The persecuted Soviet author and, eventually, Parisian émigré Andrey Sinyavsky (who used the pen name Abram Tertz) once pronounced that his quarrel with the Soviet state concerned aesthetics rather than politics. His longtime friend Igor Golomstock (1929–2017) concurred with Sinyavsky's position, as he announces at several moments in this account of a remarkable life that extends from early experiences as the child of non-prisoner civilians working in the Kolyma Gulag, to the social upheavals of Moscow during the Thaw of the 1960s, to a life in Great Britain from 1972 on. A specialist in Western European and, eventually, totalitarian art, Golomstock founded his resistance to the Soviet regime on rejection of its ugliness and falsity, rather than on any ideological commitment.
His stance of principled nonpartisan resistance enabled Golomstock to circulate among many and varied circles of Soviet social life in the decades of de-Stalinization under Khrushchev, succeeded by the...