Homo Sovieticus by Alexander Zinoviev, translated by Charles Janson, 206 pages
Homo Sovieticus is an unconventional novel - there is no plot, and the characters are caricatures with names like "Enthusiast" and "Writer". The book is divided into small - half a page to two page long - anecdotes in which the narrator, a cynical Soviet emigre who describes himself as an Agent of the Soviet State, reflects on the life of an ASS in the Soviet Union and the life of an ASS in the West.
Zinoviev's perspective, driven home in one cynical, self-important vignette after another, is that something resembling the dialectic of Marxism is at work in history, but rather than a force for liberation, it is an idiot god fumbling about with human lives. The individual is insignificant, rather, it is the masses that decide things, and the masses are venal, blind, and cruel. The only meaningful difference between East and West is that in the USSR a desire to be free of the masses makes one an individual, while in the West such a desire only buries one deeper within the mass.
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