The Yawning Heights

Fülszöveg

Here—at last—is the eagerly awaited American edition of The Yawning Heights, already an internationally acclaimed satiric masterpiece, a brilliant lampoon of life in the USSR, "the most important study of Soviet society, and of similar closed societies, that has appeared since World War 11" (THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS)—by Alexander Zinoviev, one of the Soviet Union's leading philosophers, who—because he dared to write this book— was stripped of all his degrees and honors, dismissed from his appointments, expelled from the Communist Party, and deprived of his citizenship by order of Brezhnev himself.
A work of literary genius inviting comparisons with Swift and Rabelais, The Yawning Heights takes us to a very bizarre place called Ibansk ("Fucktown for All Ivans" is a possible translation), where everyone's fate is to die of boredom. And this decaying society is inhabited by allegories recalling famous Soviet political and intellectual figures. The Boss (Stalin), Hog (Khrushchev)... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Here—at last—is the eagerly awaited American edition of The Yawning Heights, already an internationally acclaimed satiric masterpiece, a brilliant lampoon of life in the USSR, "the most important study of Soviet society, and of similar closed societies, that has appeared since World War 11" (THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS)—by Alexander Zinoviev, one of the Soviet Union's leading philosophers, who—because he dared to write this book— was stripped of all his degrees and honors, dismissed from his appointments, expelled from the Communist Party, and deprived of his citizenship by order of Brezhnev himself.
A work of literary genius inviting comparisons with Swift and Rabelais, The Yawning Heights takes us to a very bizarre place called Ibansk ("Fucktown for All Ivans" is a possible translation), where everyone's fate is to die of boredom. And this decaying society is inhabited by allegories recalling famous Soviet political and intellectual figures. The Boss (Stalin), Hog (Khrushchev) and Truth-teller (Solzhenitsyn) are only a few of those who find themselves in various groups Lind in unlikely settings, bickering about and making absurd pronouncements on life in Ibansk.
Weaving hilarious piins, searing ironies, profound paradoxes, and dazzling oxymora into a narrative unprecedented in the history of Russian literature, Zinoviev heaps merciless ridicule on such aspects of Ibanskian life as: the vulgar illusion of progress; the dreary language of the dialectic; the wacky experiments conducted by the scientific and military establishments; the outrageous exploits of the secret police; the peculiar scarcity of certain consumer goods; the odd transformations intellectuals undergo once they have visited the West; the mazelike bureaucracies that grind life to a halt; and, above all, the deep, the eerie boredom that is bred by the lack of possibility. Vissza