ZOSHCHENKO, Mikhail (Mikhailovich)

Nationality: Russian. Born: Poltava, the Ukraine, 10 August 1895. Education: Studied at the Faculty of Law, Petersburg University, 1913. Military Service: Served in army, 1915-17: ensign to second captain (wounded and decorated). Family: Married Vera Vladimirovna Kerbits in 1921. Career: Held odd jobs, including shoemaker, carpenter, office clerk; government employee for railways, post office, telephone company, and border patrol, Petrograd, 1917-20; joined Red Army, 1918-19; translator and critic, Petrograd, from 1919; evacuated to Kazakhstan, 1941; editor, journal The Star, from 1946. Awards: Banner of Red Labor medal, 1939. Member: Serapion Brothers, from 1921; All-Rus-sian Union of Writers (expelled 1946; readmitted 1953). Died: 22 July 1958.

Publications

Collections

Sobranie sochinenii [Collected Works]. 6 vols., 1929-31.

Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh. 1930-31; edited by DaniilAleksandrovich Granin and Iu Tomashevskii, 1986-87.

Izbrannye proizvedeniia v 2-kh t [Selected Works in 2 Vols]. 1968.

Izbrannye v dvukh tomakh. 1978.

Short Stories

Rasskazy Nazara Ilycha gospodina Sinebriukhova [Stories Told by Nazar Ilycha sir/gospodina Sinebriukhov]. 1922.

Sobachii niukh [The Dog's Scent]. 1926.

Obez'ianii iazyk [Monkey Language]. 1926.

Tsarskīe sapogi [The Tsar's Boots]. 1927.

Uvazhaemye grazhdane [Esteemed Citizens]. 1927.

Nad kem smeetes'. 1928.

Nerveze mentshn. 1929.

Semeinyi kuporos [Family Vitriol]. 1929.

Pis'ma k pisateliu [Letters to a Writer]. 1929.

Michel Siniagin (novella). 1930.

Izbrannye rasskazy i povesti [Selected Works]. 1931; 2 vols., 1978.

Vozvraschonnaia molodost' (novella). 1933; as Youth Restored, 1984.

Golubaia kniga [A Skyblue Book]. 1935.

Russia Laughs (selection). 1935.

Kerenskii. 1937.

Rasskazy. 1938.

Rasskazy o Lenine [Stories about Lenin] (for children). 1939.

The Woman Who Could Not Read and Other Tales. 1940.

The Wonderful Dog and Other Tales. 1942.

Povesti i rasskazy. 1952.

Rasskazy, fel'etony, povesti. 1958.

Rasskazy i povesti. 1959.

Scenes from the Bathhouse and Other Stories of Communist Russia. 1961.

Rasskazy, fel'etony, komedi. 1962.

Nervous People and Other Satires, edited by Hugh McLean. 1963.

Ispoved' [The Confession]. 1965.

Liudi [People], edited by Hector Blair. 1967.

Rasskazy dvatsatykh godov: Stories of the 1920s (in Russian), edited by A. B. Murphy, 1969.

Pered voskhodom solntsa. Porest' (sketches). 1972; as Before Sunrise, 1974.

A Man Is Not a Flea (selections). 1989.

Twelve Stories (in Russian), edited by Lesli LaRocco and SlavaPaperno. 1990.

Plays

Parusinovyi portfel' [The Canvas Briefcase]. 1944.

Screenplay:

Soldatskoe schast'e [Soldier's Luck], 1943.

Other

Rasskazy, povesti, fel'etony, teatr, kritika. 1937.

Taras Shevchenko, with others. 1939.

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Critical Studies:

"The Tragedy of a Soviet Satirist" by Rebecca A. Domar, in Through the Glass of Soviet Literature, edited by Ernest J. Simmons, 1953; "Zoshchenko in Retrospect" by Vera Von Wiren, in Russian Review, October 1962; "Zoshchenko and the Problems of Skaz " by Irwin R. Titunik, in California Slavic Studies 6, 1971; Zoshchenko: A Literary Life by A. B. Murphy, 1981; The Pragmatics of Insignificance: Chekhov, Zoshchenko, Gogol by Cathy Popkin, 1993; Mikhail Zoshchenko: Evolution of a Writer by Linda H. Scatton, 1993.

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Mikhail Zoshchenko's satiric short stories were so popular during the early days of Soviet rule (1920s-30s) that the absurdities of daily life under the new regime were often characterized as "straight out of Zoshchenko." His unique talent enabled him to work within a genre disrespected at that time (the very short story, vignette, anecdote) and turn it into high art form. He accomplished this through his use of language, narrative technique, and elusive, subtly ironic tone. Zoshchenko's satiric sketches are descendants of both Anton Chekhov's humorous and poignant short stories and Nikolai Gogol's absurdist tales.

Although Zoshchenko himself was descended from the gentry, his first-person narrator is always a man of the people—uneducated, bumbling, but stridently confident of his own worth and opinions. He reveals his ignorance through his views and his language, which is full of incorrectly used words, Soviet bureau-cratese, neologisms, and colloquialisms. Brilliant and idiosyncratic, his prose is almost as difficult to translate as poetry. Zoshchenko is regarded as one of Russian literature's finest practitioners of skaz, a literary technique that offers the illusion of oral speech and involves a form of narrative that differs markedly from the accepted literary norm. The resulting stylistic distance and dissonance between author and narrator, not to mention the reader, often serve to cast doubt on the narrator's judgment.

From the beginning Zoshchenko published his short works in mass-market, cheap editions, taking as his subject matter the challenges of day-to-day existence in the Soviet Union: securing housing, using a public bath, buying moonshine liquor, visiting the doctor, sharing a communal apartment, learning how to use new-fangled equipment, attending the theater. The language and subject matter were such a far cry from the serious literature of nineteenth-century Russia that they were seen as totally in keeping with the new revolutionary spirit of the regime, and the reading public embraced the writer with gusto.

Among his most famous works, "The Bathhouse" (1925) begins with the narrator supposing that public baths in America are excellent, and he describes them in ways that make them sound just like Russian bathhouses, only cleaner, more orderly, with better service. He is quick to add that one can get washed in Russian bathhouses, too, although he asks: "Where does a naked man put a claim check?" Once admitted to the bathing area in the bathhouse, the narrator discovers that all of the buckets are taken, and when he tries to pry one loose from a fellow who has gathered three for himself, the owner of the buckets threatens to hit him right between the eyes with the tub. The narrator replies: "This isn't tsarist Russia … to go around hitting people with tubs." Later he steals a tub from a drowsy old man, but he finally gives up when he cannot find a place to sit down and is surrounded by people doing their laundry in the bathing area. Of the two claim checks he was issued (one for his clothing and one for his outerwear), one has been washed away, and the attendant refuses to give him his coat in exchange for the string that remains. When he finally describes his coat (torn pockets, all buttons missing but the topmost one), the attendant grudgingly hands it over. Outside he realizes he has forgotten his soap but cannot be readmitted without undressing again. He gives up. All of this activity is related in language that is highly colloquial and unliterary. To prove his political correctness the narrator says that while bashing people with tubs might have been acceptable in prerevolutionary Russia, it is impermissible now under the Soviets. He asks, What kind of public bath is this? And he answers himself, "The usual kind." Readers easily identify with the unsanitary conditions, poor management, shabby clothing, and shabbier behavior among the bath customers, all described in colorful language that captures the essence of oral speech.

In "The Crisis" (1925) the narrator begins his tale with a paean to the building campaign in progress at the time and looks forward to a time when the housing crisis will be solved and "we'll sleep in one room, receive guests in another, do something else in the third." His search for an apartment in Moscow takes so long that he loses his bundle of worldly possessions and grows a beard. Finally a landlord agrees to set him up in an empty bathroom, telling him that he can fill himself a whole tubful of water and dive in it all day long if he wants. Noting that he's not a fish and would prefer to live on dry land, the narrator nevertheless agrees to the arrangement and moves in immediately. Soon he marries and his wife joins him, claiming that "lots of nice people live in bathrooms." When their first child is born a year later they give him a bath every day. The only trouble is that when the other 32 tenants of the communal apartment want to use the bathroom at the end of each day, the narrator and his family are forced to move out into the hall. Eventually his mother-in-law arrives and settles down behind the hot-water tank. The news that his wife's brother may spend his Christmas vacation with them spurs the narrator to leave town in disgust and promise to send money to his family from afar. Russia's ubiquitous housing shortage is carried to almost believable satiric extremes.

Zoshchenko also wrote longer, more literary, novella-like stories that parodied contemporary practitioners of nineteenth-century poetics by showing just how absurd such genres and language were for describing life under the new regime. Later he also began to collect and combine his very short stories into book-like works. Vozvraschonnaia molodost' (Youth Restored), Golubaia kniga (A Skyblue Book), and Pered voskhodom solntsa (Before Sunrise) form a trilogy, each one an attempt to fashion connecting and overarching structures around existing stories in such a way as to make the end result greater than the sum of its parts. A lifelong depressive, Zoshchenko gradually moved away from humor and satire in his works, as he tried to cure his depression by creating positive works and a positive self. His literary experiments with short forms came to a bitter end after Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's cultural commissar, targeted him for a vilification campaign in 1946, and he produced little of note from then until his death in 1958.

—Linda H. Scatton

See the essay on "The Lady Aristocrat."