A work of literary genius inviting comparisons with Swift and Rabelais, The Yawning Heights takes us to a very bizarre place called Ibansk (“Fucktown for All Ivans” is a possible translation), where everyone’s fate is to die of boredom. And this decaying society is inhabited by allegories recalling famous Soviet political and intellectual figures. The Boss (Stalin), Hog (Khrushchev) and Truth-teller (Solzhenitsyn) are only a few of those who find themselves in various groups and in unlikely settings, bickering about and making absurd pronouncements on life in Ibansk.

Weaving hilarious puns, searing ironies, profound paradoxes, and dazzling oxymora into a narrative unprecedented in the history of Russian literature, Zinoviev heaps merciless ridicule on such aspects of Ibanskian life as: the vulgar illusion of progress; the dreary language of the dialectic; the wacky experiments conducted by the scientific and military establishments; the outrageous exploits of the secret police; the peculiar scarcity of certain consumer goods; the odd transformations intellectuals undergo once they have visited the West; the mazelike bureaucracies that grind life to a halt; and, above all, the deep, eerie boredom that is bred by the lack of possibility.