Author. He received acclaim as a Russian writer, who was a Soviet dissident and known as one the defendants in the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial in 1965. Avoiding the Soviet censorship of his novels, he published them in the west under the pen name of Abram Tertz. He and Yuli Daniel were convicted of Anti-Soviet agitation, becoming the first Soviet writers convicted only for their works in fiction. He served six years of a seven-year sentence in Dubravny Camp #3, a forced labor Gulag Camp. Today, historians can pinpoint the beginning of the end of Communism in the USSR, as it started in February of 1966 with the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, who were two Russian writers, using pen names, who ridiculed the Communist regime with satires smuggled abroad. With serving most of his sentence, he was released one year early in 1971 after much petitioning. In 1973, Sinyavsky was allowed to emigrate in exile to France at the invitation of Professor Claude Frioux of the University of Paris. Sinyavsky became a professor of Russian literature at Sorbonne University. Born Andrey Donatovich Sinyavsky, his father was a Russian noble and his mother a peasant lady. His father was a Communist party official who was arrested as "an enemy of the state" in Stalin's purge in 1951, and his father's ordeal is documented in Sinyavsky's autobiography "Goodnight!" During World War II and the German army invasion of Russia, he graduated from high school in 1943, then was drafted into the Red Army serving as a radio engineer at an airport. After the war in 1945 and being discharged from the army, he began courses in philology, the studying of languages, at Moscow State University graduating in 1949 and receiving his PhD in 1952. He became active and respected in the literary world and the theater while teaching journalism at Moscow State University. After relocating to France, he published numerous autobiographies, which include notes on the camp; letters to and from his wife, Maria Rozanova, and his son; and other retrospect works. His 1977 article "What is the Socialist Realism?" was written in defiance of censorship, and created a sensation in Moscow literary circles, being read aloud in public. In 1980 he wrote an article for "Time" magazine answering the question, "Would you go back?" Russians, who lived in exile outside the Soviet Union, expressed mixed concerns about his literature. At first his books on his imprisonment was very successful, but in the later ones, he often repeated the same stories, thus losing the reader's interest. His co-defendant, Yuli Daniel, died in Moscow in 1988. Sinyavsky and his wife flew from France to Russia to attend the funeral. After having a heart attack in 1996, Sinyavsky was diagnosed less than a year later with lung cancer with metastases to the brain dying soon after.