REREADING ZOSHCHENKO’S OEUVRE
Alexander ZHOLKOVSKY (USC, Los Angeles)
The physical model for Alice wandering through Wonderland is Alice Liddel; the spiritual and psychological Alice Charles [Dodgson, i. e. Carroll] himself. Alice’s attitudes, her fears, her aggressions, her strengths, her weaknesses, her sharp retorts, her ineptitudes, her confusions, her insensitivities–and, in the end, her determination to survive–they all belong to Charles (Bayley, 12)
Self-demotion as Technique
The mock-metaliterary question posed in the title of this article appears in the conclusion of Zoshchenko’s story “Earthquake” (“Zemletriasenie,” 1: 441-444),11 where it promptly receives a mock-moralistic reply: “The sting of this artistic satire is aimed fair and square (v akkurat) against drinking and alcohol…” The authorial self-irony is obvious, and yet this story–and Zoshchenko’s comic corpus as a whole–has been persistently read as straight satire. In its seven decades, Zoshchenko criticism has gone through several major stages, focusing on: the writer’s comic texts, his techniques of skaz, and the politics of his crypto-dissidence, be it from a pro- or anti-Soviet point of view; on the comic texts plus A Skyblue Book (1934) and the longer tales, emphasizing Zoshchenko’s various discursive modes and his cultural profile (Vol’pe; Chudakova; Shcheglov; Popkin, 53-124; Zholkovsky, Text Counter Text, 35-87); on Before Sunrise (henceforth BS) and Youth Restored and the (quasi)autobiographical persona’s psychoanalytic profile (McLean, “Zoshchenko’s Unfinished Novel” and “Belated Sunrise”; Kern; Masing-Delic; Hodge; Hanson; Grose); and, finally, on comparisons between BS and other texts (Grubisic; Zholkovsky, “Aristokastratka”; Siniavskii; Hanson; Scatton), outlining the thematic invariants in Zoshchenko’s oeuvre.
In each type of criticism, the relationship between author (implied and real) and character (narrator, hero, the “Zoshchenkovian” type) has come up for discussion. The more sophisticated “political” scholars who have focused on skaz and dissidence have stressed the distance between the two, while the more naive or pro-Soviet critics have mixed them up. The “cultural” critics, on the other hand, have hypostatized the difference and treated Zoshchenko as an anthropologist of an exotic “culture of unculturedness” (Shcheglov), sometimes stressing the intimate kinship between the author and his characters and underscoring the ambivalence of Zoshchenko’s would-be Tolstoyan “primitivism” (Zholkovsky, Text Counter Text, with reference to Frank’s “The Ethic of Nihilism”). The psychoanalytic critics’ focus on the authorial persona of BS has lent support to this latter view of Zoshchenko as an ambiguous, problem-ridden personality, one much less innocent of the characters’ sins than admitted by the writer’s political and cultural interpreters.
The time has come for a radical shift in Zoshchenko studies. Linda Scatton based her 1993 monograph on the premise of the unity of his oeuvre and the understanding that BS and other longer “unfunny” texts, on which she focused, are just as good and “Zoshchenkovian” as the widely popular comic ones. Now that BS has been fully accepted into the Zoshchenko canon, the next step is to pose the obverse question, namely: after BS, what is to be made of the comic stories? The challenge is to recognize them as manifestations of essentially the same themes (i.e., the same neuroses as reflected in BS), and to learn to read them accordingly. In what follows, I show that Zoshchenko’s comic stories are made of exactly the same stuff as the dreams, neuroses, and autobiographical vignettes in BS. This, of course, reopens the issue of author vs. hero, a.k.a. the notorious Zoshchenkovian meshchanin. Put bluntly, my claim is that Zoshchenko is not out to get some wretched “petty-bourgeois vulgarian,” but that this “vulgarian” is a projection of his own flawed inner self.2Paraphrasing Gustave Flaubert’s famous line about identifying with his famous (anti)heroine, Zoshchenko could have said of his own “lady aristocrat”: “Madame l’aristocrate, c’est moi.”
In the following analysis I use BS not as God’s (or Freud’s) truth on the matter but rather as a literary text to be compared with other literary texts and transcended by the critic’s analysis of its hidden anxieties and agendas (see May). Although one should of course beware of taking Zoshchenko’s authorial self-revelations in BS at face value, independent confirmations of his neurotic problems are not lacking. In any case, BS–as confessional, autopsychoanalytic, and metaliterary prose–offers explicit critical insights that are usually the scholar’s business to uncover. However, the institution of Zoshchenko criticism, content with its morally sanctioned job of discovering the “truly dissident” Zoshchenko behind the self-professed parodic disguise of the “proletarian writer” (Zoshchenko 1991, 586), has resisted the shocking equation of Zoshchenko with his fictional heroes. The defense mechanisms of Zoshchenko’s laughter can be thus said to have succeeded in shielding him from scholarship’s probing scalpel. Criticism has thus perpetuated that very encroachment by society on Zoshchenko’s sensitive private soul the struggle against which may be said to constitute the underlying existential theme of his entire life and work.
In this connection, the much belabored Zoshchenko-Gogol analogy acquires new relevance.3By the year of Gogol’s hundredth anniversary in 1909, his reinterpretation was well underway, having begun in the 1890s and culminating in the revisionary 1909 centennial issue of Vesy (see Maguire, 16-21). It is now far from premature to start ushering in a view of Zoshchenko (1894-1958) from the twenty-first century, to borrow Maguire’s felicitous phrase. Clinging to the image of Zoshchenko as a mere satirist of meshchanstvo and portrayer of Soviet culture is like reading Gogol along Belinskian lines–as a critical realist “poet of real life.” There is room for that too, but only on a rather superficial level. The following montage of some familiar quotes from Gogol and less known ones from Zoshchenko (with my italics) will make the point more convincingly:
Take a close look at this city… portrayed in [“The InspectorGeneral”]: everybody… agrees that there is no such city in the whole of Russia… But what if that is the city of our own soul (nash zhe dushevnyi gorod)…? (Gogol, 4: 130).
I started endowing my heroes… with my own trash (moeisobstvennoi drian’iu)… I pursued it… with malice and mockery… under different titles and in different careers… demoted from the rank of general to that of enlisted man… These pathetic nobodies (nichtozhnye liudi)… are not at all portraits of pathetic nobodies… (Gogol, 8: 294-295)
[After reading Dead Souls Pushkin] declared…: “Lord, how sadis our Russia!” I was amazed by this. Pushkin, who knew Russia so well, failed to notice that all this… was my own invention (moia sobstvennaia vydumka)! That’s when I realized the power of the stuff taken from the soul… the soul’s truth (delo, vziatoe iz dushi… dushevnaia pravda) (Gogol, 8: 294-295).
Life did not create art, art creates life… Previous creatorsreproduced “things” (“veshchi”), whereas new creators reproduce their own emotional states (svoi dushevnye sostoianiia) (Zoshchenko 1994, 109-114).
[I]f I write about the meshchanin, that does not mean that I metsomewhere a live meshchanin and transferred him whole onto paper… I invent (vydumyvaiu) a type. I endow it with the qualities that are present in some form or other in ourselves… In almost every one of us there is some or other instinct of a meshchanin and proprietor (sobstvennik) (Zoshchenko 1991, 430-431).
In [our] psychic life there are two basic emotions: fear and joy.Preponderance (accidental) of one of the two defines character (Zoshchenko 1994, 118).
[F]rom those thoughts… that I had I have fashioned a lot of veryshort stories… accessible for today’s readers (quoted by Kadash, 285-286).
Both the longer tales and the very short stories I wrote withone and the same hand (Zoshchenko 1991, 585).
Just as in the 1830s when Pushkin himself, no less, failed to read Gogol’s “dead soul” correctly (or at least that’s what Gogol claimed) so did Vladislav Khodasevich blunder almost a century later with regard to Zoshchenko. He lumped Gogol together with other Russian writers and social critics as a poor relative:
This wretchedness is not new. Nor is Zoshchenko’s question [whetherit is worth one’s while to “shed light on such poverty and only make the bedbugs laugh (takuiu bednost’ osveshchat’ klopam na smekh)”]. In various forms this question has been posed… by Gogol, Saltykov, Ostrovskii, Chekhov… I am not comparing Zoshchenko to such outstanding people in terms of either the power of his gift or artistic significance… But the comprehensive material he gathered from everyday reality (polnota sobrannogo bytovogo materiala) makes Zoshchenko very important (145-146).
Khodasevich made the statistics of thefts, muggings, and other ills of Soviet Russian reality as reported by Zoshchenko the master metaphor of his review. But perhaps more revealing would have been a catalogue of the hypochondriac medical concerns that plagued Zoshchenko’s supposedly “healthy” satirical view of reality. We may cite if only the abundance of “medical” titles of his works, which begin but do not end with the story “Healing and Psychics” (“Vrachevanie i psikhika,” 2: 229-233), a story which prompted the earliest attempt at correlating Zoshchenko’s comical stories with his psychoanalytic interests (Von Wiren-Garczynski).4
Yet Zoshchenko’s morbidity went largely unnoticed by his political and cultural critics. The Guinness Book of Records citation for misreading Zoshchenko’s laughter as “healthy” and “simple” should probably go to Petr Pil’skii’s 1928 essay entitled “Simple laughter”:
… Zoshchenko produces the rare impression of a normal writer…Zoshchenko is simple… full of the most sincere good-naturedness… kind, caressing, soft… His careless writing… exudes youth and… impatient force… He is laughing because he is devoid of anger (bezzloben) and healthy. (Pil’skii, 157-161)
Fifteen years later, in BS, this healthy simpleton was to map out in painstaking–and painful–detail the cityscape of his tormented soul. This map may serve as a guide to Zoshchenko’s comic stories and an aid in understanding what turned his topical ephemera into lasting masterpieces.
Love and Surgery
In the already mentioned “Lady Aristocrat” (“Aristokratka,” 1: 170-173), the conflict between the narrator and heroine of the title begins with her rush for the concessions stand (I sama v bufet pret) and his offer that she have one pastry (“Ezheli, govoriu, vam okhota skushat’ odno pirozhnoe, to ne stesniaites’. Ia zaplachu”). As she, however, takes more and more, scandal erupts. An episode in BS bears striking resemblance to this scene, both in terms of the general eating anxiety and specific textual details:
– As a joke, Father starts eating his son’s pancakes. The boy cries, and Father accuses him of greediness. “All right,” the son concedes, “you can eat one pancake. I thought you were going to eat them all.” The child also offers his soup, but Father prefers to wait for the dessert–to test the child’s generosity. The child says: “All right, go ahead and eat [the dessert], if you are so greedy.” Both leave the table in a huff, but in the evening Father brings the boy his dessert and they share it (“It’s Not My Fault” [“Ia ne vinovat”], 3: 533-34; 1974, 117-18).
In “Aristokratka,” the theater outing is prompted by the heroine’s complaint that the hero’s courtship consists of his dragging her around the streets (“Chto vy menia vse po ulitsam vodite?”). In another episode from BS, one of the author’s beloveds prods him in practically the same words (“Vtoruiu nedeliu my s vami khodim po ulitsam”; “It’s My Own Fault” [“Ia sam vinovat”], 3: 509; 1974: 85). Furthermore, the story’s opening remark about not liking “those dames in hats” (bab, kotorye v shliapkakh) also has a counterpart in an openly Oedipal childhood episode in BS: “…Mama is wearing a huge hat… I don’t like Mama to dress that way… I’ll grow up big and ask Mama not to dress this way” (“By the Gate” [“U kalitki”], 3: 540; 1974, 127). These and other similarities to episodes from BS (for more detail see Zholkovsky, “Aristokastratka”) reveal the autobiographical sources of “Aristokratka”‘s narrator, in full accord with the self-demoting techniques that produce the “Zoshchenkovian type.”
Another story of a meshchanin suspiciously similar to his authorial “denouncer” is the 1927 “Operation” (“Operatsiia”), where the plot revolves around the removal of a sty:
For Petiushka… this surgery was a first… The woman-doctor … a young interesting dame… says, “…Some men… get quite used to seeing this cane-head (nabaldashnik [i.e., the sty]) in front of themselves at all times.”
But for beauty’s sake, Petiushka decided to risk surgery…
He then thinks: “…[T]hey might order me to undress [sic] my suit.Medicine is an obscure matter.” …The main thing is, the woman-doctor is a young one. Petiushka couldn’t help but try and dazzle her eyes (Okhota byla Petiushke pyl’ v glaza pustit’)5.. So he put on a clean shirt… Turned up his moustache…
The woman-doctor says, “…This is a lancet… Take off yourboots and lie down…” Petiushka was somewhat at a loss… “Uh-uh, he thinks, as for my socks, they are uninteresting, to say the least.”… So he started anyway to peel off his coat, in order to outbalance, so to speak, his lower drawbacks…
“Honest,” says he, “comrade woman-doctor, I didn’t count onlying down with my feet. After all, it’s an eye disease, an upper one…”
The woman-doctor, fatigued by her higher education… laughedthrough her teeth. That’s how she went about cutting his eye. Cuts andlaughs. Casts a glance at his foot and chokes with laughter. So that herhand shakes. Could have cut him dead with her shaking precious littlehand…
But, by the way, the surgery ended fine. And now Petiushka’seye has no cane-head. (1: 397-399)
Seen through cultural-political glasses, “Operation” is one more attack on the “uncivilized new Soviet man.” But an unprejudiced glance at this miniature as a world-class short story rather than a topical newspaper skit reveals its archetypal underpinnings: the motifs of initiation (“a first”), phallic symbolism (the eye, the cane-head, the upturned moustache, the opposition: top [eye]/ bottom [feet, “lower drawbacks”]), and fear of castration (cutting, lancet, teeth), to say nothing of the plot’s master trope (“surgery as a love tryst”) and its ambiguous resolution, at once happy and unhappy (the removal of the “cane-head” can be read, on the sexual plane, both as castration and consummation).
The story’s archetypal skeleton is fleshed out with specifically Zoshchenkovian phobias of the kind paraded in BS. Among them are the ambiguous attitude toward a sophisticated woman, the fear of undressing, the sexual desires and doubts (cane-head vs. lower drawbacks), and the fear of teeth (vaginal or otherwise), knives (the lancet), and the hand holding it. Furthermore, BS offers direct counterparts to the surgical plot itself, complete with the word “castration.” For example:
Someone is chasing me… a man with a knife in his hand.. Theknife is aimed at me from above… I immediately understood this dream… [A] hospital–evidently the operating room… the hand of… a surgeon… My mother told of an operation when I was two years old… performed without chloroform, hastily… She heard my horrible cry… I found the scar… It must have been a very deep cut… Poor little thing! You can imagine his horror when the terrible hand… armed itself with a knife and began to cut his pitiful little body… He lay with his puny little legs cocked up, felt a hellish pain and saw the hand with a knife–the familiar hand of a beggar, a thief, a predator, a murderer… What a psychic castration!…
Mother smeared her nipple with quinine so that I finally wouldbe repulsed by this mode of feeding. Shivering with revulsion and horrified that the breast concealed new misfortunes, I continued to nurse… (VIII: 3-4; 3: 608-10; 1974, 220-222).
The two traumatic experiences described here–an early surgery without an anaesthetic and weaning by quinine–have combined to produce the threatening “knife-hand-woman” cluster that is so prominent in “Operation.”
A further traumatic link is provided by yet another fragment of BS. As the narrator tries to convince a friend that old age is more frightening than death, the friend is hit by a truck and the narrator takes him to a hospital “to sew up his torn lip”:
The surgeon (a young woman) addressed her questions to me,since the injured man’s lip had swollen so much he could not answer…:”How old is your acquaintance?.. If he’s no more than 40 to 50 years old, I’ll give him plastic surgery. But if he is 50, I’ll… well, just sew him up…” Here the injured man… squirmed… Raising his hand, he thrust forward four fingers… After some eye-rolling, the woman-physician began plastic surgery. No, his lip was sewn up quite nicely, the scar was negligible, but the blow to my friend’s morale had a lasting effect on him… This pain also remained with me. And I began to think even worse of old age. (XIII: 1; 3: 683-684; 1974, 318-319)
The parallels with “Operation” are obvious and many, down to those between the sty, swollen to the size of a cane-head, and the friend’s swollen lip, resulting in his raised arm/hand, both vigorously phallic denials of his senility.6
Anxiety of Loss and General Mistrust
To avoid the impression that Zoshchenko was fixated solely on sex, let us consider the 1927 story “Guests” (here paraphrased):
– The Zephirovs invite guests for a Christmas party, hoping that thethree of them–man and wife and father-in-law–will be enough to keep the guests from excessive stealing. But the two men soon get loaded (nazhralis’), while the hostess suddenly discovers that someone has pilfered the bulb from the bathroom. The guests are promptly searched but to no avail (“Nothing especially prejudicial was found, except for some sandwiches, a half-bottle of Madeira, two medium-size glasses, and one carafe”). Mme. Zephirov even apologizes, admitting that “somebody from the outside could have dropped in… and unscrewed the bulb… But in the morning… it turned out that the host, afraid that some overreaching guests might filch the bulb, unscrewed it himself and put it in his side pocket. And there it got broken.” (“Gosti,” 1: 363-365)
Again, showing through the familiar garb of a story about drunks and thieves are Zoshchenko’s neurotic invariants: problems with food, undressing, and the anxiety of loss. I will focus on the latter motif, very typical of Zoshchenko’s comical texts, and highlight in it the subjective, “dushevnyi” element of “fear”–over the objective, social-cultural phenomenon of “theft.”
Khodasevich has noted the propensity of Zoshchenko’s “respected citizens” to stealing:
It is not in vain (nedarom) that they constantly suspect each other.The narrator has asked a college student to chop some wood for him… So “the student carries the wood, and the landlady rushes around the apartment–counts and recounts her belongings–fears he’d pinch them. And her son, Mishka… counts the overcoats. Ah, I think, the damned meshchanka! As for me, I took my coat from the hanger, took it into my room, and covered it with a newspaper” (Khodasevich, 142; the story in question is “The Incident” [“Sluchai,” Zoshchenko 1991, 239-240])
Remarkably, the expected pilfering fails to materialize–as, in fact, it fails in “Guests.” The characters suspect each other precisely in vain, contrary to the critic’s claim. Small wonder, because Khodasevich the Silver Age poet, strange as it may seem, proceeds from the materialistic assumption that art reflects life, whereas Zoshchenko the alleged Soviet satirist is concerned with pouring his own “emotional states” onto the page.
On close inspection, BS yields an episode concerning theft quite similar to “Guests.” One evening, before going to bed, the boy narrator’s elder sister Lelia says:
“There are definitely going to be burglars (vory) tonight…” I shout…, “Don’t forget to shut the doors!…”
Everyone’s asleep. But no sleep for me. The doors, of course,are shut… With my fingers I find the latch on the window. Suddenly something falls on the floor with a… bang. I hear Mama’s frightened voice: “What’s that? Who’s there?… Burglars!” “Where, where are the burglars?” I shout to Mother…
Mother calms me down. And I go to bed again, pulling the covers over my head. (“Zakryvaite dveri” [“Shut the Doors”], 3: 534-535; 1974: 119-120).
Clearly, the ‘I’ has only himself to blame: the suspicions are more real than (and predate by far) any actual thieves in the persona’s experience. The narrator is ruefully aware of this:
I–as a boy, then as a youth, and finally as a man–would shout: “Shutthe doors!”… and check the latches and bolts on the doors, the windows… put a chair in front of the door and rest a suitcase or some other things on the chair, hoping that they would fall and awaken me should someone try to enter my room. (VII: 10; 3: 604; 1974, 212-213)
The Soviet thieving orgy will later confirm and trigger the persona’s apprehensions and be duly reflected in Zoshchenko’s stories, but the paranoid attitude is there from the start.
The proportion of “false alarms” and “inadequate reactions” in the stories of theft is high, and some of them are notably reminiscent of those haunting the authorial persona’s in BS:
– The narrator and his wife hear the neighbor screaming, think that she is being robbed, decide not to interfere, and block the door with a chest of drawers; the other tenants do the same, but it turns out that the house is on fire (“The Event” [“Sobytie”], 1: 395-396);
– A police detective investigating the disappearance of a marriedcouple’s goat develops several theories of the robbery, but the goat is found standing on the roof. Nor does a new suspicion–that the thief has milked the goat–get confirmed: it is the wife herself who milked it while her husband was throwing several outsiders out, fearing that the goat would disappear again (“The Enigmatic Occurrence” [“Zagadochnoe proisshestvie”], 1940, 87-97).
As if real and imaginary stealing were not enough, the characters set about “provoking theft”:
– A woman passenger likes to catch potential thieves on a streetcar by baiting them with an attractive looking package. The curious narrator disrupts the sting, and nobody gets caught (“Casting Bait” [“Na zhivtsa”], 1: 280-281);
– The kids Lelia and Min’ka (= the narrator) place a nice package inplain view, a passer-by grabs it, and from it a frog leaps into his hand. A dozen years later, the narrator, a starving student in another town, notices a thick wallet by a fence, reaches for it, but it moves aside and children’s laughter is heard. The narrator realizes he has been punished for his childhood sins (“A Find” [“Nakhodka”], 1978, 301-305).
The affinities linking the mean bait-casting meshchanka, the (quasi)autobiographical Min’ka and his grown-up self are telling.7
Zoshchenko characters are also big on “preventive measures” against theft–in the spirit of the already familiar cases of being suspicious of guests, expelling outsiders, and fortifying doors with chests of drawers and suitcases. And as often as not, prevention takes place where no theft will. Among other means of shifting narrative emphasis away from the theft itself are also situations of “involuntary pilfering” and plot patterns where “the victim is to blame”.8
The point here is that theft is not the problem. The act of deprivation does not originate “outside,” in the objective, social space, but rather “inside,” in the unhealthy head of the subject. That subject may be represented by the authorial persona of BS, the (quasi)autobiographical Min’ka of the children’s stories, the more–or often less–honest comical narrator, or, finally, the blatantly thievish meshchanin. In other words, for Zoshchenko, Karamzin’s pithy description of the state of affairs in Russia (“Voruiut” [they steal]) is not the last word on the matter, even if everyone, including the victim and the narrator, is a crook. Zoshchenko’s fundamental view is, rather, that one has only oneself to blame (cf. the already quoted chapter titles from BS: “It’s Not My Fault” and “It’s My Fault”).
“Suspicions of theft” are an indication of the persona’s general “mistrust.” The anticipated trouble may or may not materialize, but even if it does, the mistrust existed before, above, and irrespective of the facts:
– Throughout the story, the wife of a lottery winner is certain that themoney will somehow elude her (“proizoidet kakoe-nibud’ takoe, blagodaria chemu ia skorei vsego ne uvizhu etikh deneg”), and this time around that is exactly what happens (A Skyblue Book, 3: 209-214);
– The narrator loves fellow humans, but has never met a disinterestedone, except for perhaps the fellow who once caught up with him on a deserted road, despite his fearfully accelerated steps,–in order to show him a short cut; but then again, it may be he was just after some company and a free cigarette (“An Encounter” [“Vstrecha”], 1981, 67-70).9
– Some visiting black musicians (negritianskaia negrooperetta), “spoiltby European civilization,” liked everything in the USSR, except for the rude shoving in the streets.10 True, remarks the narrator, we do walk on each other’s feet here, but that’s not out of malice, but exclusively, “Negroes, please note, out of our soul’s simplicity.” One day the narrator, distracted by the sight of a beggar, treads on the heel of a passer-by; scared, he awaits punishment, but the man never so much as turns his head or falters. “That’s soul simplicity for you… Just trudge on.” (“Soul’s Simplicity” [“Dushevnaia prostota”], 1: 392-93).
The complete failure of the expected–indeed, masochistically hoped-for–blow to materialize sets in relief the narrator’s ambivalent preoccupation with fear, mistrust, and need for stroking, be it even negative. The story’s structure belies both its ostensible moralistic-civilizing tenor (thou shalt not tread on thy neighbor’s feet) and its Aesopian reading as a satire of Soviet mores (being trod upon is the norm, hence the surprise), veiled, as it were, by the otherwise redundant dissertations on the “soul’s simplicity” and by the ambiguity of the narrator who commits the sin of treading on the other man’s foot.11 Indeed, it is once again familiar Zoshchenkovian invariants that carry the entire (non)plot:
– the initial “soul-to-soul walking” (of the narrator and the other pedestrian) forms the negative foreshadowing of the culmination–an idyllic calm before the storm;
– the sight of the beggar12 triggers the hero’s tragic flaw, motivating his fatal faux pas; a sense of guilt aggravates his fear, disarming him in the face of danger and thus increasing the tension;
– the anticipation of inevitable vengeance further heightens the spiraling suspense;
– and the absence of vengeance provides the closure: the triumphal return of the desired “soul simplicity,” albeit of a less than glorious sort, tinged with disappointment at having failed to attract any attention at all.
Among the manifold variations on the theme of mistrust are also various hypochondriac attitudes, e.g., the phobias of water and hand/arm (ruka) and other “painful objects” (bol’nye predmety) analyzed at length in BS. Mistrust often reaches hysterical dimensions and leads to “overreactions” or “provocations.”
The latter begin with “preliminary speculations” and span a gamut of mental experiments, from elaborate practical jokes to the aggressive testing of limits. Here is an example of “preliminary speculations”:
– A drunken man lying on the pavement complains that passers-byjust forge ahead without showing any sympathy to someone who might have been a victim of some accident or other–rather than a mere drunk. (“Sober Thoughts” [“Trezvye mysli”], 1978, 192-193)
Mistrust, in its turn, is just one manifestation of the shift of focus from objective to subjective problems. In the medical sphere, for instance, this shift underlies such motifs as malingering, deliberate or involuntary; wrong diagnosis; malpractice; and, last but not least, cases that are “beyond medicine” and require radical existential change–in the spirit of BS and Youth Restored.
Guests, Beggars, and Parents
To return to “Gosti,” the story’s central theme is not “thieves,” but a cognate one–“guests.” Guest/host confrontations abound in Zoshchenko’s texts. They often lead to sizable damage being sustained by one or the other party, involve other idiosyncratic phobias (of water, food, fire, bed, authority figures), and aggravate family conflicts. But once again, actual damage is often negligible compared to the “apprehensions” and “claims” it causes and the “relief” enjoyed on getting rid of the guests. In the following example, “apprehensions” are turned into “active response” and lead to the effective “ouster” of invited guests:
– In the presence of guests, their host, his wife, and their little son(with special childish bluntness) discuss the expenses incurred intreating them; the guests leave. (“Balancing the Economy” [“Khozraschet”], 1: 196-198)
Another story offers a preventive version of the same strategy:
– A host proudly tells his visitor that his family do not treat guests anymore and, in fact, eat out themselves, having liberated the wife from cooking so she can take orders for sewing. The visitor fails to see the difference and leaves, whereupon the host ascribes his guest’s angry remarks to his bitterness over being dealt out of a free meal. (“Family Happiness” [“Semeinoe schast’e”], 1: 262-264)
The guest/host topos runs the gamut of the usual manifestations of mistrust and fear. Thus, in “Gosti,” the guests are subjected to “suspicions” (partly unfounded) and “countermeasures/tests” (the search); other stories have guests and/or hosts falling victim to “provocations.” The guest/host situation can be presented from either perspective–that of the hosts or the guests13–and either party can be assigned blame in the end.
A whimsical variation on this topos is “Baron Neks”:
– A rich baron spoils his hired hands in every possible way and neverleaves them alone. They suspect him of mistrust, but it turns out that only in their company can he develop a healthy appetite. He wants them to work for him next year but they shun the invitation. (1: 182-185)
In this story, the entire guest/host paradigm is inverted and thus comically reconfirmed; it is also combined with the food, health, and trust disorders. Moreover, the inversion demonstrates Zoshchenko’s interest in role reversals, lending further support to the equation “implied author = his characters.”
Alongside thieves, another approximation of guests are beggars, who also threaten the persona with deprival. The author-narrator of BS analyzes his “beggar complex,” establishes its recurrence in his memories, dreams, fears, as well as literary works, and correlates it with his other phobias.14 In the process, he discovers its symbolic nature: being beyond the persona’s experiences as a little child, the figure of the beggar must have come later to replace that of the parents as the original “breast-snatchers”:
But could the beggar-image be understood by an infant?… Whatdoes a beggar do? He stands with an outstretched hand… Out of thesecomponents the symbolic image of a beggar might eventually arise. With perfect clarity I suddenly understood that I feared not the beggar but his hand. (VII: 9-10; 3: 602-603; 1974, 209-211)
I remembered a dream from long ago… From out of the wall,toward me, there stretched a huge hand… Evidently in the daytime a hand… removed something from the infant… Perhaps… the mother’s hand removed the breast… Perhaps the father’s hand, placed on the mother’s breast, frightened the baby still more. (VIII: 2; 3: 607-608; 1974, 218-219)
Accordingly, beggars are quite prominent in the comic stories as well, sometimes appearing there on the slimmest of pretexts. A famous beggar story is “The Story of a Nanny”:
– An ugly old hired nanny uses the child as a prop for begging in thestreets; the parents are especially outraged by the impact this experience may have on the child’s impressionable psyche, while the nanny claims the baby might even enjoy it. (“Rasskaz pro nianiu,” included in A Skyblue Book, 3: 191-194)
This story also exhibits telling analogies with BS (see, e.g., 3: 529-30, 590-91; 1974, 112-113, 194-95). As for guest/host confrontations proper, in BS they are few. To cite the two most important ones:
– On a visit to his maternal grandparents’, the boy narrator asks for a”droplet” of soup; the grandfather fulfills this request literally; feeling hurt, the boy says: “I’ll never come to see you again” (“At Grandmother’s” [“U babushki”], 3: 523; 1974, 120-121);
– Staying at the house of the narrator’s parents, a very stern paternalgrandfather says at dinner that the family’s problems are due to having “too many children.” Later the child narrator goes into the grandfather’s room and, asked why he has entered without knocking, gets angry and says: “If you want to know–this is my room.” (“A Closed Heart” [“Zakrytoe serdtse”], 3: 543-544; 1974, 131-132)
Setting the ‘I’ at odds with his hosts/guests (who happen also to be his grandparents) are the same bones of contention as in the comic stories: food and living space.15 Of special importance is, of course, food, which we have already seen withheld by a (grand)parental hand/arm. Two episodes pit the infant ‘I’ directly against his parents. One is the conflict over pancakes with Father, discussed earlier in connection with “Lady Aristocrat,” the other is the following:
– The narrator as a child bites pieces off of figs on a plate. “Of course,this is naughty… But then–I don’t eat the whole fig. I take only a little bite. Almost the whole fig remains at the disposal of the grown-ups.” Mother gives him a spanking. (“I Won’t Do It Again” [“Ia bol’she ne budu”], 3: 523-524; 1974, 104-105)16
By analogy with the interpretation of beggars as surrogate parents, guests, who are equally absent from the child’s early experience, may also be seen as playing the parental role. This symbolic identification is supported by the similarities between the “I Won’t Do It Again” episode and the famous story “Christmas Tree” (“Elka,” 1978, 285-288), where, too, the little boy “only partially” destroys the gifts (he bites into some of them and breaks others), but claims that they still remain at the disposal of the children-guests and their parents; and where a parent (the father) intervenes in the end as the ultimate “damagee” and “punisher” (he gives all the toys away to the children guests).
That “guests” are some sort of “parents” (or “relatives”) is also apparent in many other stories.
All this is perfectly natural, since the problem is precisely the child’s socialization, and society is at first represented by the parents, who at later stages are joined in this capacity by guests and other outsiders. Especially telling in this respect among the children’s stories is “Golden Words,” where the father sides with his guest the boss against his own children (“Zolotye slova,” 1978, 310-316). In a word, the guest-host conflict can be interpreted as the projection by Zoshchenko onto the so-called meshchane of his own failed psychological socialization.
Conclusion
I have tried to demonstrate the thematic unity of Zoshchenko’s serious and comical texts, identify the major motifs varying the central theme of “fear,” establish the equation “thieves = beggars = guests = relatives = parents,” and show how it reflects the neurotic relationship of the ‘I’ with “others” and parts of its own split self. But I have not so far posed the crucial question of how these newly discovered neurotic invariants of Zoshchenko’s oeuvre mesh with his better studied social, cultural, and formal invariants, as well as with general literary and mythological archetypes. How, indeed, does the “encyclopedia of fear” find itself so seamlessly wrapped in the “encyclopedia of unculturedness”?
To sketch out a preliminary answer, Zoshchenko’s anxieties focus on the violation of the social being’s personal boundaries,17 thus making him an ideal writer on the primarily “Soviet” theme of invasion of the individual’s privacy. Indeed, such intrusions–for the most part, thinly veiled and accompanied by disclaimers, but sometimes addressed quite openly–are repeatedly portrayed in Zoshchenko’s texts.18 Lying at the crossroads of the psychological and the social, the problematic of personal boundaries links the psychoanalytic and cultural approaches and accounts for the wealth of Zoshchenko’s archetypal repertoire.
Going beyond the specific fears and “painful objects” that trigger them, that is, the motifs that have been identified by the author himself in BS, one glimpses a more general existential Angst pervading Zoshchenko’s oeuvre: “the anxiety of chaos, disorder, unpredictability, fragility, and transitoriness.”19 A case in point is the story “Earthquake,” quoted in the article’s title: the problem is not so much the protagonist’s alcoholism per se as the human condition in general, epitomized by the drunkard lost in, and luckily oblivious to, the crumbling world of the 1927 Yalta tremblor. To shield himself from chaos, the Zoshchenkovian persona looks to all possible guarantors (or at least symbols of) “order”: preventive tricks, masks, art, culture, science (in particular, medicine and psychoanalysis), and even state power. All of these, however, prove tragi-comically unreliable. In this light, the readiness of both Zoshchenko’s comic heroes and his autobiographical persona to accept blame in exchange for the powerful protection of authority makes profound existential sense.20
As for the stylistic counterpart of Zoshchenko’s anxieties, it is provided by the studied helplessness of his discourse, which in even his most adult texts presents the world through the eyes, as it were, of a confused and frightened child–one straight out of BS. In a word, Zoshchenko’s unreliable narrative is his response to an unreliable world. These then are, briefly, the achetypal features that account for the enigmatic difference between run of the mill Soviet satire (which, indeed, answers the composite sketch of the “culturological Zoshchenko”) and Zoshchenko the indisputable modern classic.21
NOTES
1 The multivolume editions of Gogol (1937-52) and Zoshchenko (1987) are cited by volume and page only. References to Zoshchenko’s other editions give year and page. Before Sunrise is quoted in Gary Kern’s excellent translation (Zoshchenko, Before Sunrise), with references to the novella’s titled or numbered sections plus double page references to the 1987 and 1974 editions; where not specified, translations are mine. In addition to the usual indented quotations, small type is also used, set off by a dash, to indicate plot summaries.
2 K. I. Chukovskii formulated the writer’s authorial position as follows:
His book of stories Uvazhaemye grazhdane… is a harsh indictment… With such stories as “Parusinovyi portfel’,” “Zabavnoe prikliuchenie”… he accuses all [these corrupt people] of being brutishly lusty (skotski bludlivy)” (Tomashevskii, Vospominaniia, 54).
Zoshchenko’s one-time fellow Serapion Brother K. A. Fedin aptly stated the resulting reader response to Zoshchenko by the “accused”:
The dispute around Zoshchenko manifested the traditional historical attitude of a society towards its satirist: it contests his claims.It is quite content when it can exclaim: “What a fine job has he done on them!” But one can hardly demand that the society should exclaim with pleasure: “Wow, what a fine job has he done on me!” (ibid, 107).
Tellingly, Chukovskii failed to realize that Zoshchenko’s own amorous practices (as confessed in BS) did not differ much from those ascribed to the lustful “accused,” while Fedin stopped short of articulating the really provocative response: “What a fine job has he done on himself!”–and thereby on humans at large.
3 Zoshchenko insisted on identifying with Gogol, wrote a story entitled “Comrade Gogol,” devoted many pages to Gogol’s life, death, and sick personality in Youth Restored (1933) and BS, and kept reworking the “overcoat” and other Gogolian motifs in his stories. Critics from Bitsilli to Popkin and Kadash have drawn the main lines of comparison between the two writers: laughter, skaz, foregrounding of lower strata, poetics of insignificance, shift to didacticism, underlying hypochondria, and terminal anorexia.
4 See such titles as “Beregite zdorov’e,” “Bol’nye,” “Gipnoz,” “Doktor meditsiny,” “Domashnee sredstvo,” “Zubnoe delo,” “Istoriia bolezni,” “Klinicheskii sluchai,” “Kuznitsa zdorov’ia,” “Medik,” “Meditsinskii sluchai,” “Nervnye liudi,” “Nervy”, “Neschastnyi sluchai”, “Operatsiia,” “Patsientka,” “Psikhologicheskaia istoriia,” “Chudnyi otdykh.”
5 This seemingly inadvertent mention of the surgeon’s eyes in the story of eye surgery is one of Zoshchenko’s staple devices, sometimes laid quite bare.
6 Among the many comic love stories that find telling counterparts in BS are “Love” (“Liubov’,” 1: 193-195; cf. 3: 551-552; 1974, 141-142; see Zholkovsky, “Nevidimye miry strakhi”) and “A Merry Life” (“Veselaia zhizn’,” 1: 74-81; cf. “El’vira,” 3: 471-472; 1974, 34-36; see Zholkovsky, Inventsii, 66-67).
7 Remarkably, both in “Guests” and “The Enigmatic Occurrence” there is a kid Min’ka in the family wrongly supposed to have been robbed, while “The Incident” features a Mishka in yet another unrobbed family.
8 See, respectively, “Fokin-Mokin,” “Sapogi,” “Poritsanie Krymu,” “Spets,” “Kak sapozhki pokupali” and “Interesnaia krazha,” “Uzel,” “Chasy,” “Bednyi chelovek,” “Nochnoe proisshestvie”.
9 Incidentally, this plot has an autobiographical parallel: “Perhaps the most positive feature of the Soviet man is goodwill. I remembered the Crimea. A man ran after me [shouting]: ‘Don’t go there, there is a precipice there.’” (Zoshchenko 1994, 126).
10. Zoshchenko’s references to “negrooperetta” are based on fact: the May 1926 performances in Leningrad by Sam Wooding’s group, billed as “The Chocolate Kids” (Shokoladnye rebiata) and reviewed as a major cultural event–among others, by Mikhail Kuzmin (Kuzmin, 4; see also Poliakov, 82).
11. A sophisticated new update of the “cultural”-Aesopian approach to Zoshchenko in general and “Dushevnaia prostota” in particular has been proposed by Cathy Popkin (53-124) within the framework of her “poetics of insignificance.” Her analysis of the story is also remarkable for the Dostoevsky subtexts she adduces (from Notes from the Underground and The Brothers Karamazov); see also Zholkovsky, “K reinterpretatsii poetiki.”
12. “Beggars” were one of Zoshchenko’s invariant obsessions, about which see below.
13. See, respectively, “Gosti,” “Elka,” “Novyi chelovek,” “Muzh,” “Khozraschet” and “Stakan,” “Pominki,” “Rasskaz o podletse,” “Semeinoe schast’e.”
14. Cf.: “Then I leafed through my works, my books. Without a doubt, the theme of the beggar interested me greatly. But it was the normal interest of a literary man in a social phenomenon… The image of a beggar again stood before me. Yet this time the beggar was I myself… And that is why the image of a beggar frightened me.” (“Shut the Doors” [“Zakryvaite dveri”], 1: 4; 3: 588-591; 1974, 192-196)
15. Incidentally, the notorious “The Adventures of a Monkey” (“Prikliucheniia obez’iany” [1991, 563-568]) combines both of these motifs.
16. For an insightful psychoanalytic comparison of BS with Zoshchenko’s children’s stories, in particular “A Christmas Tree,” see Hanson.
17. On the psychological implications of violating such boundaries see, for instance, Goffman, 69-70.
18. In “The Husband” (“Muzh,” 1: 315-16), the encroachment is mitigated by its being a mere practical joke and involving purely private matters (imagined adultery) rather than political ones:
– The narrator comes home, but his “progressive” wife and her maleco-worker won’t let him in, and the police refuse to interfere. Half an hour later he is welcomed in to discover a roomful of his colleagues, who had had a committee meeting there and moreover, “pulled a prank over you. We kinda wanted to find out how husbands behave in such cases nowadays.”
A strictly political “provocation,” albeit again under the guise of a practical joke, takes place in yet another “guest” story (included in A Sky-Blue Book):
In the course of political chitchat at a party, the guests decide to callthe Kremlin, despite the hostess’ apprehensions (“Ia ne pozvoliu v moei kvartire s vozhdiami razgovarivat’”), which results in a threatening return call. Scared, they disperse. Later it turns out that one of the guests had slipped away and called from a pay phone “just to kid the good company” (“Interesnyi sluchai v gostiakh,” 3: 316-19).
Still more direct are the narrator’s disquisitions (in “Lilacs in Bloom” [“Siren tsvetet”], 2: 147-149) about guests–who else?–first frequenting a friend’s house, then, after he has been arrested, completely abandoning the wife stricken with grief, and then, once he has been released, resuming their visits as if nothing had occurred.
On the theme of Zoshchenko’s defiance of authority (and specifically of the Soviet powers-that-be) in connection with BS and his neuroses, see: Hanson; May; Zholkovsky, “‘Monter’ Zoshchenko.”
19. The theme of life’s unreliability, randomness, and lack of firm foundation, be it in science or God, is developed at length in one of the Sentimental Tales–“A Terrible Night” (“Strashnaia noch’,” 2: 94-101).
20. See, for instance, “Rabochii kostium” (1: 302-303):
– A man keeps protesting against non-admittance to a restaurant, but is happy to learn, once in the cooler, that the reason was his drunkenness, not his “work clothes.”
Cf. a similar episode in BS:
– The narrator as a little schoolboy is relieved to find out that he got a “one” [= a grade of “F”] for not knowing the assigned poem rather than “for everything I don’t know yet” (“It’s a Misunderstanding” [“Eto nedorazumenie”], 3: 540-541; 1974, 127-128).
According to students of religion, the cluster “chaos anxiety–guilt–supreme order” is a universal underlying all human faith (see Burkert).
21. This distinction is not only theoretically plausible but was, in fact, drawn by Zoshchenko himself:
Once we talked about the concept of “archetype,” introduced by [Carl]Jung [according to whom]… all people are filled with the archaic psychic stratum… which once used to generate myths and now, works of art…
Zoshchenko held that in portraying a person, the writer should depict not only what was individual (lichnoe), but also “generic/tribal” (rodovoe), that which has been imprinted on his psyche by history. The writers whoonly follow fashion fail to win his approval precisely because they neglect the “generic/tribal” and historical for the sake of the temporary and individual” (see Gennadii Gor in Tomashevskii, Vospominaniia, 211-212).
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