“The Industrial Novel” (1979) is one of the most famous works of Peter Esterhazy, translated into all languages. The visionary Zamyatin, the pessimist Orwell and the melancholic Huxley each in their own way wondered about the relationship between man and the system. The mocker Esterhazy claims: there is a system, there is a person and the connecting element between them can be one big beautiful fig. The Industrial Novel (1979), translated into all major European languages, is a look at the socialist system, full of blessed irony, this is the rarest description of socialism from the inside in world literature and the project of a possible monument to a bygone era.