Abram Tertz. Pkhentz. Translated by Ainsley Morse, with Kevin Reese. Cover design by Aleksandr Moskovsky and Eva Tamm. New York: Tamizdat Project, 2024.
ISBN: 979-8-9916623-0-7; printed at G&H Soho, U.S.A.
This iconic Thaw-era tale of loneliness and alienation relates the miseries of a mid-level Soviet accountant—pseudonym Andrei Sushinsky—who is actually an outer-space alien. A classic misunderstood hero, he struggles daily to keep himself alive (his cactus-like body requires abundant water and has been debilitated by years of concealment) and to avoid the constant threat of exposure. Repulsed by the gross physiology and petty concerns of his Soviet neighbors and fellow-citizens, Sushinsky dreams of reuniting with his lost planet and treasures the faint traces of it that remain: scraps of his long-lost language (hence the title word PKHENTZ, a barely remembered sacred name) and his own extravagantly nonhuman body. Meanwhile, years of life among humans and concerted efforts to assimilate have worn Sushinsky down and caused him to question his sense of reality and existence overall.
Written in 1957, the story was first published in the West in the wake of the infamous Moscow show trial of 1966, when two Soviet authors, Andrei Sinyavsky (aka. Abram Tertz) and Yuly Daniel (aka. Nikolai Arzhak) were sentenced, respectively, to seven and five years of hard labor for publishing their “slanderous” works abroad. While ostensibly addressing the experience of living with various covert identities in the mid-century Soviet Union (Jewish, dissident, political prisoner), the story’s subsequent wanderings broaden its purview to include refugee, émigré and queer experience. This inaugural publication presents the story for the first time as a freestanding edition and in a new English translation.
