Mikhail Mikhaylovich Zoshchenko

Mikhail Mikhaylovich Zoshchenko (born Aug. 10 [July 29, Old Style], 1895, Poltava, Ukraine, Russian Empire—died July 22, 1958, Leningrad [now St. Petersburg], Russian S.F.S.R., U.S.S.R.) was a 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.