Conclusions
Although it might appear at first sight that Little Zinnobers is ‘a drama from school life’, as a subtitle on the cover of an edition of 2010 suggests,127 the ‘little world’ of the school also has much wider implications for society as a whole. The novel is an attempt to evoke and reconsider the last years of the Soviet regime before the USSR, described as a ‘huge and mediocre, a great Zinnober’, finally collapsed. Moreover, at the end of the novel there is a suggestion that the post-Soviet period, which has given people something new, may also be a tragedy because it has taken too much away from them. The new era has removed not only the negative aspects of the past, which people themselves are glad to part with, but also certain positive features that they may regret for the
