SINYAVSKYS THOUGHTS

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33095, 9 December 1972, Page 10

SINYAVSKYS THOUGHTS

Unguarded Thoughts. By Andrey Sinyavsky. Collins. 95 pp. Not so long ago, "The Little Red School Book” was causing a largely hysterical outcry throughout New Zealand. The book under review is also little and red. It will not be widely read, certainly not by those who held up their hand in horror at frank talking about sex, drugs and authority, but it deserves to be, for it really possesses the power to stir and arouse. The subject is, in essence, God. But in thinking unguardedly about the divine (and given Sinyavsky’s dissident status in the U.S.S.R. and the spell he spent in a labour camp the title can function as a pun), the author dwells on other topics; on Russia, on sex, on death, and on the plight of modem man. The manner in which Sinyavsky writes is laconic and often aphoristic. Indeed some of his best thoughts are no more than a sentence or two in length, like this one, reminiscent of the Stoic philosopher, Epictetus: "We have insured ourselves by realising that we are doomed.” Or like this meditation on the human condition: It is not inconceivable that Hell is on earth. If so, everything makes sense. But if not, what then, O Lord? Others are cast in the form of brief tales or parables, while others again take the form of more or less rtraight-

forward assertions. Of the last kind is his meditation on the conservatism \ of the Church; a passage which is \likeiy to exasperate many New Zealand Christians, but which becomes entirely understandable in the light of he Russian Orthodox Church, workv? within a situation in which oppojn’s of the Church have pre-empted Wess: Church is bound to be conn'jtive, in as much as she wants t<\K'p faith with tradition. She “right to say one thing today antl a Uher tomorrow, depending ° n >?cn teres ts of progress . . . me > y nv h invariably “lags behind lite, so. at> by sojourning a while in etern s h e ma y b r j ng us flavour ai taste The frozen forms ?jaic ritual reflect and imitate Hyen, which is equally disinclined, keep with his _ toncal prongs Delayed on principle, the Crch’s slow reactions to the conteiorary scene threaten her stagnatic with paralysis. But even as an irrupt mummy, she await , s , me »ssage: “Arise and walk.” May she heqt when it comes Even here, the vracteristic element of doubt enters, i»nly at the last. It is in this faith and doubt, between bef an( j scepticism, that much of Sinysky’s power lies. That there is greatower here, even the most cursory gls, e will attest.