Little Jinx

by Abram Tertz, Larry P. Joseph (Translator), Rachel May (Translator), Edward J. Brown (Foreword by)

Overview

Little Jinx is a canny mockery of the Soviet world. Its author, Andrei Sinyavsky, a respectable member of the USSR's Institute for World Literature, was exposed in 1965 as the real author of a series of irreverent essays and fantastic tales that had been circulating under the nom de plume Abram Tertz. After five years in a labor camp he immigrated to Paris. Little Jinx is the tale of a man named Sinyavsky, a literary hack and runt who clumsily survives repression and anti-Semitism but also brings misery to those around him. When this "little jinx" inadvertently causes the death of his five brothers, he is consumed by a guilt that seems universal in his society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810110410
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	09/30/1992
Series:	Studies in Russian Literature and Theory
Edition description:	1
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Abram Tertz is the pseudonym of Andrei Sinyavsky, the exile Soviet dissident writer whose works have been compared to fabulists like Kafka and Borges. Tertz's settings are exotic but familiar and as compelling as those of lunatics and mystics.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Edward J. Brown
Translators' Preface
Little Jinx

Editorial Reviews

``Abram Tertz,'' the alter ego of Russian literary scholar Andrei Sinyavsky (b. 1925), writes fantastic fiction that embodies all the weird irreality of the Soviet experience. Tertz's autobiographical novel Goodnight! ( LJ 10/15/89) stuck relatively close to the facts in its depiction of Sinyavsky's life. Little Jinx (originally written in 1980) has for its narrator another ``Sinyavsky,'' the physical and spiritual runt of the family who struggles with guilt over his chance involvement in the deaths of five older half-brothers, all solid Soviet citizens. This philosophical gem of a novella addresses basic questions of longing, belonging, alienation, and the nature of guilt in a freewheeling idiom that subverts the semieducated propriety of ``Sovspeech.'' The translators rise gallantly to the challenge. Highly recommended for literary collections.-- Mary F. Zirin, Altadena, Cal.

Library Journal

"[A] simply brilliant mixture of the real and the surreal." —World Literature Today



"Its best passages are like dreams, bearing philosophical gifts in vivid, swiftly colliding images." —New York Times Book Review



"[A] masterful tale in which the paradoxes of human nature, as well as the contradictions of history, are rooted in spiritual schizophrenia." —The Nation

From the Publisher