Zoshchenko, Mikhail Mikhaylovich

Zoshchenko, Mikhail Mikhaylovich

▪ Soviet author
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.

      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.

Additional Reading
Linda Hart Scatton, Mikhail Zoshchenko: Evolution of a Writer (1993); Gregory Carleton, The Politics of Reception: Critical Constructions of Mikhail Zoshchenko (1998); Jeremy Hicks, Mikhail Zoshchenko and the Poetics of Skaz (2000).

* * *


Universalium. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Поможем написать курсовую

Look at other dictionaries:

  • Russia — /rush euh/, n. 1. Also called Russian Empire. Russian, Rossiya. a former empire in E Europe and N and W Asia: overthrown by the Russian Revolution 1917. Cap.: St. Petersburg (1703 1917). 2. See Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. 3. See Russian… …   Universalium

  • skaz — ▪ Russian literature       in Russian literature, a written narrative that imitates a spontaneous oral account in its use of dialect, slang, and the peculiar idiom of that persona. Among the well known writers who have used this device are… …   Universalium

  • Serapion Brothers — ▪ Russian literary group Russian  Serapionovy Bratya,         group of young Russian writers formed in 1921 under the unsettled conditions of the early Soviet regime. Though they had no specific program, they were united in their belief that a… …   Universalium

  • Russian literature — Introduction       the body of written works produced in the Russian language, beginning with the Christianization of Kievan Rus in the late 10th century.       The unusual shape of Russian literary history has been the source of numerous… …   Universalium

  • List of Russians — This is a list of people associated with Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, and Russia of today. For a long time Russia has been a multinational country, and many people of different ethnicity contributed to its culture, to its glory, and to its… …   Wikipedia

  • Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — a former federal union of 15 constituent republics, in E Europe and W and N Asia, comprising the larger part of the former Russian Empire: dissolved in December 1991. 8,650,069 sq. mi. (22,402,200 sq. km). Cap.: Moscow. Also called Russia, Soviet …   Universalium

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”