There is a point of view that Zinoviev created a special genre: a "sociological novel". His books combined science and literature: methods, concepts, scientific statements were artistic techniques, and literary images were used as scientific tools. Different characters expressed the author's ideas, which allowed to consider society from different points of view and to reveal its complexity and paradox. Zinoviev called his work "synthetic literature" and "symphony". Zinoviev's genre was understood as a menippea in the terms of Mikhail Bakhtin (Peter Weil and Alexander Genis), a sociological treatise, even a textbook, an analog of the medieval "Sum of Knowledge" (Maxim Kantor), a parody of a scientific treatise (Dmitry Bykov). As Pavel Fokin believes, a sociological novel is closer to literature than to science, because it uses imagery. Michael Kirkwood considers Zinoviev's creativity to the literary criticism of the "letter" fashionable in the 1970s (Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes), as a never-ending process produced, according to Bart, as a "scriptor" and not "the author". Zinoviev's books were not limited to the conventional paradigm, but covered a wide range of literary, historical, political, sociological, aesthetic, moral, and religious issues.