Abstract
In many respects Zinovy Zinik provides us with a special, even unique, view of Russian literature in the 1980s. There are two especially salient motifs in Zinik’s fiction: the Gothic element, and what can be loosely termed the “set-piece of English life”. The Gothic novel, he argues uncontentiously, arose in the mid-eighteenth century as a reaction to the age of Enlightenment with its ideas of progress and rationalism. Zinik cites several examples in Soviet public life of phenomena that we might associate with the Gothic novel. The huge official portraits of Marx and Engels always seemed to Zinik to have blue rather, than black, beards, owing possibly to the quality of the printer’s ink: they were “Blue Beards”. The External Broadcasting Corporation is a somewhat Gothic amalgamation of all the foreign stations that the hero tunes in to: The Voice of America, Radio Liberty and the BBC.
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