THE YAWNING HEIGHTS

By Aleksandr Zinoviev and Alexander Sinowjew

Book Overview

1979, Random House, Hardcover, ISBN: 0394427106, Book Condition: UsedVeryGood, , 135419 13E This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394427106
• ISBN13: 9780394427102
• Release Date: January 1979
• Publisher: Viking
• Length: 828 Pages
• Weight: 3.00 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Interesting reading

Interesting reading considering how Zinoviev's views changed after the fall of the Soviet Union. He fought to keep Lenin's body on display, and had huge critisim of the new russian system/economy. He also said he was never an anti-communist.

An essential element of any real intellectual's library

There is no book better than this to examine the social system under which hundreds of millions of people lived, largely wasted, and ended their lives. In contrast to, say, "Cursed Days" by Bunin, the author lived out his life in the mire of Absurdistan, and can explain the WHOLE period even better than Solzhenitzyn. An era, the most tragic in human history, when one could choose to either be beaten to death or bored to death. A must for any intellectual contemplating the future.

A great novel mixed with history

This is the famous lampooning of how life was in the Soviet Union, with veiled and caricatured personae of Stalin, Khrushchev, Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak and many more from the time period. One of the Soviet Union's leading philosophers, Alexander Zinoviev was, upon Brezhnev's personal orders, stripped of all degrees and honors, dismissed from his appointments, expelled from the Communist Party and deprived of citizenship for writing this book. This novel has been described as the one of the bitterest satirical attacks on the Soviet system to appear in Russian (and most probably in English as well). The book can be read on a number of different levels. Comparable to Swift, Kafka, Rabelais and Orwell. And quite readable, despite its length. Go for it.