One morning in 1949, Fan Fanych, alias Etcetera, is summoned from his Moscow apartment to KGB headquarters, where he is informed that he will be charged with a crime more heinous than any mere man could ever devise. Comrade Etcetera will be tried for "thevicious rape and murder of an aged kangaroo in the Moscow Zoo on a night between July 14, 1789, and January 9, 1905." Every moment in the nightmarish and hilarious account that follows lives up to the absurdity of this accusation. A seductive KGB agent attempts to convince Fan Fanych that he is a kangaroo; he finds himself in the dock at a spectacular show trial; is sent to a camp full of dedicated old Bolsheviks pathetically attempting to maintain their beliefs in the face of every new atrocity; encounters Hitler in Berlin and Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at Yalta, where he is privileged to witness the famous conference as it was really conducted. Kangaroo is a savage, cleansing satire in which Yuz Aleshkovsky confronts the hypocrisy, the cruelty, and the tragic failure of the Soviet regime. His phantasmagoria is faithful to reality, for—as Dostoevsky knew—it is impossible for "realism" to portray a society whose corruption is literally fantastic. "Kangaroo will stand as a landmark for literary historians and Russian writers of the future. . . . This is both a funny novel and a novel with a serious message about the evils of totalitarianism." (Washington Post Book World 5-4-86) "A torrent of scatological satire that leaves few targets in Soviet history or society untouched." (Los Angeles Times Book Review 7-6-86) "Aleshkovsky's special power is that devastating sense of humor. . . . Here for the first time I know of, a Russian has stripped away the sonorities of Soviet history to highlight its absurdity from an ordinary, human point of view." (Flora Lewis, New York Times) "Kangaroo is a novel of the most terrifying hilarity." (Joseph Brodsky) "As obscene a