Written in 1957, Abram Tertz's story "Pkhents" was first published in the West after the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel in Moscow in 1966.
This iconic text from the Thaw era tells the story of an ordinary Soviet accountant, who is actually an alien hiding under the name Andrei Kazimirovich Sushinsky. Day after day, he is forced to disguise himself, avoiding the threat of exposure; he dreams of returning to his home planet and guards the few evidence of it that remains to him: his bizarre, inhuman body and scraps of an almost forgotten language.
“Pkhents” – as an allegory for the experiences of dissidents, political prisoners, queer people, emigrants and refugees – is the subject of the final chapter of Yakov Klotz’s Tamizdat: Contraband Russian Literature in the Cold War (2024), and “Pkhents” itself was recently published by Tamizdat Project as a separate edition and in a new English translation.
Yakov Klots teaches Russian literature at the City University of New York (Hunter College CUNY). He is the author of Joseph Brodsky in Lithuania (2010), Poets in New York: On the City, Language, Diaspora (2016), and Tamizdat: Contraband Russian Literature in the Cold War (2024). Founder and Director Tamizdat Project – a project about banned books from the former USSR and Eastern Europe.