For The Radiant Future one's gratitude is unalloyed. It is nearer than The Yawning Heights to being an ordinary narrative and is thus easier for the reader to follow. There is a central character to get interested in and care about, even though he is not very likable. The central character is the narrator, head of the Department of Theoretical Problems of the Methodology of Scientific Communism…. The narrator's career as a philosopher has some resemblance to Zinoviev's own, and indeed it is possible that an element of self-hatred has been incorporated…. According to one of the cardinal principles of The Yawning Heights, it is impossible to flourish, or even grow up, in the Soviet Union while still retaining a moral sense. Therefore almost anybody you have ever heard of is automatically reprehensible.

This principle would be intolerably strict if Zinoviev did not in the first instance apply it to himself, and more rigorously than to anyone else. The Radiant Future, I think, is clear evidence that he does so. The book has an expiatory quality that gives it a dimension missing from The Yawning Heights, in which the squalor is without pathos. The narrator of The Radiant Future is enough of a recognizably human character for us to identify with him and realize that his compromises might have been ours if we had shared his circumstances.

The circumstances are those of the Soviet Union nearly unaltered. For the most part of its enormous bulk, The Yawning Heights draws on the Russian satirical tradition that goes back at least as far as Saltykov-Shchedrin's The History of a Town, and beyond that to the whole Western tradition of utopian satire, which is essentially a means of drawing attention to a state of affairs by exaggerating it…. But another, and equally important, part of The Yawning Heights simply analyzes things as they are. This part of the book grows out of the more recent post-revolutionary satirical tradition founded by Zamyatin's We. In this satirical tradition the true state of affairs is found to be already so exaggerated that its enormity can be conveyed only by analysis….

The closely argued passages of sociological analysis in The Yawning Heights belong to this second tradition and are, in my view, by far the most original parts in the book. As an exercise in neo-Swiftian scatological imagination The Yawning Heights leaves Swift's title safe, but as an analytical treatise it has great vitality. The Radiant Future is the same sort of thing but more economically done, since there is no supererogatory burden of fantasy….

At first glance the narrator is ideally equipped to thrive in the Soviet academic system. He has no interest in his subject beyond the means it offers to gain advancement, usually by suppressing any signs of originality in others. We recognize the state of affairs characterized by Sakharov when he outlined the tragedy of creative life in the Iron Curtain countries. But the narrator makes one mistake. He listens to his colleague Anton instead of taking immediate steps to crush him. Anton, a revenant from Stalin's camps, has analyzed the Soviet system and written a book about it. Reading the manuscript, the narrator becomes infected with Anton's penetrating realism, and the onward march of his career falters as a consequence. (p. 19)

Most of Anton's ideas can be deduced from The Yawning Heights, but in The Radiant Future they are laid out in a more readily appreciable chain of consequence. Once again Zinoviev insists that the Soviet Union is not a distortion of communism but an...