["The Yawning Heights" is monomaniacal,] complex, brilliant and fascinating. It is a huge book, a philosophical and sociological commentary on a country called "Ibansk," and it is made up of fragments, sober essays that break off and turn into narrative fantasies and anecdotes that merge into explosive soliloquy….

Mr. Zinoviev possesses ample scope and material as a satirist, enough to make Swift and Voltaire look like innocents and strangers to the wicked ways of the world. But Swift and Voltaire kept it short when they were being brilliant and sardonic at the expense of human hypocrisy and folly. Mr. Zinoviev writes every paragraph with a sort of passionate self-indulgence. Economy and understatement are not for him. In a sense this shows that he is not really a satirist at all but a prophet, a preacher, a voice delivering an endless tirade in the wilderness—and an investigator examining...