Little Jinx

Little Jinx is a canny mockery of the Soviet world. Its author, Andrei Sinyavsky, a respectable member of the USSR's Institute for World Literature, was exposed in 1965 as the real author of a series of irreverent essays and fantastic tales that had been circulating under the nom de plume Abram Tertz. After five years in a labor camp he immigrated to Paris. Little Jinx is the tale of a man named Sinyavsky, a literary hack and runt who clumsily survives repression and anti-Semitism but also brings misery to those around him. When this "little jinx" inadvertently causes the death of his five brothers, he is consumed by a guilt that seems universal in his society.

"[A] simply brilliant mixture of the real and the surreal." --World Literature Today

"Its best passages are like dreams, bearing philosophical gifts in vivid, swiftly colliding images." --New York Times Book Review

"[A] masterful tale in which the paradoxes of human nature, as well as the contradictions of history, are rooted in spiritual schizophrenia." --The Nation