Alexander Zinoviev must be one of the world's fastest writers. It is less than four years ago that his first work (outside his professional speciality) was published, and that was a gigantic novel, The Yawning Heights…. Since then, he has published three more novels [The Radiant Future, Notes of a Night Watchman and Anteroom to Paradise]….

Yawning Heights [is] a rambling, surrealist presentation of the recent and future history of the Soviet Union in a variety of tenuously connected and often hilarious episodes….

On the one hand we have a superb satirist presenting an original and penetrating indictment of Soviet society. On the other hand we have the tireless gossip and armchair theoretician, repeating himself endlessly and without any sense of form. Both sides of Zinoviev seem to be indissolubly linked, and probably we could not have the one without the other. So inevitably the reader has a...