What does Zinoviev's "The Yawning Heights" say about?

The history of Russian literature contains many remarkable examples of art written in various genres. However, the 20th century most fully illuminated the problem of the need to create a new novel that combines realism, fantasy, satire, and appeals to philosophy and sociology. Most fully this was embodied in the novel "Yawning heights", which was written by the Soviet sociological scientist A. Zinoviev.

History of the appearance of the book in print

The book Zinoviev was first published in 1976 in Switzerland. At that time, her author was at least a disgraced but prominent Soviet scientist-sociologist and philosopher, doctor of science, professor.

The book "Yawning heights" aroused public resonance both in Western countries and in the USSR. And if in the West they saw sharp and satirical criticism of Soviet reality, and the book as a whole was accepted positively, in the USSR its publication was regarded as a betrayal of the motherland, which forced A. Zinoviev to leave the country for emigration.

Alexander Zinoviev "Yawning heights". The summary of the work

The story tells the story of the city of Ibansk and its inhabitants. And the author's descriptions are quite comical and reminiscent of the prose of N. Gogol and M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin. "Yawning heights" is generally an interesting work. This is both an anti-utopia, an acute social satire, and a new sociological novel in which the author-scientist articulates his scientific theories in an artistic way.

The author offers various types of his contemporaries. These are officials who are ready for any dirty tricks for the sake of achieving their goals, covered up with noble slogans of building communism; these are people from the intelligentsia, some of whom dream about Western values, and some are frank chatterboxes.

In the work there is no clear plot, the composition of the novel is subject to the laws of the logic of philosophical investigation.

What was the reason for writing the book?

A lot of books written during his long life, Alexander Zinoviev, "Yawning heights" refers to one of his epoch-making creations.

The reasons for writing this book have accumulated a lot. First of all, Zinoviev, as a conscientious social scientist, could not help but see that the Communist slogans of the imminent victory of socialism and the construction of an entirely new state system on earth are far from being real. He saw the imperfection of the society in which he lived, he was not afraid to write about it openly.

Of course, such a position of the scientist was not liked by many of his contemporaries, who, formally being men of science or statesmen, sought simply to receive their benefits from the existing order of things and the existing social system.

Such "opportunists" depicted with all the power of his talent the author in the work "The Glowing Heights". Zinoviev in general in this his first novel demonstrated the full force of both his erudition and scientific foresight of future social events.

Many of his contemporaries saw in the writer's novel only anti-utopia and the exposure of communism, so the author was ranked among a number of dissidents, and Zinoviev was far from this circle.

Understanding the novel today

Today the work "Yawning heights" stands apart from a number of works of Russian literature. It is, in essence, a social and philosophical novel.

Modern readers are not always ready to take from the shelf the book "Yawning heights". This is due both to the complexity of the writer's style and to the fact that some of the realities about which he writes have already been lost.

However, this novel is a milestone in the creative biography of the writer, so without his careful study it is impossible to understand the essence of the philosophical and social concept of Zinoviev as a scientist.

By the way, in the last decades of his life the author turned his attention to the capitalist world he was currently in, and concluded that global capitalism, which will strive to rule the world after the death of the USSR, will be a huge evil for humanity.

A lot of bold thoughts were expressed by the author in the book "Yawning heights". Zinoviev was always bold, he went through the war, and persecution of colleagues, and separation from his homeland, he had nothing to fear in life.

Therefore, today the journalism and art works of A. Zinoviev are as relevant as ever. And we are talking not only about the novel "The Yawning Heights", reviews of which have always been different, it is about all the legacy of the Russian philosopher and seer Alexander Alexandrovich Zinoviev.