of individuals (Lenin, Stalin, etc.) or the "Party" or "bureaucracy" based on the dichotomy of "Power" and "People", Zinoviev describes society at the level of microsociology, his works echo with the "ironic sociological treatise" – the laws of Parkinson and Murphy. 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. Zinoviev's numerous works represent a holistic artistic universe with their own laws, ideology and poetics, form one gigantic text or collection of texts with a single atomic structure that has no beginning and no end and repeats ad infinitum, therefore it can be read from any place. This structure corresponds to the author's vision of social reality. The idea of a complex, diverse and changeable social world, but subordinate to objective laws, is embodied in the compositional structure, the "sociological triangle" of three elements: personality, institution, city. The tops of the triangle infinitely forked, united, intersect, revealing all sorts of social relations. Fragments (paragraphs or phrases) contain a complete statement that abstracts part of the social world. Texts, as a rule, consist of dialogues and reflections of representatives of different professions and social strata, cases of life, anecdotes, poems, etc. are often cited. The place of composition and plot is occupied by a kaleidoscope of various situations in which good and evil, sublime and low, heroism and meanness are indistinguishable. There are no