In view of past misunderstandings, the writer notifies his critic that the person who narrates these tales, is, so to speak, an imaginary person. He is a type—a middling intellectual who happens to live at the turn of two epochs.
Neurasthenia, ideological vacillation, major contradictions, and melancholy—that’s what we had to bestow upon our “promoted worker,” I. V. Kolenkorov.1 Whereas the author—the writer M. M. Zoshchenko, son and brother to unhealthy men of this same sort—has, for his part, put all that behind him. At the present moment, he exhibits no contradictions. His soul is clear, bestrewn with blossoming roses. And if these roses wither from time to time, if tranquility departs from his heart—it is for wholly different reasons, of which the author will write at some later date.
In this case, we are dealing with a literary device.
The author implores the honorable critic to keep this tangle in mind before raising a hand against the defenseless writer.
April 1929
Mikh. Zoshchenko
Leningrad