“Pkhentz” by Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), an iconic Thaw-era tale of loneliness and alienation, relates the earthly sojourn of a mid-level Soviet accountant who is actually an outer-space alien dreaming of returning home. The short story is a moving allegory for the experiences of political prisoners and dissidents, émigrés, and queer persons.
The epilogue to Yakov Klots’s book “Tamizdat: Contraband Russian Literature in the Cold War Era” (2024) is devoted to “Pkhentz,” and the short story itself was recently published by Tamizdat Project as a stand-alone edition, with a new English translation.
We will discuss “Pkhentz” in Russian and hear excerpts from the Armenian translation by Sona Mnatsakanyan.
Yakov Klots teaches Russian literature at Hunter College and is the founder and director of Tamizdat Project, a public scholarship initiative for the study of banned books from the Cold War to the Present.
Sona Mnatsakanyan teaches Armenian literature at the American University of Armenia in Yerevan and is writing a doctoral dissertation at Humboldt University in Berlin.