Fantastic stories

Abram Tertz is the pseudonym of Andrei Sinyavsky, the exiled Soviet dissident writer. The interrelated tales in his Fantastic Stories have been compared with those of great twentieth-century fabulists like Kafka and Borges. One reads Tertz with a kind of vertigo, on guard against the nameless unexpected-the inexplicable and obscure changes in policy, the unfamiliar predawn knock at the door.