Donat was arrested several times by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution as an "enemy of the people", and during his last stay in jail the medical authorities took his electroencephalographic reading.

In the early 1960s, Novy Mir was considered the most liberal legal publications in the Soviet Union, and Sinyavsky began leaning towards a dissident position.

In November 1962, Novy Mir became famous for publishing Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's groundbreaking One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a novella about a prisoner of the Gulag.

On 4 September 1965, Sinyavsky was arrested along with fellow-writer and friend Yuli Daniel, and tried in the first Soviet show trial during which writers were openly convicted solely for their literary work.

The Sinyavsky–Daniel trial was accompanied by harsh propaganda campaigns in the Soviet media, perceived as a sign of demise of the Khrushchev Thaw which had allowed greater freedoms of expression during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Sinyavsky became a professor of Russian literature at Sorbonne University, co-founded the Russian-language almanac Sintaksis with his wife Maria Rozanova, and actively contributed to Radio Liberty.

On 17 October 1991, Sinyavsky was featured in a report received by Izvestia on the review of convictions for several prominent Soviet individuals due to lack of corpus delicti in their actions.

Sinyavsky died in 1997 in Fontenay-aux-Roses, near Paris, and was buried there by the Russian Orthodox priest and writer Vladimir Vigilyansky with Andrei Voznesensky in attendance.

Volokhonsky, who was born and raised in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), first visited the United States in the early 1970s and happened across Pevear's Hudson Review article about Sinyavsky.