Zinoviev, Alexander

New York. 1980. January 1981. Random House. 1st Trade Edition. Very Good in Slightly Worn Dustjacket With A Few Small Tears. 039451257x. Translated from the Russian by Gordon Clough. 288 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration and design by David Tamura. keywords: Literature Translated Russia . FROM THE PUBLISHER - One of the literary masterworks of our age, In his novel, THE RADIANT FUTURE, Zinoviev provides another comic tour de force, as profound and scathing as its predecessor, THE YAWNING HEIGHTS, but more restrained and concise. THE RADIANT FUTURE is about the life and times of a middle-rank Moscow intellectual. The story runs: ‘Where the Avenue of Marxism-Leninism meets Cosmonaut Square, a great permanent slogan was erected that reads ‘Long Live Communism - the Radiant Future of All Mankind!' In a neighboring apartment block lives the speaker with his wife his teenage children and his mother-in-law. A professor of philosophy, he is head of the Department of Theoretical Problems of the Methodology of Scientific Communism. While the bright new slogan slowly falls to pieces and becomes the rendezvous of Moscow's prostitutes and pushers, the valiant Marxist dialectician sees his own monolithic dogma gradually eroded by the constant undermining of his Socratic friend Anton, and by the embarrassing questions of his sharp-eyed children. Little by little all the suppressed squalor that attends the Communist way of life is dredged up and has to be faced, and the mediocre professor with petty ambitions ultimately falls from grace: he has built his career on the betrayal of his fellows, but now his own doubts betray him. inventory #7394 ISBN: 039451257x.