Here, in his second novel, The Radiant Future, Zinoviev gives another comic tour de force, as profound and scathing as its predecessor, to be sure, but more restrained and concise. The Radiant Future is about the life and times of a middle-rank Moscow intellectual. The story runs: “Where the Avenue of Marxism-Leninism meets Cosmonaut Square, a great permanent slogan was erected that reads: ‘Long Live Communism—the Radiant Future of All Mankind!’” In a neighboring apartment block lives the speaker with his wife, his teenage children and his mother-in-law. A professor of philosophy, he is head of the Department of Theoretical Problems of the Methodology of Scientific Communism. While the bright new slogan slowly falls to pieces and becomes the rendezvous of Moscow’s pimps, prostitutes and pushers, the valiant Marxist dialectician sees his own monolithic dogma gradually eroded by the constant undermining of his Socratic friend Anton, and by the embarrassing questions of his sharp-eyed children. Little by little all the suppressed squalor that attends the Communist way of life is dredged up and has to be faced, and the mediocre professor with his petty ambitions ultimately falls from grace: he has built his career on the betrayal of his fellows, but now his own doubts betray him.

In The Radiant Future Alexander Zinoviev masterfully weaves together several narrative threads, symbolic and richly detailed by turns, to create an at once wicked and compassionate portrait of a man transformed into one of the living dead by his espousal of an inhumane ideology. Like Animal Farm and 1984, The Radiant Future is a powerful parable for our times.