He believed himself an ironist and he might even have enjoyed the century's finale, in which a dozen governments nominally committed to his insights play the role of ancien regime before the sickle of revolution. Stoyo Petkanov, the former President, a cross between Nicolae Ceaucescu and Bulgaria's Georgi Dimitrov, is on trial in the courts of the shakily democratic successor government. As in the former Soviet Union, the new crowd is trying to cope with the horrors of an economy in transition.
Goods are short and prices high.
Human intercourse has been corrupted by police intrigue under the Communists. Peter Solinsky, the son of a party intellectual, raised to the privileges of the old order, finds himself state prosecutor, charged with conducting Petkanov's show trial. The trial is intended by the new government as a ritual of self-congratulation and exculpation. In other words, Petkanov is to be a scapegoat, as Ceaucescu was, for four decades of cant, hypocrisy and terror. Battered by the saturnine taunting of the fallen old leader, who does his best to turn the tables and put his enemies on trial, the prosecutor grows weary and confused.