Yawning Heights
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Yawning Heights
''Yawning Heights'' ( rus, Зияющие Высоты, r=Ziyayushchiye Vysoty) is the first published novel by Soviet philosopher Alexander Zinoviev. Zinoviev expressed skepticism and frustration toward writings that attempted to expose and reveal the evils of Soviet communism. Zinoviev chose, instead, to satirize and ridicule Soviet society in ''Yawning Heights'', presented as the city / nation of Ibansk. The novel has been compared to the writings of Jonathan Swift, Lewis Carroll, and others. Everyone in ''Yawning Heights'' is named Iban Ibanovich Ibanov, so each is instead referred to by a descriptive name, rather than their proper name. Some are recognizable. In the book, one of the characters writes a satirical novel critical of his society. The character knows that the Brothers ( KGB) are searching his house to find his controversial book. This represents the level of metafiction. Satire As a logician, Zinoviev was able to reduce many features of Soviet communism to ...
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Debut Novel
A debut novel is the first novel a novelist publishes. Debut novels are often the author's first opportunity to make an impact on the publishing industry, and thus the success or failure of a debut novel can affect the ability of the author to publish in the future. First-time novelists without a previous published reputation, such as publication in nonfiction, magazines, or literary journals, typically struggle to find a publisher. Sometimes new novelists will self-publish their debut novels, because publishing houses will not risk the capital needed to market books by an unknown author to the public. Most publishers purchase rights to novels, especially debut novels, through literary agents, who screen client work before sending it to publishers. These hurdles to publishing reflect both publishers' limits in resources for reviewing and publishing unknown works, and that readers typically buy more books by established authors with a reputation than first-time writers. For this ...
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Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national republics; in practice, both its government and its economy were highly centralized until its final years. It was a one-party state governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with the city of Moscow serving as its capital as well as that of its largest and most populous republic: the Russian SFSR. Other major cities included Leningrad (Russian SFSR), Kiev (Ukrainian SSR), Minsk ( Byelorussian SSR), Tashkent (Uzbek SSR), Alma-Ata (Kazakh SSR), and Novosibirsk (Russian SFSR). It was the largest country in the world, covering over and spanning eleven time zones. The country's roots lay in the October Revolution of 1917, when the Bolsheviks, under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Russian Provisional Government ...
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Alexander Zinoviev
Alexander Alexandrovich Zinoviev (Russian: Алекса́ндр Алекса́ндрович Зино́вьев; October 29, 1922 – May 10, 2006) was a Soviet philosopher, writer, sociologist, and journalist. Coming from a poor peasant family, a participant in World War II, Alexander Zinoviev in the 1950s and 1960s was one of the symbols of the rebirth of philosophical thought in the Soviet Union. After the publication in the West of the screening book '' Yawning Heights'', which brought Zinoviev world fame, in 1978 he was expelled from the country and deprived of Soviet citizenship. He returned to Russia in 1999. The creative heritage of Zinoviev includes about 40 books, covers a number of areas of knowledge: sociology, social philosophy, mathematical logic, ethics, political thought. Most of his work is difficult to attribute to any direction, put in any framework, including academic. Having gained fame in the 1960s as a researcher of non-classical logic, in exile, Zinoviev ...
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Communism
Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange which allocates products to everyone in the society.: "One widespread distinction was that socialism socialised production only while communism socialised production and consumption." Communist society also involves the absence of private property, social classes, money, and the state. Communists often seek a voluntary state of self-governance, but disagree on the means to this end. This reflects a distinction between a more libertarian approach of communization, revolutionary spontaneity, and workers' self-management, and a more vanguardist or communist party-driven approach through the development of a constitutional socialist st ...
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Ibansk
''Yawning Heights'' ( rus, Зияющие Высоты, r=Ziyayushchiye Vysoty) is the first published novel by Soviet philosopher Alexander Zinoviev. Zinoviev expressed skepticism and frustration toward writings that attempted to expose and reveal the evils of Soviet communism. Zinoviev chose, instead, to satirize and ridicule Soviet society in ''Yawning Heights'', presented as the city / nation of Ibansk. The novel has been compared to the writings of Jonathan Swift, Lewis Carroll, and others. Everyone in ''Yawning Heights'' is named Iban Ibanovich Ibanov, so each is instead referred to by a descriptive name, rather than their proper name. Some are recognizable. In the book, one of the characters writes a satirical novel critical of his society. The character knows that the Brothers ( KGB) are searching his house to find his controversial book. This represents the level of metafiction. Satire As a logician, Zinoviev was able to reduce many features of Soviet communism to ...
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Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish Satire, satirist, author, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whig (British political party), Whigs, then for the Tories (British political party), Tories), poet, and Anglican cleric who became Dean (Christianity), Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, hence his common sobriquet, "Dean Swift". Swift is remembered for works such as ''A Tale of a Tub'' (1704), ''An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity'' (1712), ''Gulliver's Travels'' (1726), and ''A Modest Proposal'' (1729). He is regarded by the ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' as the foremost prose satirist in the English language, and is less well known for his poetry. He originally published all of his works under pseudonyms—such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, M. B. Drapier—or anonymously. He was a master of two styles of satire, the Satire#Classifications, Horatian and Juvenalian styles. His deadpan, ironic writing style, partic ...
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Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (; 27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet and mathematician. His most notable works are ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (1865) and its sequel ''Through the Looking-Glass'' (1871). He was noted for his facility with word play, logic, and fantasy. His poems ''Jabberwocky'' (1871) and ''The Hunting of the Snark'' (1876) are classified in the genre of literary nonsense. Carroll came from a family of high-church Anglicanism, Anglicans, and developed a long relationship with Christ Church, Oxford, where he lived for most of his life as a scholar and teacher. Alice Liddell, the daughter of Christ Church's dean Henry Liddell, is widely identified as the original inspiration for ''Alice in Wonderland'', though Carroll always denied this. An avid puzzler, Carroll created the word ladder puzzle (which he then called "Doublets"), which he published in his weekly column for ''Vanity Fair ( ...
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Metafiction
Metafiction is a form of fiction which emphasises its own narrative structure in a way that continually reminds the audience that they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Metafiction is self-conscious about language, literary form, and story-telling, and works of metafiction directly or indirectly draw attention to their status as artifacts. Metafiction is frequently used as a form of parody or a tool to undermine literary conventions and explore the relationship between literature and reality, life, and art. Although metafiction is most commonly associated with postmodern literature that developed in the mid-20th century, its use can be traced back to much earlier works of fiction, such as ''The Canterbury Tales'' (Geoffrey Chaucer, 1387), ''Don Quixote'' (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605), ''The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman'' (Laurence Sterne, 1759), and '' Vanity Fair'' (William Makepeace Thackeray, 1847). Metafiction became particularly prominent in the 1960 ...
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Logic
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premises in a topic-neutral way. When used as a countable noun, the term "a logic" refers to a logical formal system that articulates a proof system. Formal logic contrasts with informal logic, which is associated with informal fallacies, critical thinking, and argumentation theory. While there is no general agreement on how formal and informal logic are to be distinguished, one prominent approach associates their difference with whether the studied arguments are expressed in formal or informal languages. Logic plays a central role in multiple fields, such as philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics. Logic studies arguments, which consist of a set of premises together with a conclusion. Premises and conclusions are usually un ...
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Catch-22
''Catch-22'' is a satirical war novel by American author Joseph Heller. He began writing it in 1953; the novel was first published in 1961. Often cited as one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century, it uses a distinctive non-chronological third-person omniscient narration, describing events from the points of view of different characters. The separate storylines are out of sequence so the timeline develops along with the plot. The novel is set during World War II, from 1942 to 1944. It mainly follows the life of antihero Captain John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier. Most of the events in the book occur while the fictional 256th US Army Air Squadron is based on the island of Pianosa, in the Mediterranean Sea west of Italy, although it also covers episodes from basic training at Lowry Field in Colorado and Air Corps training at Santa Ana Army Air Base in California. The novel examines the absurdity of war and military life through the experienc ...
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Gordon Clough
Arthur Gordon Clough (26 August 1934, County Borough of Salford, Salford, Lancashire – 6 April 1996, London), was an English radio presenter and journalist, primarily known for his work on BBC Radio 4. Education He was educated at Bolton School and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read French language, French and Russian language, Russian. National service He spent his national service monitoring Soviet Union, Soviet radio traffic in the Baltic Sea, and joined the BBC Russian Service. He was banned from entering the Soviet Union as an alleged former spy. Career In 1968 he entered domestic journalism and then studio presentation, working on ''The World This Weekend'', ''PM (Radio 4), PM'' and ''The World at One''. Aided by his fluency in Russian, he moved back to front-line journalism at the time of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, making a series of award-winning documentary programmes. Clough also covered South Africa months after the release of Nelson Mandela, and for a season ...
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1976 Russian Novels
Events January * January 3 – The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights enters into force. * January 5 – The Pol Pot regime proclaims a new constitution for Democratic Kampuchea. * January 11 – The 1976 Philadelphia Flyers–Red Army game results in a 4–1 victory for the National Hockey League's Philadelphia Flyers over HC CSKA Moscow of the Soviet Union. * January 16 – The trial against jailed members of the Red Army Faction (the West German extreme-left militant Baader–Meinhof Group) begins in Stuttgart. * January 18 ** Full diplomatic relations are established between Bangladesh and Pakistan 5 years after the Bangladesh Liberation War. ** The Scottish Labour Party (1976), Scottish Labour Party is formed as a breakaway from the UK-wide party. ** Super Bowl X in American football: The Pittsburgh Steelers defeat the Dallas Cowboys, 21–17, in Miami. * January 21 – First commercial Concorde flight, from London to Bahrain. * January 27 ...
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