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PARTISAN REVIEW
consists in its dazzling play of mind-expressed in ideas, inventions,
and obscenities-rather than in the play of narrative expressed in
characters. Readers with some familiarity with Soviet satire will cer–
tainly recognize that the book is a monstrous-and magnificenl–
outgrowth of two related imaginative streams:
Vranyo,
elaborately
artificial jesting; and
Zaviratsya ,
the telling of tall tales beyond the
capacity of belief. Readers who also remember the period of the so–
called "Thaw" may also understand this book as the artistic culmina–
tion of the experimental improvisations which suddenly, at that time,
formed so large a part of literary expression. "Anecdotes, " Zinoviev
himself observes, "sprang up in amazing numbers on subjects which it
might have seemed were wholly inapplicable to anecdotes or to humor
of any kind." These retold everyday events from Soviet life in a brief,
aphoristic, and concentrated form.
Since the classic anecdotes of the period were outlawed and
punishable, something of the character of a riddle always hovered
about them.
The Yawning Heights
is, even in its punning title, a series
of anecdotal conundrums, the key and meaning of which arise from
repetition, parallelism, and accumulation . Though in this "exhaus–
tively incomplete and rigorously unsystematic book " there is no
continuous story in any usual sense, there is what may be called an
orchestration of a structure of themes. Everything comes at us masked.
Place and person are anonymous. The setting is called Ibansk not to
conceal the fact that the Soviet Union is the subject of the satire, but LO
suggest that
in reality
the U.S.S.R. is a truly pseudonymous state. Most
of the people are called Ibanov precisely because such a staLe turns
people into interchangeable units in a series: "Many years later Fellow–
worker met the famous Writer Ibanov (Ibanov is a pen-name-his real
name is Ibanov)." The central characters meet in archetypal places-in
the Bar or the "Cooler" or on the site of the legendary "Shithouse"–
and they are called by the typical names of their activities (as under–
stood from the point of view of Ibanskian officialdom). Supporters of
the State are the likes of Leader, Boss, Writer, Colleague, and Careerist;
whi le the dissident outlaws are labelled Schizophrenic, Slanderer,
Bawler, and Chatterer. These latter characters, too, are interchange–
able, each one derived from an aspect of Zinoviev's own career. Easily
identifiable historical characters are also given archetypal names–
Stalin (Boss), Khrushchev (Hog), Solzhenitsyn (Truth-teller), Yevtu–
shenko (Writer)-not because Zinoviev wished to protect himself
against charges of libel, but because such persons played archetypal
roles. Very clearly, Zinoviev is suggesting, the reality of Soviet life is
