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Kelly Catriona. As has become obvious from archival revelations in recent years, boastful propaganda claims about how Soviet children enjoyed a better life than any others in the world were not always borne out by reality.

The narrator is a social misfit of forty who ruminates at length on his defects and his endless humiliating experiences and conflicts, for he is a Russian intellectual with great sensitivity and a particularly acute sense of the failings of the modern world and of everyone in it, especially himself. Of course the only thing left for it is to dismiss all that with a wave of its paw, and, with a smile of assumed contempt in which it does not even itself believe, creep ignominiously into its mouse-hole. There in its nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and, above all, everlasting spite. Once the situation has been completely and convincingly conveyed to the reader in a long outburst of fascinating, brilliant and constantly sidesplittingly-funny prose, the undergrounder proceeds to relate the two major events of the book — the goodbye party for a former school comrade whom he hates and despises of course that he has insisted on participating in to the astonishment and dismay of all the other participants and that turns out even worse and more humiliatingly than he had with his inherent pessimism foreseen himself ; and then his very unexpected, moving and quite unforgettable encounter with a certain Liza.