Daniel’s life was closely connected with Ukraine. Here, he studied for a year at the Faculty of Philology at Kharkiv University, met his wife, Larisa Bogoraz, translated Ukrainian poets, and had many friends, including the close friendship he shared with Ivan and Leonida Svitlychny. For the 100th anniversary of Yuly Daniel’s birth, we are publishing on the Virtual Museum of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group his biography, final statement at trial, and memoirs about him by the poet Marlena Rakhlina.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Daniel, together with his friend Andrei Sinyavsky, secretly published his works abroad. The two short stories and two novellas he smuggled abroad between 1958 and 1963 were signed with the pseudonym Nikolai Arzhak, which the author borrowed from criminal folklore.
Even Daniel’s friends did not know about this side of his life.
‘Once, when Yulik’s activities were in full swing, I started a conversation about him with Arkady Filatov. At that time, Arkady was in Moscow very often and saw Yulik much more frequently than I did’, recalled Marlena Rakhlina. ‘I said that I didn’t understand his life: he was a talented man, yet he was wasting himself on goodness knows what (translating worthless poets). Arkady knew everything and was choking with indignation, but of course, he couldn’t answer me, as I knew nothing’.
The heroes of Daniel’s novellas recognise their own responsibility for the general civic passivity, cowardice and hypocrisy. In the short story ‘Hands’ (1958), written from the perspective of a former executioner, the narrator, who carried out death sentences for the Cheka, finds his hands have started to tremble. In his later works, the question of ‘personal guilt’ and ‘atonement for one’s deeds’ is transformed into the problem of ‘personal responsibility for collective guilt’. In the novella ‘Atonement’ (1963), the theme of civic responsibility takes on a tragic hue. The protagonist, an intellectual from the ‘thaw’ era, is falsely accused of having informed on his acquaintances to the MGB during the years of the Stalinist terror. Subjected to public ostracism, he comes to realise that Stalinism was not only the work of criminals at the head of the state but also the result of general passivity. He accepts this collective guilt and, amid the complete indifference of those around him, breaks under its weight and descends into madness.
However, in any event, for the author and his heroes, civic responsibility remains not so much a social virtue as the only possible way of overcoming total unfreedom and the hopeless disunity of people.
For several years, the state security services had been searching for the two authors who were secretly publishing abroad. They were under surveillance.
‘On 29 August 1965, Yulik suddenly and uninvited, as was his way, came straight to my birthday celebration. And right then, as if like jacks-in-the-box, two people appeared whom I had long suspected of being ‘informers’,’ Marlena Rakhlina recalled.
In September 1965, they were arrested. A few days prior to this, sensing his imminent arrest from a number of signs, Daniel went to his wife, Larisa Bogoraz, who was living and working in Novosibirsk at the time.
‘In Novosibirsk, a certain ‘art historian in civilian clothes’ appeared almost immediately, who categorically insisted he travel to Moscow. Their plane tickets were for adjacent seats (touching, isn’t it?). Lara immediately bought a ticket for the same flight. They tried to ask the ‘art historian’ to give her his seat, but it didn’t work. Then she asked her neighbour, who swapped with Yulik, and they spent the whole long journey together. He was arrested as soon as they reached the airport, but there he thought that one of the KGB men had treated his wife disrespectfully—and he broke free and lunged at him with his fists’.
This arrest turned out to be one of the first actions in cultural policy by the new post-Khrushchev leadership and caused noticeable alarm in liberal creative intellectual circles. The writers’ trial became a ‘show trial’. It was actively covered in the press in an attempt to prove that the charges brought against Daniel and Sinyavsky were not fabricated, that they had indeed published their works in the West, and had indeed done so secretly, under pseudonyms. However, the literary community publicly expressed doubts as to whether this was sufficient grounds for criminal prosecution. While the press stigmatised the ‘renegades’ and ‘literary werewolves’, creative young people openly protested against the persecution of the writers. On 5 December 1965, the ‘glasnost rally’ took place in Pushkin Square in Moscow. This date is considered the beginning of the human rights movement in the USSR.
The trial of the two writers on charges of ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’ was heard in the Supreme Court of the RSFSR from 10 to 14 February 1966.
‘They tell me: you slandered the people, the country, the government with your horrific invention of an Open Murder Day (in the novella ‘Moscow Speaking’, the government declared a ‘Day of Open Murders’ in the country—Ed.). I answer: it could have happened, if we recall the crimes of the era of the cult of personality; they are far more terrible than anything Sinyavsky or I have written’, Daniel said in his final statement.
Both writers refused to admit their guilt. Daniel was sentenced to five years in the camps, and Sinyavsky to seven.
For many activists of the public movement during the Brezhnev era, it was their participation in the protest campaign surrounding the Sinyavsky and Daniel case that proved to be the first dissident episode in their biographies; for an even greater number of people, this trial became the beginning of a reassessment of their attitude towards the official ideology.
