The article is devoted to a series of historical novels «Ardent Revolutionaries» and its role in the literary process of the 1970s. The series is considered in the context of the social and philosophical idea of «different-thinking» and dissidence in the late Soviet Era as a factor which had a great impact on the change in the attitude towards soviet ideology. This paper, based on the analysis of Aksenov’s historical novel ˝Love for Electricity˝, deals with literary devices that express ambiguous pathos of the author.