Your current reading list

[lightstalker]

Just finished "The rise and fall of Communism"- Archie Brown.

Looking to track down a copy of "The yawning heights" by Alexandr Zinoviev -think Orwell crossed with Dostoyevsky crossed with Solzhenitsyn crossed with Charles Bukowski

DURING the cold war, dissidents were front-line troops in the battle of wills and ideas. Despised and persecuted by the Communist regimes of the Soviet empire, they were idealised in the West. When they emigrated, they were idolised.

It is convenient, but too crude, to assume that anti-Soviet sentiments automatically meant pro-Western ones. Although some dissidents found material and mental well-being in exile, others were horrified by the decadence and cynicism they found. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was one of the outspoken disillusioned. Another was Alexander Zinoviev.


A decorated wartime pilot and distinguished mathematical logician, Mr Zinoviev could have enjoyed a quiet and privileged life in the Soviet Union. But he became a fearless and scathing critic of his country's Brezhnevite senescence. He was already in near-disgrace by the time his greatest work, “The Yawning Heights”, was published in Switzerland in 1976. It parodied, with flashes of Swiftian brilliance, the inhabitants of a fictional Soviet city, Ibansk (roughly, in Russian, “Fucktown”). Ruled by nonentities and suffused with boredom and mediocrity, Ibansk embodied the mind-rotting stagnation of life in the Soviet provinces.

The Soviet authorities were perplexed. To jail Mr Zinoviev would acknowledge that this satire was not wholly fanciful; to ignore him would look weak. So they stripped him of his medals and academic positions. Two years later, he was encouraged to emigrate. He went to Munich, then a centre of émigré dissident life.

He loathed it. His next book, “Homo Sovieticus” (1985), was acclaimed for its dissection of the Soviet mindset. Today, it seems still more savage in its assault on the pampered, hypocritical West. “It's only among us Soviet people that defenders of the West's ideals can be found,” Mr Zinoviev wrote.

Even more disappointing to him, austere and idealistic as he was, were the self-important and subsidised marionettes of the émigré world. He had got away from the “swamp of the idiocies, vulgarities and lies that is Soviet ideology, only to be forced to plunge head first into the even more idiotic, vulgar and lying marsh of anti-Sovietism.”

That was a bit harsh. Not all Western support was self-interested, rejoicing at the discomfiture of the Soviet enemy; some Westerners genuinely desired Russia to be free. But when, eventually, those freedoms came, Mr Zinoviev was still not happy. He loathed Mikhail Gorbachev's half-baked perestroika reforms, parodying them in another book, “Katastroika”. He detested Boris Yeltsin, the first president of post-Soviet Russia, seeing him as a pawn of the cold war's vainglorious victors.

Even before he returned to live in Moscow in 1999, he took up causes that mystified his fans and delighted nostalgic communists. He strongly supported Serbia against what he saw as Western aggression, and later became a leading member of an outfit set up to champion its leader, Slobodan Milosevic, against war-crimes charges. He became an increasingly ardent defender of the Soviet Union. Stalin had rightly punished him for “terrorism”, he said. Brezhnev was too soft on dissidents. His individualism found Western conformism worse than Soviet collectivism.

He scorned Vladimir Putin's Russia, describing it last September as a “hybrid, a hare with horns”. Its ingredients, he said, were “hidden Sovietism, elements of Western values and the retarded feudalism of the Russian Orthodox church.”
Progressive regression

Mr Zinoviev's contrarian approach, cynical and idealistic by turns, reflected one school of the Russian intelligentsia. By contrast, Mr Solzhenitsyn, another ex-émigré, though no fan of either the West or modern Russia, has remained staunchly pro-clerical and patriotic. But Mr Zinoviev's émigré counterparts still found his intellectual journey fascinating. Dmitry Mikheyev, a former political prisoner and physicist turned teacher of Western-style leadership to Moscow businessmen, compared him to a character in a Dostoevsky novel: “someone not entirely sane and rather idealistic, sensitive, emotional, full of contradictions.”

His intellectual mischief-making may have been tasteless, but it was not rancorous; there was a playful, good-humoured streak. Vladimir Bukovsky, a consistently anti-communist dissident settled in Cambridge, once asked him why, to the dismay of his friends, he was suddenly defending Stalin. “Anyone can attack Stalin,” Mr Zinoviev replied. “It's more interesting to find arguments in favour of him; without Stalin, my family would still be peasants.” Mr Bukovsky countered that the victims of Stalin's purges seemed a high price to pay for the Zinoviev family's elevation; Mr Zinoviev assented with good grace.

Mapping his intellectual journey was complicated by his delight in misleading gullible Westerners. In his teenage years, he claimed, he had been sent to Siberia (fresh from being top of the class at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History) for plotting to kill Stalin. According to one of his oldest friends, this tale was pure invention. Mr Zinoviev was “a brilliant mystifier”. That applied to his views and his life alike.

[flipflop]

Spot the difference:





Cheers

[michelle in alaska]

...these just crossed my path. anybody read them?



and

[flipflop]

I've just raided my clients' library and have procured the following titles for some splendiferous downtime reading:

"Tribes of the Hindoo Koosh" - Major J Biddulph, written sometime not long after 1878 (this is a 2004 Indian re-print)

"The Races of Afghanistan: Being a brief account of the principal nations inhabiting that country" - Surgeon-General H.W. Bellew (1880)

"A short walk min the Hindu Kush" - Eric Newby

"Intercourse between India and the Western World" (sounds a bit rude, what) - H.G. Rawlinson (1916)

Great stuff!

Cheers

[coldharvest]

"Tribes of the Hindoo Koosh" - Major J Biddulph, written sometime not long after 1878 (this is a 2004 Indian re-print)

"The Races of Afghanistan: Being a brief account of the principal nations inhabiting that country" - Surgeon-General H.W. Bellew (1880)

be a dear and tell me what those are like when you're done

[flipflop]

I'd be delighted to Sir

Cheers

[marie-angelique]

i can't tell you how many friends have told me to read this

and i finally got around to starting it last week while my flight out was delayed 4 hours, but i am very glad now as this is a great read and i am not even finished but can't put it down. cheers.

[coldharvest]

i can't tell you how many friends have told me to read this

and i finally got around to starting it last week while my flight out was delayed 4 hours, but i am very glad now as this is a great read and i am not even finished but can't put it down. cheers.

I read it about 6 months ago, extraordinary story.

[Penta]

Not so long ago, someone (can't remember who, the list of possibles is so long!) slagged me off for getting my ideas about Afghanistan from this supposedly crappy book, which I'd never even heard of at the time. I'd decided to give it a miss after that. But it is worth a read, is it?

[coldharvest]

Not so long ago, someone (can't remember who, the list of possibles is so long!) slagged me off for getting my ideas about Afghanistan from this supposedly crappy book, which I'd never even heard of at the time. I'd decided to give it a miss after that. But it is worth a read, is it?

You'd fuckin' love it.....if you had a penis, you'd get a boner.

[nowonmai]

Looks like a chick lit cover

[marie-angelique]

there's enough mountaineering culture woven through the fabric that even you, nowonmai, might enjoy it. and at least so far it isn't all la de da look how great i am, he wonders if he is really doing the right thing...mkay, i better finish the thing before i go on anymore.

[Hitoru]

My wife left this laying around, so I read it in a few hours while recovering from a clients dog attack. It was quite superficial, lacking depth and I can't say I would recommend it. But he still is a funny motherfucker.



I have also recently read "You can't start from here". I enjoyed it, it was a bunch of somewhat amusing anecdotes and not the kind of sketchy he's going to be really fucked cliff hanging adventure I prefer.

[flipflop]

Looks like a chick lit cover

Shurely you mean chattering class tree-hugging Gucci socialist chick lit?

I'll stick with the long dead army boys

Cheers

[vagabond]

I'll be honest and say I kind of avoided bc of the cover (yes, I judged, sue me) as well.

Currently trying to finish Wired for War by PW Singer