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Пхенц-фест! 100 лет Андрею Синявскому
Phenz-fest! 100th anniversary of Andrei Sinyavsky
Event by: Babel Books Berlin, Tamizdat Project
Location: Bernauer Str. 49, Bernauer Straße 49, Berlin - Mitte
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Talks & discussions
About event
We invite you to celebrate Andrei Sinyavsky's centenary with us! Mini-lectures on tamizdat, censorship and smuggled publications during the Cold War era will be given by Denis Larionov (“Not disputing involvement in what was written”) and Yakov Klots (“Tamizdat project of Abram Tertz”). Abram Tertz's story "Phents" (1957) - in the original and translated into English and Armenian - will be read by Evgeny Ostashevsky and Sona Mnatsakanyan.
"Phents" by Sinyavsky-Tertz is a landmark text of the Thaw about the life of an ordinary Soviet accountant, but in fact an alien, forced to disguise himself, avoiding the threat of exposure. Its cactus-like body requires constant watering and is worn out by assimilation to a foreign environment. He dreams of returning home to his native planet, and protects the few evidence of it that he still has: his bizarre, inhuman body and scraps of an almost forgotten language. Written in 1957, the story was first published in Tamizdat after the trial of Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel (Nikolai Arzhak) in February 1966 (the writers were sentenced to five and seven years in the camps, respectively, for publishing “slanderous” writings in the West). Today, “Phents” reads as an artistic testimony to the experiences of not only dissidents and political prisoners, but also queer people, emigrants and refugees.
Phents was first published as a separate edition last fall by Tamizdat Project (in a new English translation by Ainsley Morse), and now for the first time in Armenian, translated by Sona Mnatsakanyan.
"Phents" by Sinyavsky-Tertz is a landmark text of the Thaw about the life of an ordinary Soviet accountant, but in fact an alien, forced to disguise himself, avoiding the threat of exposure. Its cactus-like body requires constant watering and is worn out by assimilation to a foreign environment. He dreams of returning home to his native planet, and protects the few evidence of it that he still has: his bizarre, inhuman body and scraps of an almost forgotten language. Written in 1957, the story was first published in Tamizdat after the trial of Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel (Nikolai Arzhak) in February 1966 (the writers were sentenced to five and seven years in the camps, respectively, for publishing “slanderous” writings in the West). Today, “Phents” reads as an artistic testimony to the experiences of not only dissidents and political prisoners, but also queer people, emigrants and refugees.
Phents was first published as a separate edition last fall by Tamizdat Project (in a new English translation by Ainsley Morse), and now for the first time in Armenian, translated by Sona Mnatsakanyan.