Although it calls itself a novel, "The Yawning Heights" defies categories, and perhaps description. Satire? Philosophical romance? Encyclopedia? Obsequy? It is Gogol with elephantiasis. It begins lumpy, achieves an astonishing texture, goes on almost forever, and ends in despair. It contains and dissects and reviles Soviet bureaucracy, rhetoric, science, psychology, philosophy, literature, art, theater, music, medicine, politics, education and journalism. There isn't a Soviet intellectual known to the West who doesn't appear in its many pages, and there are hundreds unknown to us who strut and grovel and inform and disappear. The intelligentsia of the Soviet Union, in fact, is for Alexander Zinoviev what Paris was for Proust: rotten, but significant….

We are in Ibansk … where everybody's name is Ibanov. We distinguished among the Ibanovs, as they experience the total Ism, by their professions. Thus, one Ibanov is Sociologist, another Careerist, a third Colleague, a fourth Schizophrenic, a...