Trzy spotkania z Andriejem Siniawskim. Paryż – Genewa – Kraków (1987–1993)

Abstract

The above memoirs and literary essay talk about my three meetings with Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky (1927–1997), Russian writer and literary critic, who was widely known in the 1970s–1990s). Originally, Sinyavsky published under his own name in the USSR, but from 1959 his writings appeared illegally in the West under the pen name “Abram Tertz.” Sinyavsky-Tertz remained in exile in France from 1973 until the end of his life. The first part of my text discusses the contacts that the Krakow underground journal “Arka” and Andrzej Drawicz, the great Polish expert on Russia, established with Russian writers in exile living in Paris during the times of the iron curtain (primarily Irina Ilovayska-Alberti, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Vladimir Maksimov and Andrei Sinyavsky). I reconstruct from memory my first meeting with Sinyavsky and Maria Rozanova, his wife, at Fontenay-aux-Roses near Paris in 1987. During the writer’s lifetime, Rozanova assisted her husband in his editorial activities. In the second part of the essay I talk about my second meeting with the writer in Geneva in 1988, during the international conference on the Millennium of the Baptism of Kievan Rus’ organized by professor Georges Nivat. In the third and final part, I write about my third meeting with Sinyavsky and Rozanova which took place in Krakow in November 1993, two years after the collapse of the USSR. The result of this last meeting was an interview with Sinyavsky and Rozanova prepared by me and Andrzej Romanowski for the weekly “Tygodnik Powszechny” thirty years ago, and published below with my current commentary in the form of footnotes.