ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the remnants of religion in Soviet Man by examining the spiritual stratum in the work of Alexander Zinoviev, former Chairman of the Logic Department at Moscow University, an avowed dialectical materialist and self-professed homo sovieticus. Zinoviev’s characters are too preoccupied with the daily struggle for survival and have no time to be concerned with any principle that might be considered a gift from God or might provide creative responses to the demands encountered in life. Zinoviev’s religion is based upon the undeniable existence of an immortal soul which he perceives as an illumination, the realization of a higher mode of existence. In Zinoviev’s conception, man is given the freedom to accept or not to accept God. Zinoviev, a highly sophisticated Soviet man, admits that he is a duplex man - an atheist by his education and worldview, and a believer by his upbringing and experience.
