Mikhail Zoshchenko
Mikhail Mikhaylovich Zoshchenko, (b.
Aug. 10 [July 29, Old Style], 1895,
Poltava, Ukraine, Russian Empire—d. July
22, 1958, Leningrad [now St.
Petersburg], Russian S.F.S.R.,
U.S.S.R.), Soviet satirist whose short
stories and sketches are among the best
comic literature of the Soviet period.
Zoshchenko studied law and then in 1915
joined the army. He served as an officer
during World War I, was wounded and
gassed, and was awarded four medals for
gallantry. Between 1917 and 1920 he
lived in many different cities and
worked at a variety of odd jobs and
trades. In 1921 in Petrograd (now St.
Petersburg) he joined the Serapion
Brothers literary group. His first works
to become famous were the stories in
Rasskazy Nazara Ilicha, gospodina
Sinebryukhova (1922; “The Tales of Nazar
Ilyich, Mr. Bluebelly”). Zoshchenko used
skaz, a first-person narrative form, in
these tales, which depict Russia during
the Russian Civil War (1918–20) from the
point of view and in the language of a
semiliterate soldier and former peasant
disoriented by the long years of war and
revolution. Zoshchenko’s later tales are
primarily satires on everyday Soviet
life. One of their main targets is
bureaucratic red tape and corruption,
which he attacked with a tongue-in-cheek
wit filtered through the naive language
of the semiliterate. The malapropisms
present throughout these works make them
difficult, though not impossible, to
translate (notable among translations
into English is Nervous People, and
Other Satires [1963], trans. by Maria
Gordon and Hugh McLean). Despite their
extraordinary humour, Zoshchenko’s
stories paint a horrifying picture of
life in Soviet Russia.
Beginning in the 1930s, Zoshchenko was
subjected to increasingly severe
criticism from Soviet officials. He
tried to conform to the requirements of
Socialist Realism—notably in Istoriya
odnoy zhizhni (1935; “The Story of One
Life”), dealing with the construction,
by forced labour, of the White
Sea–Baltic Waterway—but with little
success. In 1943 the magazine Oktyabr
began to serialize his
psychological-introspective series of
episodes, anecdotes, and reminiscences
entitled Pered voskhodom solntsa
(“Before Sunrise”) but suspended
publication after the second
installment. It was only in 1972 that
the series was published in full, as
Povest o razume (“A Tale About Reason”).
In 1946 Zoshchenko published in the
literary magazine Zvezda a short story,
“Priklyucheniya obezyany” (“The
Adventures of a Monkey”), which was
condemned by Communist critics as
malicious and insulting to the Soviet
people. He was expelled (with the poet
Anna Akhmatova) from the Union of Soviet
Writers, which meant the virtual end of
his literary career. In 1954, meeting
with English students in Russia,
Zoshchenko stated that he did not
consider himself guilty, after which he
was subjected to further persecution.
These pressures led to a psychological
crisis; as a result, Zoshchenko spent
his final years in ill health.
After his death, the Soviet press tended
to ignore him, but some of his works
were reissued, and their prompt sale
indicated his continuing popularity.
