Satire may lead to moral pronouncements. In Andrej Sinjavskij's
writing it leads to metafiction, especially in its gravitation toward play
and display (Griffin, 71). In Sinjavskij's intertextual excesses, satire
is carried out in layers of discourse where literary conventions are
exposed for what they are. While telling a story, Sinjavskij flaunts the
writer's consciousness, pointing to artifice, parading the shared
territory of fiction
and reality.
Not unlike
Nabokov, he makes a puzzle of this territory, forcing the reader to question
what lies inside and outside of fiction.
Using fantasy as an
alternate world, he plays an obvious fabrication against the historical events
of his day. In the process he shows that this juncture has much in common with
Stalin's world, that is, with fiction and reality
(Sinjavskij,
2, 37). In the following study I would like to discuss the intertextual
features of Sinjavskij's writing, exploring further how play and display not
only result in parody, but also in constructing and deconstructing illusions,
unmasking the foundation of characters and, in general, the conventions of
realism.
Sinjavskij's satire develops from Juvenalian and Horatian modes
to Menippean, that is, from praise and blame to witty innuendo, deploying
philosophy and fantasy together with historical allusions and a range of
voices. What appears to be a fragmented world is actually a patchwork of
texts, some of which are introduced for their own sake, others of
which are reframed or turned upside down. To problematize the source and
the center of discourse, Sinjavskij introduces Terc,
who seems
to exist both inside and outside the text. In Tercian,
befriending a character who
seems to represent Sinjavskij. In Tercian
pose, this time playing the part of a
narrator who is at odds with another narrator, arguing about the presence of
still another narrator on a higher plane. This Pirandellist intertextual play
and display amounts not only to a peek at the back stage
of
writing, but also at ontological and epistemological clowning.
Sinjavskij's flat characters (party officials, Jewish intellectuals, KGB
operatives, writers, deceivers and outsiders) are in full service to parody.
Moreover, they are indices to well-known texts in the media, on stage, in the
streets—the subjects of stories both printed and told. They make up true
community
baggage, the contents of which Sinjavskij needs in
order to mark a recognizeable satiric trail through fantastic circumstances.
Such indicies, of course, are no different from Sinjavskij's numerous
citations and allusions to authors (Pu&shachek;kin, Gogol&soft;, Lermontov,
Dostoevskij, Majakovskij, Gor&soft;kij), wherein he relies on the reader to
sense givens,
and, more important, to understand that reality
is more like a catalogue of texts rather than a canon.
After establishing the bearing of Sinjavskij's metafiction, I want to turn
to novel
exhibits the conventions
of a memoir. But while Sinjavskij fashions a sincere
narrative
tone, he also lays in blatent intertextual material such as a play, letters,
several poems, folk tales, historical tracts, dialogues and other conventions
of illustration and dramatization. Above all, he demonstrates a play of
autobiographical fiction (characteristic of his pre-prison writing) and
fictional autobiography (characteristic of his post-prison writing), as if
creating a text that hesitates between fiction and confession. In this mosaic
of mitigation, Sinjavskij provides another form of
in-betweeness
for his wit, permitting the reader to see that
candor and camouflage may come from the same shed.