SOURCE: "Dissidents Abroad," in Partisan Review, Vol. LVIII, No. 1, Winter, 1991, pp. 149-50.

In the following brief review, Aksyonov's novel Say Cheese! is lauded as a "well-made, surprisingly fluid" book.

Conformists are all alike; dissidents are all different—and more original. Andrei Sinyavsky's and Vassily Aksyonov's new novels are striking examples of this literary rule. Say Cheese! by Aksyonov is a very amusing and skillfull work, as it charts the waters of the dissident imagination. Goodnight by Sinyavsky (writing as Abram Tertz) is a strange, haunting mixture of narrative, commentary, and rumination. Both writers live in exile, Sinyavsky in Paris, Aksyonov in Washington, D.C. Sinyavsky spent seven years in a labor camp for having a premature criticism of socialist realism smuggled to the West, using the pseudonym of Abram Tertz. Aksyonov was forced to leave the Soviet Union for "treasonable" writings. Sinyavsky strikes one as the most profound...