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.
