Alexander Zinoviev — The Yawning Heights [1979]

Some satirists point lean and mean heat-seeking missiles at their targets and annihilate them with the sharpness of their wit and erudition. Others, such as Mr. Zinoviev, pen “sociological novels” of staggering length (816pp in a small font), taking apart the Soviet communist regime in a sequence of deadpan accounts of life under the ultimate ‘-Ism’, a fictitious Russia named Ibansk populated by a series of Iban Ibanovich Ibanovs, known by their functions, such as ‘Dauber’, ‘Writer’, ‘Schizophrenic’, ‘Artist’, etcetera. The ‘novel’ comprises a series of titled fragments exploring the satirical world through philosophical paradoxes, high-level logic (Zinoviev wrote various academic texts on logic), fast-paced dialogues that end up unpeeling one’s brain in their complexities, and other amusing scenes and set-pieces involving the ‘characters’, each of whom speak in the same formal voice of the narrator. Each section packs in ideas and premises to the hilt, making it onerous to select one passage to showcase the author’s satirical prowess. The sections featuring ‘Artist’ and ‘Writer’ were some of the funniest to me, criticising the intellectual bind all pre-perestroika artists around the time faced in the manner of such titans as Bulgakov (The Heart of a Dog) or Olesha (Envy). Framed as a ‘found document’, located “on a newly opened rubbish dump”, the titular section proves the most humorous (the humour here is too deadpan for thighs to be slapped or coffee to be spluttered—painful identification the reserve of those who lived in Russia through such a regime), containing more ribald material (scatological poems), and dialogues that lend the novel an oomph and readability, something the book begins to lack due to its absence of structure or plot (or any conventional novel architecture). As a consequence, the book loses steam into its final third (I read up to p.613 before throwing in the towel), and as impressive and ambitious a novel this is, the inclusion of so much material written in the same tone drags the book down into the boring and repetitive. Zinoviev’s novel was published in Switzerland in 1976 (in Russian), and for this affront to the regime, the author was kicked from his lecturing post and the Academy of Sciences, and “offered” the chance to leave Russia. He moved to Munich. Praise around the novel has been copious. Among the lovers, Clive James, who called the novel “a work vital to the continuity of civilisation”, and a NYRB writer said “Zinoviev will, I predict, be read by millions . . . in the tradition of Hobbes, Voltaire, Swift, Orwell.” This prediction has not come to pass (the “sociological novel” never blossomed into a school outside Zinoviev’s works, although the approach here is Swiftian in the extreme), but there is still time for the satirist to rise and be read through his more concise works. His novel-writing ceased in 1986, after which he focused on non-fiction works with titles like The Global Suprasociety and Russia and The Confessions of a Dissident and so on, like a proper ‘Intellectual’. A shame. Let the power of this epic satire rise and ascend to the pantheon!

Editions:

Hardback, The Bodley Head, 1979.

Paperback, Penguin Books, 1981.

Bibliography:

Novels:

The Yawning Heights, The Bodley Head, 1979.

The Radiant Future, Random House, 1980.

Homo Sovieticus, Gollancz, 1985.

The Madhouse, Gollancz, 1986.