Siberian trip
Sir: I have just read Involuntary Journey to Siberia, attributed to `Andrei Amalrik,' together with another book, Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?. ascribed to the same author. The first of these books was reviewed by Tibor Szamuely in the SPECTATOR (28 November), as if it were a genuine autobiography by a dissident Rus- sian intellectual. But it must be obvious to any reader that this book is some kind of cruel hoax. It is a fictionalised autobiography of a spiv. a crook, a liar—who contradicts himself again and again in a smug, self-righteous way. Look at it yourself. sir. Ask any fiction reviewer. It is like Moll Flanders, Barry Lyndon. Felix Kroll. It is like a message from Lord Gnome, or any amount of other parodies in Private Eye.
One tiny example. The narrator tells us that he cannot go to work because he has to look alter his paralysed old father who can scarcely move or speak. Within pages. the old man is padding up and down the corridor, annoying the neighbours—and annoying them more by heating glue over a stove. This is only one of innumer- able blatantly farcical elements in `Amalrik's' story.
At first I assumed that it was the
work of a KGB man, trying to dis- credit the Russian intelligentsia by portraying them as spivs—and also discrediting the Western intelligent- sia. if the book and its narrator are respected in the west. I thought the book was part of a plot against Solzhenitsyn (and also Ginsburg. who is deliberately defamed in this book): and I was nauseated. think- ing of the misuse of wit and Ike- rary skill for the purpose of per- secution. I felt genuinely. whole- heartedly 'anti-communist'.
This still seems the most likely explanation. But the parody is so blatant that is seems hardly pos- sible.
What I want to know is this. Why did Tibor Ssamuely write about this hook as if it were a truthful memoir by a sincere man?
D. A. N. Jones 19 Endymion Road, London sw2
Previous page
