The imprisonment of Andrei Sinyavsky in 1965 stilled, in mid-career, the most original and enigmatic voice in contemporary Soviet literature. At the time of his arrest he was known in the USSR solely as a gifted, liberal, literary critic and scholar. Abroad he was known as Abram Tertz, a mysterious Russian author – possibly not even a resident of the Soviet Union – who had written a brilliant, devastating critique of socialist realism, two short novels (The Trial Begins and Lyubimov), six short stories, and a small collection of aphorisms (Unguarded Thoughts).

As Sinyavsky he had written (sometimes collaborating with A. Menshutin) reviews and essays on contemporary Soviet poetry, several articles in literary histories and encyclopedias, and a superb introduction to a collection of Pasternak's poetry. He had coauthored, with I. Golomshtok, a book on Picasso. Nearly all of these writings were remarkable for their intellectual discipline, liveliness, erudition, and aesthetic sensitivity. At the same time these writings, though often controversial in their liberal bias, were well within the prevailing ideological limits.

As Tertz, on the other hand, he was both the advocate and the practitioner of what he called, in his essay On Socialist Realism, a “phantasmagoric art,” a literature of the grotesque, which strove to be “truthful with the aid of absurd fantasy.” Such an art was not without precedent in Russian literature. The strain of the grotesque and fantastic, stemming primarily from Gogol, was prominent in the nineteenth century. It had been even more pronounced in the first two decades of the twentieth century, in such writers as Sologub, Bely, and Remizov, and it was prominent during the early years of the Soviet period in the prose fiction of Zamyatin, Olesha, and others.