The second was Helene, the daughter of the French naval officer whom he met in 1947 while studying at Moscow University. Helene first introduced him to Western literature and art; later, the KGB tried to coerce him to betray her. Goodnight! concludes with an emphasis on the moral and ideological complexity of the important figures in Sinyavsky’s life, blurring the lines between morals, politics, and art.