"A Bright Future" describes the poverty, lies and spiritual emptiness of Soviet life on the example of the moral degradation of the sixties intellectual, a mediocre person who started his career in Stalin's time and achieved success during the "thaw". The novel "On the Eve of Paradise" is dedicated to various manifestations of dissidence generated by Soviet society and being part of it. "The Yellow House" continues the satire on the "progressive Soviet intelligentsia", exposes its duplicity, combining conformism with an orientation to the West; unwillingness to associate themselves with the people while preserving their instincts; meaningless parasitism on the texts of "bourgeois science". The main character, junior researcher, tries to preserve the individuality in the team, but becomes a renegade. As Claude Schwab summed up, the intelligentsia betrayed true spirituality: in scientific institutions they are not looking for truth, a lie is no longer even a lie, but a "pseudo-liqueur". Konstantin Krylov gives a characteristic quotation from Zinoviev's autobiography: