BOOKS
619
Later, in the Palace of Pioneers, the elevator broke down while we
were inside it. 1 was dismayed and muttered something ungracious
about Soviet machinery. But Tatjana was ecstatic at the chance to have
a little talk without surveillance.
" Professor dear," she said, "you above all persons, you a scientist
of literature, will understand a private theory of mine. I call it the
Theory of Mistakes.
You know, I'm interested only in mistakes.
Writers, the good ones, are, for instance, always mistaken. That's what
1 like about them. Computers, mathematical formulas, public
pronouncements-these are invariably correct, but not amusing. Man
is amusing, and the amusing
is
the authentic, because only he has the
capacity, and the destiny,
to
make mistakes."
She peeled an orange which she drew from her purse.
"I call my Theory of Mistakes apocalyptic because in stating it I
might be mistaken.
If
my theory is proved wrong, 1would be unconsol–
able. Yet if 1 am
not
mistaken, am 1 human?"
1 was interested in her chatter but not comforted.
"You're in a terrible trap, aren't you?" 1 grumbled. "Just like this
elevator
I"
To approach an understanding of this anecdote would require
nothing less than a complete reading of Alexander Zinoviev's 829-page
The Yawning Heights,
a book which caused a greater sensation in the
U.S.S.R. than any of Solzhenitsyn's works, and resulted in Zinoviev's
being stripped of his citizenship by decree of the Praesidium of the
Supreme Soviet.
The book itself is a gigantic collection of anecdotes, written in
prose and verse and embedded in an enormous variety of forms: comic
aphorisms , social analysis, conversations, beast fables, scholarly arti–
cles, interviews, allegories, ballads, letters, dreams, excerpts from
wall newspapers, parables, parodies, Utopian or dystopian forecasts,
rogues' songs, and legends.
The Yawning Heights
is certainly not a
novel; it is not even a book in the ordinary sense; like Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer,
it is" libel, slander, defamation of character," a "gob
of spit in the face of Art, " a dark mirror, and a kick in the pants of the
Slale.
Western readers are likely to get a perspective on
The Yawning
Heights
by placing it in the company of
Gargantua and Pantagruel,
Gulliver's Travels,
Burton 's
Anatomy of Melancholy,
and the thieves '
poems of Franc;ois Villon; and such comparisons would be helpful,
since, like these, the fundamental appeal of
The Yawning Heights
