Nervous People, and Other Satires

Mikhail Zoshchenko

Indiana University Press, 1975 - Fiction - 449 pages

Among the most popular writers of the early Soviet period was the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, whose career spanned nearly four decades and who was as beloved by ordinary people as he was admired by the elite. His most popular pieces, often appearing in newspapers, were "short-short stories" written in a slangy, colloquial style. Typical targets of his satire are the Soviet bureaucracy, crowded conditions in communal apartments, marital infidelities and the rapid turnover in marriage partners, and what a disdainful Soviet judge in one of the sketches dismisses as "the petty-bourgeois mode of life, with its adulterous episodes, lying, and similar nonsense." Farcical complications, satiric understatement, humorous anachronisms, and an ironic contrast between high-flown sentiments and the down-to-earth reality of mercenary instincts were his favorite devices. Zoshchenko had an uncanny knack for eluding Soviet censorship (one of the sketches even touches humorously on the dangerous topic of party purges) and his work as a result offers us a marvelous window on life in Russia during the twenties and thirties.

Contents

• What the Nightingale Sang 3500 69: 3
• The Lilacs Are Blooming: 27
• Michel Sinyagin: 69
• Nervous People: 124
• The Bathhouse: 131
• The Crisis: 137
• Patients: 144
• Pelageya: 154
• A Summer Breather: 162
• The Czars Boots: 170
• A Clever Little Trick: 176
• Dont Speculate: 185
• The Affidavit: 189
• The Story of a Man Who Was Purged from: 197
• Baths and People: 204
• A Tragicomedy: 211
• An Amusing Adventure: 218
• A Water Ballet: 228
• A True Incident: 238
• A Heart of Stone: 246
• The Dictaphone: 254
• BigCity Lights: 263
• Clouds: 269
• The Canvas Brief Case: 279
• The Funeral Feast: 286
• A Jolly Game: 295
• Bees and People: 305
• The Buoy: 312
• An Extraordinary Incident: 325
• Before Sunrise excerpts: 332

About the author

His first book of stories appeared in 1921 and became extraordinarily popular. However, he came under political pressure in the 1930s because some of his works, such as Youth Restored (1933), were too slyly ambiguous to fit the socialist realist model. In 1946, together with Akhmatova, he was singled out for an extraordinary attack by culture "boss" Andrei Zhdanov and was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. From then on he mostly produced translations. Zoshchenko was an extremely effective satirist who took his subjects from the paradoxes and incongruities of post-Revolutionary Russian society. He showed that human nature, which the new government was trying to change, would assert itself nonetheless. His language is fascinating. He often chooses lower-class narrators who speak in a mixture of the colloquial and of the new Soviet rhetoric---with highly comic results. During the 1930s, Zoshchenko's fiction began to explore philosophical and theoretical problems. A well-known example is Before Sunrise, the first part of which was published in 1943. In it the author analyzes his own psyche, in the process touching on the then-forbidden theories of Freud. Publication of the complete text of this work did not occur until 1972.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Nervous People, and Other Satires; Midland book
• Author: Mikhail Zoshchenko
• Editor: Hugh McLean
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Indiana University Press, 1975
• ISBN: 0253201926, 9780253201928
• Length: 449 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Literary; Fiction / Short Stories (single author); Literary Criticism / General; Literary Criticism / Russian & Soviet