Walks with Pushkin

“Abram Terz is the literary pseudonym of Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky (1925–1997), a philologist, research fellow at IMLI in Moscow and professor at Sorbonne in Paris, author of the books “In the Shadow of Gogol”, “Good Night”, “A Voice from the Choir”, “Ivan the Fool”, the novella “Lyubimov” and the novel “The Cat's House”. “Strolls with Pushkin” is the most well-known book of Andrei Sinyavsky, which has sparked the most debates. He wrote it during his imprisonment in Dubrovlage. The book also includes the essays “Journey to the Black River” and a letter-response to A.I. Solzhenitsyn “Reading in Hearts”, published in the journal “Syntax”. Preface by Alexander Genis. The book's design features a drawing by Mikhail Shemyakin. “Strolls with Pushkin” is lyrical prose by the writer Abram Terz, in which I try in my own way to express my love for Pushkin and to give thanks to his shadow that saved me in the camp. Andrei Sinyavsky. To establish a friendly relationship with Pushkin, Terz set aside tradition, did not concern himself with footnotes, nearly abolished controversy, disregarded terminology, and wrote with lapidary precision and poetic freedom. At the same time, the author skillfully and decisively excluded the word “I” from the text, but not the intimate tone with which no one has ever spoken to Pushkin before. Alexander Genis