Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky (; 8 October 1925 – 25 February 1997) was a Russian writer and Soviet dissident known as a defendant in the Sinyavsky–Daniel trial in 1965. Sinyavsky was a literary critic for Novy Mir and wrote works critical of Soviet society under the pseudonym Abram Tertz () published in the West to avoid censorship in the Soviet Union. Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were convicted of Anti-Soviet agitation in a show trial, becoming the first Soviet writers convicted solely for their works and for fiction, and served six years at a Gulag camp. Sinyavsky emigrated to France in 1973 where he became a professor of Russian literature and published numerous autobiographical and retrospective works. Early life and education Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky was born on 8 October 1925 in Moscow, Soviet Union, the son of Donat Evgenievich Sinyavsky, a Russian nobleman from Syzran who became a member of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, and a mother of a Russian peasant background. Donat was arrested several times by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution as an "enemy of the people", and during his last stay in jail the medical authorities took his electroencephalographic reading. Sinyavsky described his father's experiences in the autobiographical novel Goodnight! Sinyavsky's family was evacuated to Syzran following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, where he graduated from school in 1943. Sinyavsky was drafted into the Red Army after graduation and served as a radio engineer at an airfield. In 1945, Sinyavsky became a philology student at Moscow State University, becoming a full-time student following his demobilization from the Red Army the next year, and studied the works of Vladimir Mayakovsky. Sinyavsky graduated in 1949 and attended graduate school where he successfully defended his thesis in 1952. Sinyavsky worked at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow and taught at Moscow State University's Faculty of Journalism and the Moscow Art Theatre School. By the end of 1960, Sinyavsky was admitted into the Union of Soviet Writers. Sinyavsky became one of the leading literary critics of the Novy Mir magazine, at the time headed by Aleksandr Tvardovsky. In the early 1960s, Novy Mir was considered the most liberal legal publications in the Soviet Union and began leaning towards a dissident position. In November 1962, Novy Mir became famous for publishing Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's groundbreaking One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a novella about a prisoner of