Angels on the Head of a Pin

Angels on the Head of a Pin is a novel by the Russian émigré writer Yuri Druzhnikov, written between 1969 and 1976. The story begins with Makartsev, editor-in-chief of the Moscow newspaper Labour Truth, suffering a heart attack outside the Central Committee building: it is presumed that someone placed on his desk the manuscript of an underground publication of unknown origin, its contents so sensitive that no one dared report it upward. After the editor collapses, a power vacuum opens at the paper, and a succession of figures takes the stage—the driver, the secretary, the typist, reporters, editors, the deputy editor, and ever higher reaches of the propaganda and censorship apparatus. Through a slowly unfolding cast of characters and dossier-like reconstructions of their careers, the novel portrays daily life in the years after Khrushchev's fall and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia: the newspaper forever reports that "all is normal," yet everyone in the newsroom wears a different face and tells a different story; some make their living from lies, some preserve themselves through silence, and others pay the price for a single truthful word. With the cool detachment of a news feature, the author weaves institutional intrigue, the relationship between the intelligentsia and power, and love and betrayal into an ironic panorama of an era. Substantial in length, loose in pacing yet never disordered, the book has been called one of the sharpest literary records of the Stagnation era.