Anecdotal Evidence: `A Spy in the Service of Literature'

Anecdotal Evidence: `A Spy in the Service of Literature': And an uncharacteristically terse snippet from Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus (1944): “While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.” 

Again, we’re not talking about formal influence. I have no idea whether Sinyavsky was familiar with any of these writers. All were bottomlessly curious. None was a systematic thinker. Here is a passage from A Voice from the Chorus devoted to the great Isaac Babel, who was murdered with a bullet in the head by the NKVD in Lubyanka seventy-four years ago this week, on Jan. 27, 1940:  

"[Isaac] Babel exhibited a trait common, perhaps, to all writers: he was not merely an observer, he was also a snooper. All his life he spied 'through the keyhole' in the hope of seeing...