Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895-1958)
Like Ring Lardner, S. J. Perelman, Flann O‘Brien, and many another master of literary comedy, Zoshchenko was a writer whose professional merriment masked an obscure but tormenting wound. His pain was, in part, purely physical and obvious: he had been gassed as a soldier in the First World War and suffered for the rest of his life from the damage to his liver and heart. But he himself realized that his essential melancholy antedated this bodily trauma.
He avenged himself on the world, and assisted millions of readers in doing so, by laughing at it. Even dictatorships—or especially dictatorships—require jesters who have a limited license to make fun of otherwise protected people and institutions. Zoshchenko occasionally had his license revoked, but by and large he managed to be safely hilarious. In the story “Bees and People,” one scarcely notices that the reason Panfilich is able to find many hives of honeybees for sale is that the populations of three villages in which their former owners lived had been forcibly relocated to the Far East. In this aptly named story, there is a certain unstated connection between the bees and the people. Ostensibly an account of how good old Russian ingenuity wins out in the end, it does not fail to suggest that bees whose lives are disrupted can at least have the satisfaction of a vengeance denied their former keepers.
Zoshchenko’s style is at once unique and restlessly mutable. Like that of Gogol, it changes so much from story to story, and even within one story, that no single persona can be identified with it. It is called skaz, a Russian term that has been pointlessly imported into English, since no Russian or foreign theorist has ever been able to assign to it a meaning that might justify its encumbering the lexicon of criticism. It means roughly a style that conveys an impression of oral (usually subliterary) speech. “Impression” is the key word. To seek in Zoshchenko’s invented language some ethnographically authentic reflection of how Soviet bureaucrats and philistines actually spoke would be like looking for the language of cockroaches in Don Marquis’s archy and mehitabel.
Before Sunrise appeared, of all inopportune moments, in 1943, at the height of the Second World War. The censor must have been looking the other way; in any case, publication was stopped after two installments, and the work remains unfinished. Distinguished historians of Soviet literature have found it baffling; E. J. Brown calls it a novel and an elaborate exercise in humor; G. P. Struve opines that it might, after all, be a hoax. Like many Russian masterpieces, it is completely unclassifiable and deeply flawed. The least inadequate description of it is perhaps “the history of a self-analysis.”
Zoshchenko set out to discover the cause of his lifelong melancholy by painstakingly reviewing his whole existence, even that which preceded consciousness itself (hence, “before sunrise”). He felt that healing might begin by uncovering some forgotten psychic wound and correctly interpreting it. If this sounds like one of the tenets of classical psychoanalysis, it is, though Zoshchenko mentions Freud (officially proscribed by the authorities) only to reject his method in favor of the condoned theories of Pavlov. If Before Sunrise were limited to its superficial exposition of psychological theory, it would have little value. But its artistic merit rests upon numerous “snapshots” (as he called them)—vivid and telegraphically terse little vignettes drawn from a period that extended from Zoshchenko’s earliest memories to his young manhood.