The six stories collected here were written between 1923 and 1929; five of them were first collected in a volume titled What the Nightingale Sang: Sentimental Tales (O chem pel solovei. Sentimental’nye povesti, 1927), along with two other stories—“Wisdom” (“Mudrost’”) and “The Goat” (“Koza”). The texts I’ve used for this translation appear in volume 3 of Zoshchenko’s Collected Works (Sobranie sochinenii [Moscow: Vremia, 2008]), edited by I. N. Sukhikh, and are drawn from Zoshchenko’s Selected Tales (Izbrannye povesti) of 1936. The 1936 volume arranges the texts logically: The six stories narrated by I. V. Kolenkorov are grouped together and furnished with four prefaces, while “Wisdom” and “The Goat” appear in a separate cycle—First Tales (Pervye povesti)—along with “The Female Fish” (“Ryb’ia samka”). Unlike the six Sentimental Tales proper, “The Goat” has no framing narrator, while “Wisdom” appears to be narrated by some version of “Zoshchenko”; they are not the work of Kolenkorov. The four self-defensive—and contradictory—prefaces were radically revised from earlier texts and fashioned into a numbered series especially for the 1936 Selected Tales. I’ve chosen to limit the volume to the six Kolenkorov tales and their four prefaces—that is, to Kolenkorov’s collected works.
Zoshchenko made many revisions to his stories between editions—some minor, some more significant. Although I based the translation primarily on the 1936 text, I’ve also, in a few instances, restored passages that were likely cut for reasons of censorship. Earlier versions of the stories have been reprinted in Stories and Feuilletons, 1922–1945. Sentimental Tales (Rasskazy i fel’etony, 1922–1945. Sentimental’nye povesti [Moscow: OLMA-PRESS, 2004]).