Sentimental Tales

5. On the Proletarian Culture (Proltkult) movement, see Edward J. Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature, 1928–1932 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), James Francis Murphy, The Proletarian Moment: The Controversy over Leftism in Literature (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), and Mark D. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).

6. Mikhail Chumandrin, “Chei pisatel’—Mikhail Zoshchenko?,” printed in Zvezda, no. 3 (1930), 206–219. Reprinted in Litso i maska Mikhaila Zoshchenko, 161–178. Discussed, along with other critical responses, in Carleton, 67–68, and throughout.

7. Chumandrin, in Litso i maska Mikhaila Zoshchenko, 172, 178.

8. Zoshchenko, “O sebe,” in Begemotnik: Entsiklopediia “Begemota”: Avtobiografii, portrety, sharzhi i izbrannye rasskazy, stikhi i risunki nashikh iumoristov—pisatelei i khudozhnikov (Leningrad, 1928). Reprinted in Sobranie sochinenii, ed. I. N. Sukhikh (Moscow: Vremia, 2008), 105–107. My translation.

9. This was established by Iurii Tomashevskii. See his “Chronological Canvas of the Life and Work of Mikhail Zoshchenko” in Litso i maska Mikhaila Zoshchenko, 340; an English translation of this “Chronological Canvas” appears in Russian Studies in Literature 33, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 60–92. Russian Studies in Literature 33, nos. 1 and 2 (1997) feature a number of valuable articles on Zoshchenko. Tomashevskii (1932–1995) was Secretary of the Commission to Preserve Zoshchenko’s Literary Heritage and compiled an indispensable volume of reminiscences, Vospominaniia o Mikhaile Zoshchenko (St. Petersburg: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1995). Linda Hart Scatton’s Mikhail Zoshchenko: Evolution of a Writer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), originally published in 1993 and revised in 2009, is an excellent English-language resource on the author’s life and work. A.B. Murphy’s Mikhail Zoshchenko: A Literary Profile (Oxford: William A. Meeuws, 1981) was the first book-length study of Zoshchenko in English.

10. Zoshchenko, “A Wonderful Audacity,” translated by Rose France, in 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution, edited by Boris Dralyuk (London: Pushkin Press, 2016), 206–208.

11. Zoshchenko, “O sebe.”

12. See Hongor Oulanoff, The Serapion Brothers: Theory and Practice (The Hague, Mouton, 1966) and The Serapion Brothers: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gary Kern and Christopher Collins (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1975).

13. Zoshchenko, “O sebe, ob ideologii i eshche koe o chem,” Literaturnye Zapiski, no. 3 (August 1, 1922). Reprinted in Sobranie sochinenii, 101–103.

14. For more on Zoshchenko’s style, in the context of the Russian literary tradition of skaz (intentionally nonstandard, markedly oral prose), see Jeremy Hicks, Mikhail Zoshchenko and the Poetics of Skaz (Nottingham, England: Astra, 2000).

15. Zoshchenko, “O sebe, o kritikakh i o svoei rabote,” in Mikhail Zoshchenko. Stat’i i materialy, ed. B. V. Kazanskii and Iu. N. Tynianov (Leningrad: Academia, 1928), 10. Reprinted in Sobranie sochinenii, 108–111.

16. Zoshchenko, “O sebe, o kritikakh.”

17. Kolenkorov’s very name is indicative of his unsuitability, as well as of his odd ontological status. As Lesley Milne points out, “Kolenkorov’s name is derived from the word kolenkor, or ‘calico,’ that plain-coloured cloth used, among other things, for bookbinding. Kolenkor features also in the idiom ‘Eto sovsem drugoi kolenkor’—‘That’s quite another kettle of fish.’ Kolenkorov’s Sentimental Tales are indeed quite a different kettle of fish from the officially propagated literature in a post-revolutionary Russia engaged in its grandiose socio-political experiment,” Zoshchenko and the Ilf-Petrov Partnership: How They Laughed, Birmingham Slavonic Monographs, no. 35 (Birmingham: Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, 2003), 44.

18. See Thomas P. Hodge, “Freudian Elements in Zoshchenko’s Pered voskhodom solntsa (1943),” Slavonic and East European Review 67, no. 1 (January 1989): 1–28.

19. As Milne writes, Zoshchenko “applied to be reinstated, but in his case it was argued that ‘reinstatement’ would mean conceding that the original decision to exclude him had been a mistake. Zoshchenko was, accordingly, not ‘reinstated’ but only ‘admitted’ to membership, as if for the first time, on the basis of what he had been able to publish between 1946 and 1953,” Zoshchenko and the Ilf-Petrov Partnership, 10.

20. White, “Some Remarks on Humor,” 174.

21. Alexander Zholkovsky’s article on the theatrical dimension of Zoshchenko’s art is titled “Mikhail Zoshchenko’s Shadow Operas,” in Russian Literature and the Other Arts, ed. Catriona Kelly and Stephen Lovell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 119–146. Zholkovsky is one of Zoshchenko’s most perceptive critics, who has been able to reconcile, convincingly, his “humorous” and “serious” works; see, for instance, “ ‘What Is the Author Trying to Say with His Artistic Work?’: Rereading Zoshchenko’s Oeuvre,” Slavic and East European Journal 40, no. 3 (1996): 458–474, and Mikhail Zoshchenko: Poetika nedoveriia, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Izd-vo LKI, 2007).

1. This is Zoshchenko’s homage to his close friend and mentor at the World Literature workshop, the great translator, essayist, and children’s poet Korney Chukovsky (né, Nikolay Vasilyevich Korneychukov, 1882–1969). In his diary entry for August 23, 1927, Chukovsky wrote: “My one and only consolation at this time is Zoshchenko, who often comes and spends whole days with me. He is very worried about his book What the Nightingale Sang. He is outraged by a review, published by some idiot in Izvestiia [one of the two official Communist Party newspapers], that treats Nightingale as a petit bourgeois encomium to petit bourgeois life. In response to the review he has written a hilarious note to the preface for the second edition, claiming that the author of the book is in fact Kolenkorov, one of his characters. Since he is so worried about the book, he was very happy when I told him that I read it as poetry, that the amalgamation of styles he achieves with such virtuosity does not prevent me from sensing the work’s lofty—biblical—lyrical qualities,” Kornei Chukovsky, Diary, 1901–1969, edited by Victor Erlich, translated by Michael Henry Heim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 202–203.

1. The tag “promoted worker” alludes to the Soviet phenomenon of “vydvizhenstvo,” a concerted effort to promote workers to administrative positions with the help of adult education courses. Kolenkorov, Zoshchenko suggests, should be regarded as someone who has been promoted—hastily and, in all likelihood, prematurely—to the rank of author.

1. The Fourth Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) was held in Petrograd and Moscow between November 5 and December 5, 1922.

2. Lenten sugar is a candylike dessert for Lent, made by boiling sugar (which is refined without egg whites or animal blood serum) in water and fruit juice. Later, non-Lenten versions of the dessert were made of plain sugar boiled in butter and milk. It was sold in crumbled pink or blue pieces, resembling the Scottish tablet, Dutch borstplaat, and French sucre à la crème.

3. Persian Lilac (Lilas de Perse) was a popular perfume invented by Henri Brocard (1839–1900) and produced at the Moscow soap and perfumery factory he had founded in 1864. The factory was nationalized in 1917 and, in 1922, renamed New Dawn (Novaya Zarya).

1. Established in 1921, the Hero of Labor award was given to outstanding workers in Moscow and Leningrad; in 1927, it was extended to the whole of the Soviet Union.

2. Russian populism (“narodnichestvo”) was a socialist movement of the 1860s and 1870s. The populists (“narodniki”) were urban intellectuals who believed that the key to reform lay with the peasantry, and so “went out to the people,” spreading political propaganda throughout the countryside. Unfortunately, most peasants were not receptive. That, in combination with tsarist repression, splintered and radicalized the movement. It was a radical cell of populists—the People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya) group—that assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845–1929) was an influential Slavic linguist. He was born in Warsaw, in Congress Poland, which was in a “personal union” with the Russian Empire and would, in 1867, be absorbed into the imperial realm. He spent most of his career at Russian universities. In addition to his linguistic work, Baudouin de Courtenay was known as an advocate of national revival and limited autonomy for minority groups under Russian rule. In 1914, he was arrested for publishing a pamphlet espousing his federalist views (“The National and Territorial Aspects of Autonomy”) and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment at the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. He was released after three months.

3. Jack London’s works were enormously popular in the Soviet Union, and more or less ideologically acceptable; Nadezhda Krupskaya read two of Jack London’s stories to her husband, Vladimir Lenin, in the days before his death. (Nadezhda K. Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin, vol. 1, trans. E. Verney [New York: International Publishers, 1930], 209.)

1. The German philosopher is likely Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), whose The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1918–1922) was influential in the postwar years. For Spengler, primitive human culture began at the end of the last Ice Age; he deduced that Western civilization, modern culture’s final phase, had spent its vital energy and would soon begin to decline.

1. The newspaper Pravda (Truth) was the official organ of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union until 1991.

2. Jacob Becker, who immigrated to St. Petersburg from Bavaria in 1841, became one of the most prominent piano manufacturers in Russia. The Becker firm, which had been the official purveyor to Nicholas II, was nationalized in 1917; their factory was renamed Red October (Krasny Oktyabr).

3. The Living Church, or “Renovationism,” was a schismatic offshoot of the Russian Orthodox Church, which was founded in 1922 and dissolved in 1946. The Living Church accepted Soviet rule and was infiltrated by the secret police; the moral qualities of its de facto leader, Alexander Ivanovich Vvedensky (1889–1946), were questionable.

4. The People’s Commissariat for Naval Affairs was established in February 1918. In November 1923, it became part of the People’s Commissariat for Military and Naval Affairs, which was subsequently dissolved in March 1934 and replaced by the People’s Commissariat of Defense.

5. By “polka tremblam,” Kolenkorov means “Polka Tremblante” (“tramblan” in Russian). It is a partnered dance, better known as the “schottische,” which likely originated in Bohemia.

6. The “flea waltz” (“Der Flohwalzer”) is a simple composition for piano, often taught to beginners. The “shimmy” was a popular dance of the Jazz Age, associated with the Kraków-born American actress and dancer Gilda Gray (née Marianna Michalska, 1901–1959). The last reference is, of course, to Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies.

7. During the 1920s, “Americanism” was synonymous with businesslike efficiency and modern methods of production.

1. Zoshchenko ends his catalog of “deficiencies” with “chubarovshchina”—a term referring to a notorious incident that occurred on August 21, 1926 in Leningrad’s Chubarov Lane, when an unmarried female worker was raped by twenty-six (some accounts say forty) young male workers, a number of whom were members of the League of Young Communists (Komsomol). The incident, and the term “churbarovshchina,” came to symbolize lack of ideological discipline.

2. This is an allusion to the arrests and show trials of technicians accused of sabotaging Soviet industry in the late 1920s and 1930s. The first and most famous of these incidents occurred when fifty-three engineers were arrested in the town of Shakhty and put on trial in 1928. Five of the accused were sentenced to death and another forty-four were imprisoned.

3. White officer: Zoshchenko uses the term “zlotopogonnik” (person with gold epaulettes), which at the time referred to officers of the White army.

4. Author’s note: The maiden smiled playfully and cheerfully, smelling the lilacs.

5. The “German dentist” is, in all likelihood, Freud, and what our author describes is some version of the theory of drives. Freudian analysis was tolerated in Soviet Russia in the 1920s but was officially denounced at the 1930 Congress on Human Behavior in Moscow. See Martin A. Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). Zoshchenko had a lifelong interest in Freud, and his autobiography, Before Sunrise, can be read as a work of Freudian self-analysis. See note xviii.

6. Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) is regarded as Russia’s greatest literary figure, who presided over the Golden Age of Russian poetry; the years of his birth and death essentially bracketed that period. The Symbolist Alexander Blok (1880–1921) occupied a similar position during the Silver Age of Russian poetry, which also lasted roughly from 1880 to the early 1920s. The verse “A bird hopping on a branch,” which our author attributes to Pushkin, is not to be found in Pushkin’s oeuvre.