Authors

Minami Toyoshima¹;  ¹ The University of Tokyo, Japan

Discussion

Russian writer Andrei Sinyavsky and Czech playwright Václav Havel were both prominent dissidents in communist countries during the Cold War. The texts they published led to their imprisonment. They left essays analysing totalitarian societies governed by communist regimes. The similarity of their careers could also be found in the fact that although they were engaged in different genres (Sinyavsky wrote prose and Havel wrote drama), both composed literary works that did not belong to the official literature (Sinyavsky published his works as tamizdat, and Havel mainly published his works as samizdat).

In my presentation, I will conduct a comparative study of the essays and literary works of Sinyavsky and Havel and aim to clarify the concept and poetics of alien languages in their works. In their essays, both writers shared the same question: What enables the stability of Communist regimes? They focused on the distinctive circumstances of language under the communist regime, characterised by the severance of the signifier and signified. In the first half of my presentation, I will compare Sinyavsky’s Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History (1988) with Havel’s The Power of the Powerless (1978) and The Anatomy of Reticence (1984). These texts, intended for Western readers, examine society under a communist regime, where citizens become accustomed to the regime’s manipulation of language and gradually internalise the distorted language as an integral part of everyday life. In my study, I also shed light on the rhetorical differences between the writers by applying a discourse analysis.

The latter half of my presentation compares Sinyavsky’s short story Pchenc (1957, published under the pseudonym Abram Tertz) and Havel’s drama The Memorandum (1965). In Pchenc, the protagonist, an alien living in Moscow disguised as a human, screams in the final scene in his native language, which is an alien language for other people, highlighting his isolation within human society. In The Memorandum, the artificial language ptydepe is adopted in the anonymous ‘office’. The protagonist, Gross, the head of the department, is the only person not informed of the adaptation of ptydepe, while the other characters struggle to adjust to the changes made by ptydepe and seize power in the office. I intend to explicate the germination of the idea of alien language in the literary works of Sinyavsky and Havel and examine how this concept led to gaining insights into the language situation in communist countries as presented in their essays.