Alexander ZHOLKOVSKY (USC, Los Angeles)
In Zoshchenko criticism, the two major components of the writer’s oeuvre tend to be treated separately. While his comic corpus is interpreted in a ‘cultural-sociological’ vein–as an Aesopian satire of the ‘new, i. e. Soviet, Man,’1 the studies of his ‘serious’works (especially, Pered voskhodom solntsa [Before Sunrise], 1943, henceforth abbreviated as PVS) focus, following his own lead, more or less psychoanalytically, on his morbid self.2 Elsewhere I have argued for a ‘single Zoshchenko,’ claiming that all of his works revolve around one obsessive theme: ‘fear of environment’; that the notorious ‘Zoshchenkovian characters’ are the author’s own alter egos, defensively demoted by him to a comic status (according to the formula first developed by Gogol); that his unreliable skaz narrative represents his and his characters’ unreliable response to an unreliable world; that Zoshchenko’s ‘mask’ is existential rather than Aesopian; in sum, that he is a classic of the Soviet era not so much as a satirist of communal apartment mores but rather as a poet of a mistrustful and hopeless quest for calm, protection, law, and order.3
Not surprisingly, given this general philosophical orientation, the problems of the self’s fluid boundaries, author’s/characters’ masks, and role-playing take centre stage, and this is perhaps why Zoshchenko devotes so much attention to various theatrical motifs. Theatre ranks equal with the other ‘other art’ that is so conspicuous in his texts: painting, whose prominence may be in part due to his having been the son of a professional artist.4 Zoshchenko wrote for the theatre (mostly comedies of errors),5 and many of his comic texts involve theatre in one way or another.
Indeed, over a dozen stories, some of them among his best, beginning with the famous ‘Aristokratka’ [Lady Aristocrat] (1922), unfold at the theatre.6 Still others, including his other signature piece of the ’20s, ‘Bania’ [The Bathhouse] (1925), promote the characteristically Zoshchenkovian commandment: ‘Ne v teatre!’ [This is not a theatre!].7 Viewed through the ‘cultural-sociological’ lens, these texts display with perfect clarity the cultural predicament of the Zoshchenkovian character–primitive, uncouth, underdressed, ill-mannered, pathetically helpless in his ‘inability to meet culture’s challenge,’8 yet posing as a ‘new man,’ arbiter of new tastes and morals, and thus a threat to all things refined, including the gentlemanly and sophisticated M. M. Zoshchenko himself. The opposition is thus construed as an indictment of the new man’s barbarity. The ambiguity of the ‘cultured/uncultured’ dichotomy, which becomes inescapably evident when its ‘cultured’ pole takes the form of oppressive Soviet officialdom, is duly reflected in some of the analyses–as a further extension of the same ‘unculturedness’ now parading as ‘culture.’ From this perspective, the theatre, with its emphasis on dress and other codes, demarcations, and conventionalized roles, both on stage and in the arrangement of the entire theatrical chronotope, is an ideal objet trouve for enhancing and playing out the ‘culture/unculture’ opposition.9
What passes unnoticed when such constructions are made is the existential, rather than merely Soviet, nature of the human condition as perceived and inhabited by the ‘Zoshchenkovian character,’ be this the ridiculous meshchanin (petit bourgeois), the writer’s autobiographical persona (in PVS), or the real author himself (who increasingly emerges, now that a growing mass of documentary evidence becomes available, as a coherent identity).10 In the overall pattern of ‘desperate attempts to cope with fear,’ a major role is reserved for ‘feigning.’ The Zoshchenkovian character tries to pretend (be it to his superiors, the society at large, himself, or the reader) that the threatening object is not to be feared, that he himself is not what he seems, and, eventually, that the text is not about his real concern–namely, his deep-seated fear of his environment (whether represented by the Soviet regime, parents or quasi-parental figures, thieves, guests, relatives, threatening women, aging, or death).11 To be sure, he knows all along that this tactic is wrong and doomed to failure. In the stories, this is manifested through the pathetic incompetence of the comic characters, in the ‘serious’ works, through the characters’ (including the autobiographical persona’s) case histories and direct authorial comments.
An ambiguous interplay of such critical (self-)awareness and a defensive need for cover underlies Zoshchenko’s impervious narrative posture in general and his obsession with masks, roles, and theatre in particular. Of special interest, however, are the cases where the recourse to ‘theatre’ is almost completely written out of the picture. I will dwell on two such instances, one from Zoshchenko’s comic period, the other from PVS, with their different techniques of dissimulation.
‘Monter’
‘Monter'[The Electrician] (1926)12 is one of those among Zoshchenko’s openly theatrical stories which make a point of distorting or even completely ignoring (as does ‘Aristokratka’) what is happening on the stage.
‘When the entire theatre… was having its picture taken… they shoved the electrician… somewhere on the side, as if to say, technical staff. And in the middle… they put the tenor. The electrician… never said a word to this loutishness, but in his soul he harboured a certain rudeness…
Now this here comes up… Two young lady-friends turn up at his booth. Either he had invited them before, or else they just barged in–nobody knows… [They] basically ask to be seated with everyone in the hall,’ but the administrator refuses, saying that ‘every chair has been accounted for.’ Then the electrician, in his turn, refuses ‘to play’: he ‘turns off the lights in the entire goddamn theatre… and sits there flirting desperately’ with his dames.
A ‘total filibuster [obstruktsiia]’ arises. ‘The cashier screams, afraid they’ll filch his money in the darkness… [T]he chancer, the opera’s principal tenor… goes right to the management and says in his tenor voice: “I refuse to sing tenor in the dark… Let that son-of-a-bitch electrician sing.” The electrician says: “… Since he… gets photographed in the middle, let him sing with one hand and switch the light on with the other… We’re through with tenors!”‘
Relenting, the administrator seats ‘the young girls in prominent positions.’ Now that the electrician’s claims have been satisfied (‘”[T]he ruin is not via them, the ruin is via me… I am not in principle stingy about the current…”‘), he ‘gives light,’ and the show begins.
A cultural-sociological interpretation of the story easily suggests itself, with such ‘typically Zoshchenkovian’ issues as egalitarianism, new technology, embezzlement, uncivilized attitudes, etc., echoed, on the formal level, by his inimitable combination of quasi-illiterate use of language, representing ‘unculture,’ with thematic and rhythmical repetitions of a kind close to those found in poetry and to be undrerstood as projections of ‘culture.’ Yet, such an approach takes one only so far. The question that, with a slight variation, frames the story–‘Who is more important in the theatre: the actor, the director, or perhaps the stage carpenter?’–seems to remain unresolved and, moreover, to be a false dilemma, intended, as is often the case in Zoshchenko, to throw the reader off the track. One hesitates to side either with the electrician against the tenor, thus espousing the ‘anticultural’ stance of a vulgar womanizer, or with the tenor cum management against the ‘monter,’ thus defending ‘culture’ at the cost of the ‘little man”s human dignity. The only recourse left, short of dismissing the story as a mere sketch about the goings-on in a provincial company, would be to invoke the general Zoshchenkovian ‘ambivalence,’ blanketing the cultural failures of all parties involved. It is only natural, therefore, to focus, in search of more specific answers, on the story’s existential aspects.
The main conflict takes place if not ‘via’ [cherez] the young ladies, then certainly in connection with them, as the hero is publicly humiliated in the most acutely existential–amorous–quarter and responds in kind by demonstratively preferring the girls’ company to his immediate professional duties. Public humiliation is a recurrent theme in Zoshchenko’s stories (see, e. g., ‘Aristokratka’). In ‘Monter,’ it is first foreshadowed in the episode of collective and artistic photograph-taking, during which the electrician, is pointedly marginalizing13 and then taken to its limit, dramatic in every sense, as the electrician’s ego is further injured by the neglect shown his lady guests and the ensuing row involves the on-stage tenor, off-stage personnel (the electrician, the cashier, the administrator, the management), and the entire theatre hall (‘The audience is shouting’).
The playhouse dimension is highlighted by the consistent recurrence in the narrative of two leitmotifs pertaining to theatre. One is the motif of ‘seating,’ directly associated in the story with the theme of ‘human dignity’:
‘But in the centre, on the chair with a back, they seated [the italics henceforward are mine–AZ] the tenor’–‘[T]he young ladies… asked to be seated with everyone in the hall’–‘”I’ll whip up a pair of tickets for you right away. Just sit down here, by the booth”‘–‘”Then we”ll see… who to photograph on the side and who to seat in the middle”‘–‘[H]e has locked the booth with all the keys–and sits flirting desperately…’–“‘I’ll seat them somewhere right away”‘–‘So they seat his young ladies in outstanding seats and begin the performance.’
Indeed, as the ‘monter’ sits flirting with the dames in his darkened booth, he assumes the position, as it were, of a privileged theatre-goer entertaining his lady-guests in a box of his own.
The other is the motif of ‘acting,’ set in additional relief by the ungrammaticalities that accompany its mentions and culminate in the electrician’s representation of his sit-down strike in thespian terms:
‘They acted an opera in this municipal theatre’–‘Besides the outstanding acting by the actors [igry artistov], this theatre… had an electrician’–‘Today, for example, they are acting [the opera] Ruslan i Liudmila [Ruslan and Liudmila]…’–‘”Well, in that case, I refuse to act. I refuse, in short, to illuminate your production. Act it without me.”‘
The theatricalization of the plot does not stop there, as it taps the most natural of available resources: the staged performance proper, despite the usual Zoshchenkovian lack of any narrative foregrounding of this theatricality. Indeed, although the actual opera performed that night, Mikhail Glinka’s Ruslan,14 is mentioned only in passing, it is highly relevant to the story–compare the single most pronounced case of such ‘mousetrap’ interaction in Zoshchenko: the story ‘Akter’ [Actor] (1925), in which an amateur replacement actor is robbed for real by his fellow performers enacting the play’s fictional plot, while the audience, taking the victim’s screams for hyper-realistic action, cheer their lungs out.15 On close inspection, the two plots, of ‘Monter’ and its intertext–Zoshchenko’s frame narrative story, on the one hand, and Glinka’s ‘play within a play,’ on the other– exhibit telling parallels.
Both plots feature a conflict over women (the two young ladies; Liudmila), pitting the hero (the electrician; Ruslan) against an overwhelming opposition (the administrator, the tenor; Prince Svetozar, Golova [the Head], Chernomor, Farlaf), which is unexpectedly overcome so that the stories end happily (ignoring the tenor, the administrator eventually accedes to the electrician’s demands; seeing that the rivals have been removed, Svetozar gives Liudmila away to Ruslan, although, in earlier stages of the plot, he had promised her to any successful rescuer). Compared to the evil wizard Chernomor and the Grand Prince Svetozar, Ruslan is, if not a ‘little man,’ certainly a personage of lesser rank, whose victory is made possible only thanks to the help of the good magician Finn (and a magic donor, hostile to Ruslan, Golova). In the story, this aid motif is paralleled, on a reduced scale, by the final intervention of the administrator, who combines the roles of Svetozar and Finn. These rather generic similarities are bolstered by one quite specific resonance. The turning off of the lights, naturalized by the nature of the electrician’s job, forms an unexpected parallel to the spectacular episode at the end of the opera’s first act when Ruslan and Liudmila’s wedding feast is interrupted by a ‘loud stroke of thunder… the stage is in a complete darkness… all the characters are stunned, dumbfounded, freeze,’ and it turns out that Liudmila has been abducted.16 Thus the electrician suddenly switches from the role of a Ruslan to that of a Chernomor, rendering the archetypal underpinnings of his action even more intriguing.
The ‘light/dark’ opposition is central to Glinka’s opera (even the name of the grand prince is a tell-tale one: Svetozar [lit. Light-Dawn], contrasted to Chernomor [lit. Black-Sea, or even Black-Plague]. Moreover, in the original Pushkin poem (which instead of Svetozar, a character straight out of a ‘magic tale’ [volshebnaia skazka], has a fictionalized historical Kievan Prince: Vladimir-solnyshko [Vladimir-the-Sun]), Zoshchenko’s ‘light/dark’ motif has a counterpart in the ‘invisibility’ bestowed by Chernomor’s magic cap, which conceals the abductor and victim from Ruslan. In its turn, the ‘darkness’ caused by the electrician spawns multiple variations: the cashier fears that ‘in the dark’ the proceeds will be stolen; the tenor refuses ‘to sing tenor in the dark’; and the culprit himself, having plunged the entire theatre into darkness ‘to the devil’s grandmother’ [lit. k chertovoi babushke], tries to reap, Chernomor-style, the sexual fruits of his black magic. The ‘diabolical’ motif reappears in the words of both the administrator and the ‘monter’ about ‘the devil’s girls’ [chertovy devitsy]. Moreover, in the story’s closure, the motif of ‘supernatural power over light’ returns in a positive, ‘divine,’ quasi-biblical key: ‘Right away, he says, I’ll give you light… He gave them light that minute. Begin, he says.’17
Even the inimitably Zoshchenkovian phrase, ‘Let him sing with one hand and switch on the light with the other,’ follows a venerable poetic formula–even as it pushes it to a zeugmatic extreme. In Pushkin’s poem, the same verbal pattern appears at a decisive moment in Ruslan’s combat with Chernomor:
Togda Ruslan odnoi rukoiu/ Vzial mech srazhennoi golovy/ I, borodu skhvativ drugoiu,/ Otsek ee, kak gorst’ travy ‘Then Ruslan with one hand took the sword of the vanquished Golova and, seizing [Chernomor’s magical] beard with the other, severed it, like a grassy tuft’ (Canto Five).18
The dualism of the electrician’s mapping onto both Ruslan and Chernomor is aggravated by yet another intertextual incongruity. While the story features the tenor as the main performer in the opera, Glinka’s Ruslan is rather poorly suited to such a casting. The opera’s main protagonist, Ruslan, is a baritone; his magic adversary Chernomor is an extra without a singing role; Ruslan’s earthly antagonist, Farlaf, is a bass; the ambivalent father figure, Svetozar, is a bass, too; and Ruslan’s effeminate ally Ratmir is a contralto. Only more or less episodic characters are tenors: the epic singer Baian, who is only on hand in the first act; the magic helper Finn, who appears in the second and, briefly, the fifth; and the hostile donor Golova, whose part is sung by a chorus of tenors (Act II). This subtle incongruity is, of course, noticeable–and appreciable–only by connoisseurs, like Zoshchenko himself, who was a man of refined culture, a friend of the composer Dmitrii Shostakovich, and an eager concert and theatre-goer, often in the company of the women he courted.
The blurring of the correspondences between the two casts is, actually, in accord with the general ‘alternativeness’ characteristic of Zoshchenko’s narrative.19 The events take place ‘in Saratov or Simbirsk, in a word, somewhere not far from Turkestan.’ Similarly, appearing modestly as a ‘monter’ is someone whose job would be officially described as ‘zaveduiushchii osvetitel’noi chast’u’ [lighting designer]. By the same token, the word ‘tenor’ does not so much denote here a specific type of operatic voice, as it refers–with semiliterate vagueness–to the show’s ‘star,’ premier lover, and thus, Ruslan, after all.20 As a result, both the electrician and the tenor emerge as counterparts of Ruslan, complicating–alternativizing–the intertextual correspondences even further.
Be as it may, in seeking to locate the likely projection of the authorial self, one naturally looks to the main protagonist. Moreover, the electrician’s interest in the young ladies, his thin skin, and his marginal position in the theatre all speak in favour of such an identification. Zoshchenko had the reputation of a womanizer, was quick to take offense (among the Serapions, his sensitivity was proverbial), and deliberately worked in a ‘disreputable’ literary genre. Add to this his neurotic obsession with such ‘pathogenic objects,’ painstakingly analyzed in PVS, as ‘ruka’ [hand/arm] and ‘udar groma’ [thunderclap], and the opposition ‘light/darkness.’
To begin with the last, it appears even in the title of Zoshchenko’s autobiographical narrative, which persistently deploys the ‘light of reason’ metaphor.
‘What could have illuminated these scenes [of infancy]? Fear, perhaps?… Now these stories are cast in an entirely different light. Now you can see almost everything in them… The light of logic expels…. these [basest of] forces… The light of my reason lit up the horrible thickets where the fears were lurking… I had… suffered defeat in the darkness... But now, as the sun lit up the duelling place, I spied my enemy’s pathetic and barbaric mug… The old fears said farewell to my person… only because the light of my reason illuminated the illogic of their existence.’21
The same ‘enlightenment’ motifs, only in a more ambiguous vein, befitting Zoshchenko’s comic style, appear in ‘Elektrifikatsiia’ [Electrification] (1924):
‘This business… to illuminate Soviet Russia with light… And they started bringing in light here… [T]he little landlady… suggested they illuminate the apartment… They did, and goodness gracious [batiushki-svety, lit. fathers-lights], the lights did illuminate it! Mould and filth all around us… You couldn’t see any of it when we had the oil lamps… Batiushki-svety! A nauseating spectacle to see….
I lit the electricity–batiushki-svety!… “It’s disgusting to look at it all.” And all this is filled with bright light, and everything leapt into the eye… I started coming home bored. I arrived, didn’t light the light, and burrowed into my cot…
The landlady cut the line. “It hurts,” she said. “It all looks so poor in that light. Why illuminate that kind of poverty with light for the bedbugs’ amusement…? I don’t want to live with light,” she said.
Hey, lads, light is fine, but lighting it up is bad!…. Everything that’s good in the dark is bad in the light.’22
The motifs of ‘hand/arm’ and ‘thunderclap’ in PVS have been discussed at length in Zoshchenko criticism in connection with PVS.23 Here I will only point out their uncanny relevance to ‘Monter”s Glinkian subtext.
In Ruslan, the scene of thunder, darkness, freeze action, and abduction of the bride right before the consummation of the marriage is accompanied by the words of the chorus:
‘What happened? The wrath of Perun?’ and those of Ruslan: ‘What a wondrous moment! What does this marvelous dream mean? This numbness of feeling? And the mysterious dark/gloom all around? Where’s Liudmila?’–Chorus: ‘Where’s our princess?’–Ruslan: ‘She was speaking to me here with a quiet tenderness.’24
Compare in PVS:
‘I recalled a dream from long ago… From out of the wall, toward me, there stretched a huge hand… I scream. Awake in terror… Evidently in the daytime a hand took, seized, removed something from the infant… But what?…The mother’s breast?… Perhaps the father’s hand, placed on the mother’s breast… frightened the baby…
Lightning struck in the yard of our dacha… Horrible thunder shook our whole dacha. This coincided with the very moment when mother had begun to breast-feed me. The clap of thunder was so strong and unexpected that mother lost consciousness for a minute and dropped me. I fell on the bed… Hurt my hand…
In the future the mother’s breast came to personify woman, love, and sexuality… Yes, without a doubt–I avoided woman… and at the same time yearned for her… in order to flee from her in fear of the expected retribution…. Did there not follow on her heels–a shot, a clap [of thunder], a knife?… The chastising [karaiushchaia] hand–of a husband, a brother, father–accompanied this [woman’s] image.’25
The traumatic cluster and its auto-interpretation comprise a dream, a clap of thunder and lighting (= Perun’s wrath), frozen senselessness, and loss of woman. One could safely assume Glinka’s opera to be a favourite of Zoshchenko’s–if not a direct, then a subliminal, source of the cited episode from PVS.
In ‘Monter,’ the ‘hand/arm’ motif is not as pervasive. The initial switching on of the lights is presumed but never described; in the scene of the demonstrative extinguishing of the light and locking up of the booth, the hand is implied but not mentioned; and the same is true for the final giving of light. But these omissions are more than made up for by the mocking retort about the tenor’s putative help-yourself performance, with its close-ups of the two hands: first the ‘singing’ and then the ‘lighting’ one.
Unlike the neurotic persona of PVS, the authorial mask of the electrician comes out a clear winner, proving that power over light, dark, and women is ‘in his hands.’ The ‘hand/arm anxiety’ is presented as overcome. This may help to explain the electrician’s metamorphosis from a Ruslan into a Chernomor, which would otherwise be enigmatic, given the relative empowerment of these two characters in the intertexts.
Pondering the moral dilemma posed by his one-time alleged victory over, but by the same token, fusion with, the baser forces of his soul, the author-narrator of PVS writes:
‘I got up from my bed no longer the man I had been. Unusually healthy, strong… I arose from my bed… I nearly ran in circles, not knowing how to direct my barbaric forces… Like a tank, I moved through the fields of my life, overcoming all obstacles, all barriers with ease… I seemed to have started to bring people more grief than before, when I was fettered, feeble.’26
The solution to this problem of Nietzschean amoralism27 Zoshchenko finds in channelling his newly found strength into the sphere of art:
‘Now my reason was free. I was at liberty to do what I wanted. Once again I took up what my hands had once held–art. But now I took ut up without trembling hands, with no despair in my heart…’28
This sensation of creative omnipotence is akin to the ‘divine giving of light’ at the close of our story.
To resume the theme of Zoshchenko’s ‘touchiness,’ in PVS there are quite a few episodes from the persona’s childhood and youth that exhibit his repressed or defiant reaction to humiliation by authority figures, in particular in matters connected with ‘cultural’ activities: his visit to the arrogant artist-bureaucrat on whom depended the size of the pension for the late father; his threat to ‘spit on’ the school-teacher who had treated him with mockery; his attempted suicide over a flunking grade for the composition on a Turgenevan topic; the dismissal, by the editor of a thick journal, of his short stories as ‘drivel.’29 In some of these cases, the autobiographical young Zoshchenko, like the electrician, ‘harboured a certain rudeness,’ while in others, he gave it a desperate vent and was even ready, to use the electrician’s phrase, ‘to spit in the kisser’ of his mighty opponent the teacher. In a further characteristic link to ‘Monter,’ the persona’s (over)reaction was misinterpreted by the authority figures (e. g., ascribed to the low grade–cf. the lack of seats for the ‘dames’), while what was at issue was human and professional dignity (of the little boy Zoshchenko and the electrician).
The problem of professional standing was close to Zoshchenko’s heart. In February 1927, i. e. soon after writing ‘Monter,’ he publicly opted for ‘petty literature,’ ‘the disreputable form of the… very short story,’ ‘bad literary traditions’ etc., thereby defiantly depriving himself of ‘criticism’s enlightened [!] attention.’30 In the context of Zoshchenko’s obstinate pleading of his aesthetic case, the defense of the peripheral ‘technical staff’ in ‘Monter’ finally acquires programmatic significance. From behind the figure of the tenor, then, peeks the emblematic representative of ‘major literature’: Leo Tolstoy, or rather, a literary official who ‘places an order for a red Leo Tolstoy,’ or a thick-journal editor like Voronskii. By publicly facing down his powerful opponents (the tenor, the administrator, the management) the electrician fulfills Zoshchenko’s authorial dream of recognition on his own–‘marginalistic’–creative terms.31
The figure of the lighting man suits this role all the better as it combines ‘marginality’ with a resemblance to the director, who, too, acts from behind the scenes, after all. Remarkably, Glinka’s Chernomor, in his turn, is an extra, yet one responsible for powerful stage effects: the thunder, darkness etc. (in Act I) as well as the putting on of a ballet performance intended to seduce Liudmila (Act IV).32
The plausibility of Zoshchenko’s self-identification with the electrician is also buttressed by the following passage in Golubaia kniga [The Sky-Blue Book] (1934; abbr. as GK), which is rich in ‘enlightening,’ ‘inflammatory,’ ‘marginal,’ and ‘theatrical’ motifs:
‘In his day… Voltaire with his laughter extinguished the bonfires that burned [szhigali] people up. But we, with our weak and insignificant powers, take on a much more modest task. We hope with our laughter to light [zazhech’] at least a small splinter-candle by the light of which some people might notice what is good for them… If this happens, then in the overall show of life [spektakle zhizni] we would consider fulfilled our modest role of a laboratory assistant and lighting man [osvetitelia] of the performance.’33
The ‘modesty’ of this ‘lighting role’ is, of course, self-consciously exaggerated, in the spirit of pride-aping humility. Zoshchenko’s narrator picks up here on a motif from an earlier discussion (with a ‘bourgeois philosopher’) of the meaning of life’s spectacle–one strikingly, perhaps deliberately similar to the situation in ‘Monter’:
‘”Yes,” said the philosopher. “In essence, life is unreal… So let peoples amuse themselves, arrange for operettas with all those kings and soldiers and merchants of theirs…” And we say to him…: “… Even if your amusing definition of life as operetta stands… you are in favour of an operetta in which one actor sings and the rest raise the curtain for him. Whereas we…”–“Whereas you,” he breaks in, “are in favour of an operetta in which all the actors are extras… and want to be tenors.”–“By no means. We are in favour of a spectacle in which the roles are all correctly distributed among the actors–according to their talents.”‘34
The proposed view of the electrician as a stand-in for his author’s ‘creative ego’ finds a further corroboration in the rebuff given by Zoshchenko to his accusers at the Writers’ Union meeting in Leningrad in June 1954–after he had refused (in an interview with visiting British students) to accept Zhdanov’s 1946 denunciation of (Akhmatova and) himself. As a witness remembered,
‘It suddenly turned out that Zoshchenko was not defending himself… he was on the offensive. One man against the entire organization with its secretaries of administration, sections, editors-in-chief… He had been invited to the podium in order to bow his head and repent…
[He declared:] “I can say that… my literary life and fate are over… A satirist must be a morally pure man, and I have been humiliated like the worst son of a bitch… I have no intention of asking for anything. I don’t need your leniency”–he looked at the presidium–“or your Druzin, or your abuse and shouts…”
This was a victory… [T]he price did not concern him. There was nothing stopping him anymore.’35
This dates from a much later stage of Zoshchenko’s life than ‘Monter,’ but in archetypal matters chronology is not overly important. Zoshchenko’s defiant behavior at the close of his career was of a piece with his anti-authoritarian outbursts as a child, at school, and in the early ’20s. Reminiscing about the times of the Serapion Brothers, V. A. Kaverin wrote:
‘There were no crummy guests [“gostishek”] and I especially liked such gatherings–I was a proponent of our ‘order’ being closed… something knightly, requiring rituals and “initiations”… Then Zoshchenko came, dressed up like a dandy. His first book had just come out… [U]nfortunately he had invited three actresses from some theatre…
The girls were quite pretty… especially one… who… while her girlfriends were reciting their poetry… was making eyes at me… Did I think that the unceremonious invasion… was an insult to our “order”?… I listened with revulsion to our guests’ trite poems and… attacked them scornfully and sharply…. [T]he girls took offense and left. Zoshchenko saw them home.
The Serapions all fell upon me like one man… [W]hen he returned [, e]veryone fell silent… [No one] had ever seen him like that before…. He was enraged… [H]e said I had behaved like a sanctimonious hypocrite… and demanded that my comrades condemn my behavior.’36
Kaverin then challenged Zoshchenko to a duel, but at the next meeting of the ‘order’ they were reconciled.
The many parallels with ‘Monter’ are obvious: the ladies’ semi-legitimate intrusion; the theatrical element (actresses); the main opponent’s insistence on prescribed artistic exclusivity (‘knightly order’); the furiously taken offense almost resulting in extreme consequences (duel; compare the electrician’s strike and, even more appropriately, Ruslan’s knightly combats); and the ultimate appeal to authority (the Serapions). One cannot exclude at least some influence of this incident, which occurred in January 1922, on the writing of ‘Monter,’ which first appeared in 1926 and begins ‘when the entire theatre was photographed in 1923.’
As for the story’s take on theatre, it is summed up aptly in the closing words about the ‘complex theatrical mechanism’ (used also in the story’s early titles37). This time around, Zoshchenko focused precisely on the inner workings of an artistic institution by involving on-stage as well as off-stage personnel, the management, the audience (including the ‘devitsy’), and the actual work of art performed. And, last but not least, by donning, to covertly express his existential and artistic ambitions and frustrations, the unlikely mask of a stage hand, whom he then let steal the show from the usual star through the appropriation–in an intertextual tour de force–of two roles and a central theatrical effect of the opera in question.
‘El’vira’
This ultra-short vignette places the autobiographical persona of PVS in the vicinity of Kislovodsk, where a twenty-year old historical Zoshchenko worked as a railway ticket-collector.
-The narrator was enjoying his quiet room, but then El’vira, a formidably strong but practically illiterate circus performer, moved in next door. Back in Penza, she had a brief affair with a married general, whom (and whose spouse) she now followed to the spa. Showing her powerful ‘ruki’ [hands/arms], she said she could kill the general–unless he ‘out of decency’ reimbursed her at least for the roundtrip. She wanted to write to him but, because of her illiteracy, this task fell to the narrator, inspired by the hope that, with the money, she would leave for home. His composition, hailed by El’vira as a genuine ‘cry of a woman’s soul…, turned over the general’s innards,’ and he sent her five hundred roubles. Flush with the sudden wealth–and gratitude to the letter-writer, she stayed at the spa and ‘almost never left my room. It’s a good thing the world war began soon after–so I could leave.’38
The similarities with ‘Monter’–and Glinka’s Ruslan–are rather slight: El’vira’s profession (‘aktrisa tsirka’), her ‘ruki,’ and the motif of a victorious confrontation with an authority figure (the general). The differences, on the other hand, are considerable: from the prominence of the sexual theme to the undisguised involvement of the autobiographical persona to the text’s consummate stylistic simplicity (characteristic of PVS) and the absence of any specific theatrical reference. As for the place of the two stories in Zoshchenko’s life-and-works, it is less simple than the mere fact of their belonging to different creative periods might suggest. Completed in 1943, ‘El’vira’ refers to and quite probably reflects a personal experience of 1914, thus, in a sense, both post- and pre-dating ‘Monter.’ In fact, Zoshchenko had kept planning and working on what was to become PVS ever since 1922.39 Incidentally, in the same year, Zoshchenko published the story ‘Veselaia zhizn” [Merry Life] (1922), which reads as a remote, yet recognizable version of ‘El’vira.’
– An aging general, tired of his wife, starts an affair with a circus performer, ‘mamzel” [M-lle] Ziuzil’. He takes her to Kislovodsk but, realizing that she lacks class, decides, on the advice of his valet, to let her go. She threatens to ‘tear his head clean out’ [golovu vyrvu], and, fearing for his military honour, he determines to stay in his room. He is then visited by a certain Lezghian, who, over some soup, demands, on Ziuzil’s behalf, that the general settle the matter with an influx of ‘capital’ [udovletvorite kapitalom]–or else she will ‘insult him physically in public.’ Stressing that he ‘will always intervene on behalf of a lady’s honour,’ the Lezghian adds that he ‘can press three poods with his left hand/arm’ and that because of his ‘heavy hand’ there have occurred ‘terminal outcomes.’
The general sends Ziuzil’ three hundred roubles [tri katen’ki], but the valet spends the money in drink. Not aware of this, the general ventures out to a cafe, is slapped on the face by Ziuzil’, and falls on the ground. He contemplates shooting himself but decides against it, since he was insulted by a woman, not a man, after all. He leaves town, but soon dies of overeating and dysentery.40
The elements that later went, in the same or altered guise, into the PVS vignette are many and obvious (the general-spouse-‘actress’ triangle; Kislovodsk; abandonment; blackmail; threatening hands/arms; several hundred-rouble ransom), including the presence of mediators (valet, Lezghian; author-narrator). Even the ‘honour’ leitmotif has a counterpart in El’vira’s appeal to the general’s ‘decency’ (and the electrician’s hypersensitivity). The only major motif of ‘Veselaia zhizn” absent from ‘El’vira’ is Zoshchenko’s ‘food anxiety’ (note the soup, the cafe, the dysentery)–unless one counts the spa’s gastroenterological specialization and the impact of the letter on the general’s insides.
The transformation of ‘Veselaia zhizn” into ‘El’vira’ involves several operations: a drastic abridgement; the introduction (or restoration–if such happened to be the real-life scenario) of a first-person perspective on the events (in the person of the author acting as a mediator between the general and the ‘actress’); and the renaming of the woman–with interesting intertextual implications.
The name ‘El’vira’ is presented as fictitious–invented by its bearer, who, ‘according to her passport, is Nastia Gorokhova.’ In this, the heroine seems to do the bidding of the author, who changes the name from the earlier ‘Ziuzil” and, by choosing this stagy alias,41 highlights her resemblance to her namesake in Mozart’s Don Giovanni:42
– Seduced and abandoned by the Don, Donna Elvira pursues him, torn between love, forgiveness, and care, on the one hand, and vengeance, on the other [Nastia-El’vira hesitates, too–between murder, blackmail, and insistence on ‘decency’], and keeps interfering in his actions at every step [just like Nastia invades the narrator’s room].
Unlike the meretricious circus performer, however, the operatic Donna does not ask even for emotional ‘boons’ [merce], measuring the ‘price’ of her loss only in terms of the tears she has shed; yet, the very motif of ‘damages and compensation’ is there.
More resemblances emerge if we allow for multiple correlations among the characters. Thus, Donna Elvira threatens to ‘tear out the heart’ of her seducer [“Gli vo’ cavar il cor!’], while in the story, the letter ‘turned over the general’s innards’–to say nothing of Ziuzil’s intention to ‘tear out his head.’ In fact, all of Don Giovanni’s opponents want to kill him in one way or another (Masetto, for one, ‘want[s] to cut him into a hundred pieces’) and to watch how ‘the scoundrel draws the noose around his neck,’ i. e. gets metaphorically strangled, which is precisely the end that awaits the general at the hands of Nastia-El’vira.
If Donna Elvira does not try to blackmail the Don for money, he himself keeps paying off his peasant victims and, while feasting, proclaims openly his desire to have fun for his money. The ‘reimbursement’ motif appears also in the relationship between Donna Anna and Don Ottavio, who offers his ‘heart and hand’ as a ‘sweet compensation’ for the bitter loss of her father. The most clear case of successful extortion is, of course, the four-pistoles raise that Leporello gets out of Don Giovanni by moral strictures and threats to leave his employ.
The figure of Leporello provides more material for story-opera parallels. In Act I, trying to get rid of Donna Elvira, Don Giovanni leaves it to Leporello to do the explaining (Leporello obliges with the famous ‘catalogo’ of the Don’s conquests). In Act II, in order to make love to Elvira’s maid, Don Giovanni exchanges clothes with Leporello, who is to divert Elvira’s attention by impersonating his master. To start things off, the Don talks to Elvira from behind the disguised Leporello’s back and, proud with the show he has put on, praises his own talent (‘Piu fertile talento/ Del mio, no, no si da’). Donna Elvira duly takes Leporello for her ‘adored husband’; having enjoyed this for a while, he, too, soon gets bored with her and eventually finds ‘the moment to escape,’ but then falls into the hands of the threesome of Don Giovanni’s pursuers (Elvira, Anna, Ottavio), in a farcical foreshadowing of his master’s fate.
Almost all of this is to be found in Zoshchenko’s ‘El’vira’–with interesting shifts in role distribution. The authorial narrator combines some of Leporello’s features (replacing the general as El’vira’s involuntary lover and casting about for ways to get rid of her) with those of Don Giovanni (acting as a verbal artist and the author of a substitution). Although the motif of ‘writing love letters on behalf of another’ points to other intertexts (Les Liaisons dangereuses, Cyrano de Bergerac–or Maxim Gorky’s ‘Boles”43), the theme of ‘proud, if ambiguous, authorship’ clearly links the story to Don Giovanni, all the more so thanks to the mediation of Pushkin. In Kamennyi gost’ [The Stone Guest] (1830), Don Guan is a variously gifted artistic personality–protean, Pushkin-like, the author of a lyric sung by one of his mistresses, Laura (compare the ‘cry of a woman’s soul’ penned by the author-narrator in ‘El’vira’).
Thus, Zoshchenko’s narrative reads like a rewrite of a classical libretto, which, of course, was itself a product of a long tradition of transformations, beginning with Tirso de Molina’s play (1630) and including Moliere’s (1665). Moreover, almost all of the opera’s characters keep donning masks and play-acting, even when they purport to act ‘natural.’ On hearing Donna Elvira complain about her seduction by the Don, Leporello makes a pithy aside: ‘Pare un libro stampato!’ [She sounds like a book]. The Don Juan list, which follows soon after this, is, too, a textual object, which Leporello invites Donna Elvira to read together with him (‘Osservate, leggete con me’) and which Don Giovanni is busy completing in the course of the action (‘Ah, to my list/ Tomorrow morning/ You will have to add/ At least ten names!’). To crown these metatextual activities, during his last dinner Don Giovanni enjoys the performance of three musical pieces, among them –in a virtuoso auto-quotation by Mozart–a fragment from The Marriage of Figaro!44
Among the motifs that ‘El’vira’ shares with ‘Veselaia zhizn” (and ‘Monter’/Ruslan) are the potentially murderous ‘ruki,’ in this case spectacularly shown off by the heroine. The second occurrence of the motif, however, is elaborately hidden: the punitive task is carried out by the ‘hand’ of another character–the litterateur-narrator, and on a different–verbal, albeit figuratively physical, plane: ‘My hand is guided by the hope…. My letter turned over the general’s innards…’ Now, if there is an obsessively hand-fetishist opera in world repertoire, it is Don Giovanni. The two key manifestations of this leitmotif are, of course, the seduction of Zerlina (‘La ci daremm la mano…’ [There you will give me your hand…]) and Don Giovanni’s fatal handshake with the Statue (‘Dammi la mano…’ [Give me your hand…]), but they are echoed by a dozen others:
– Don Giovanni, together with Zerlina, tells a jealous Masetto that she is ‘in the hands of a gentleman’ (in man d’un cavalier) and then praises her ‘perfumed fingers’ (dituccie… odorose).45 Later, he brazenly offers Donna Anna ‘this arm’ (questa man) to fight against her offender, i. e. himself. Having finally identified Don Giovanni, Donna Anna tells her fiance Don Ottavio about the way Don Giovanni tried to possess her: ‘with one hand he stops me from screaming, and with the other he sqeezes me so hard, that I already believed myself conquered’ [‘Con una mano cerca d’impedire la voce, e coll’altra m’afferra stretta cosi, che gia mi credo vinta’).46 A guilty Zerlina asks Masetto to beat her, promising masochistically to kiss his hands (‘E le care tue mane/ Lieta poi sapro baciar’).
– In Act II, Leporello, disguised as Don Giovanni, kisses Donna Elvira’s hand; Masetto, beaten up by the Don, complains to Zerlina about hurting everywhere including questa mano, and she offers him, as a cure, to put it on her beating heart; Don Giovanni tells Leporello how in his clothes he went about seducing his girlfriend: first he took her hand, then she his; and Don Ottavio offers Donna Anna his heart hand as a compensation.
Pushkin in Kamennyi gost’, settles, like Zoshchenko, for two main displays of ‘ruka,’ one being the inevitable final handshake, the other, an original variation, which combines ingeniously the ‘hand’motif with that of ‘substituted identity’:
– Inspecting the statue of the Commendatore, Don Guan notes that it represents him as a giant–‘A sam pokoinik mal byl i tschedushen,/ Zdes’ stav na tsypochki ne mog by ruku/ Do svoego on nosu dotianut” [Whereas the dead man was but short and weedy,/ Here, had he stood on tiptoe, he could not with his hand/ Have reached his own nose].47
In light of the parallels between the Don Giovanni topos and Zoshchenko’s hand anxiety, the character of the general in ‘El’vira’ acquires new overtones. His military rank makes him a fearsome Commendatore-like figure (in addition to his Don Giovanni role), especially given Zoshchenko’s fear of the ‘chastising hand of the husband… father’ and the Pushkin paradigm ‘the Commendatore–the Bronze Horseman–Tat’iana’s “impressive general” [vazhnyi general] of a husband’).48
In PVS, the hand is associated with woman’s breast and desire/fear of a woman, but the punishing extremity itself is that of a man. However, El’vira’s ‘ruki,’ which ‘have held three men under the big top’ and are thus thrice masculine, as it were, stand out as a uniquely androgynous hybrid, akin to the many ambiguous role reversals of the story. In keeping with the tradition, El’vira is a victim harbouring a vengeful attitude that is to be carried out by a man; but the modernist transplantation of the deadly superhuman hands onto her female body is Zoshchenko’s very own. An intermediate stage of this metamorphosis is attested by ‘Veselaia zhizn’,’ where ‘mamzel’ Ziuzil”can slap the general off his feet, but the deadly ‘ruki’ still remain the privileged distinction of a special male character–her Lezghian sidekick.49 The pattern is subtly echoed and modified in ‘El’vira’: the heroine parades her athletic hands/arms, but it is now the author/narrator’s writing hand that delivers the decisive blow. The theme of sexual ambiguity is carried further in the product of that writing hand: the letter. This is, androgynously, ‘a cry of a woman’s soul,’ but also ‘turns over the general’s innards,’ suggesting certain anal, i. e. homosexual connotations.
‘Androgyny’ finds its parallels elsewhere in Zoshchenko, for instance, in his comic story ‘Fotokartochka’ [The Photograph] (1945), where the first-person protagonist, ill-served by a professional photographer, buys instead a ‘ready-made’ photo, which turns out to be a woman’s.50 As for ‘homosexuality,’ Zoshchenko’s avowed fear of women can be said to take, in ‘El’vira,’ the form of an attraction to/ rejection of the virago-ish El’vira in both of her partners, whose coming together through the letter can then be said to represent a sort of male bonding through a shared woman. It is such hidden homosexual overtones that may underlie the aura of shame that envelopes the story’s entire triangle.51
Don Giovanni, despite its general atmosphere of play-acting and masquerade, does not offer sex inversion models (unlike, say, Cosi fan tutte), but Kamennyi gost’ does–to an extent. In seducing Donna Anna, Don Guan uses and then discards one by one several disguises, among them the monastic cloth, used to gain access to the pious widow, who, according to a real hermit, ‘never converses with a man/…/ With me it’s quite another thing–I’m a monk.’52
There seems to be a method to the role redistributions that yield ‘El’vira”s cast. While the author-narrator accumulates some or other functions of Don Giovanni/ Don Guan (creative author, role-player, lover and deserter [of Elvira], unconventional lover [of the general],), the Statue (avenging hand), Leporello (confidant, substitute lover, role-player), the monk (sex change), the Lezghian (mediator, blackmailer, avenging hand), and even Donna Elvira and Donna Anna (seduced, if not raped, and suffering lover), he does so in a consistently ‘weak’—involuntary, passive, cautious, secret, almost cowardly–manner. He is invaded and dominated by El’vira, performs his major feat on her orders and under her name–from behind her back, as it were, and never comes into open contact with his adversary (and obscure object of desire), the general. This mode of behaviour is, of course, a direct opposite of that instanced by the authorial protagonist of the other operatic story analyzed in this essay. Or, rather, the two are complementary manifestations of one and the same aggressive-defensive Zoshchenkovian posture.
To conclude, theatrical subtexts loom rather large behind the explicit plots of some Zoshchenko stories. This theatricalization is called upon to reflect neither a multi-faceted bustle of society mores, as in William Todd’s picture of the age of Pushkin,53 nor merely the cultural and hierarchical problematic of the early Soviet times, as in Cathy Popkin’s study of Zoshchenko, but rather the more specific concerns of Zoshchenkovian characters–by providing scripts, roles, and masks for their aggressive-defensive dissimulation. The conspiratorial strategies may, indeed, account for the inconspicuous manner itself in which the theatrical plots appear in the stories. Tellingly, the electrician’s bold move, appropriating the operatic villain’s act, is accompanied by a more direct textual reference to the underlying opera, whereas the covert ways of ‘El’vira”s timid author-narrator are reproduced in his total failure to acknowledge his sources.
Accordingly, more ‘shadow plays’ mentioned in Zoshchenko only in passing may yet prove highly relevant to the respective stories, and still others will be discovered where no pointers seem to exist. Thus, the narrator of ‘Dushevnaia prostota’ [Soul Simplicity] (1926), before proceeding to the story’s main topic (‘we tread on each others’ feet’), holds forth about a visiting troupe of black musicians performing a ‘negro operetta [negritianskaia negrooperetta],’ who, being ‘spoilt by European civilization’ are appalled by our rude manners. Theatre, and European theatre at that, is, in the usual Zoshchenkovian manner, held up as a cultural paragon. Research into contemporary press coverage makes it clear that the particular group of black artists which toured Russia in 1926 was remarkable for its elaborate dance acts;54 knowledge of this factual background allows readers to appreciate Zoshchenko’s subtly contrapuntal use of material that is more relevant to a story about a ‘leg-and-foot issue’ than it seems at first sight. Perhaps one day scholars will be able to identify even the actual opera that is so utterly–and tantalizingly–ignored by the notorious ‘aristokratka’ and her date.55
1. For more or less recent ‘cultural-sociological’ scholarship, see, for instance, M. O. Chudakova, Poetika Mikhaila Zoshchenko (Moscow, 1979); Iu. K. Shcheglov, ‘Entsiklopediia nekul’turnosti: rasskazy dvadtsatykh godov i Golubaia kniga,’ in A. K. Zholkovskii, Iu. K. Shcheglov, Mir avtora i struktura teksta (Tenafly, NJ, 1986), pp. 53-84; Tsezar’ Vol’pe, Iskusstvo nepokhozhesti (Moscow, 1991), pp. 141-316; Cathy Popkin, The Pragmatics of Insignificance: Chekhov, Zoshchenko, Gogol (Stanford, 1993), pp. 53-124; Alexander Zholkovsky, Text Counter Text. Rereadings in Russian Literary History (Stanford, 1994), pp. 35-87.
2. See Hugh McLean, ‘Zoshchenko’s Unfinished Novel: Before Sunrise,’ in Major Soviet Writers. Essays in Criticism, Edward Brown, ed. (London, 1973), pp 310-320, and ‘Belated Sunrise: A Review Article,’ Slavic and East European Journal 18: 4 (1974): 406-410; Gary Kern, ‘After the Afterword,’ in Mikhail Zoshchenko, Before Sunrise. A Novella, trans. Gary Kern (Ann Arbor, 1974), pp. 345-366; Irene Masing-Delic, ‘Biology, Reason and Literature in Zoshchenko’s Pered voskhodom solntsa,’ Russian Literature 8 (1980), 77-101; Thomas Hodge, ‘Freudian Elements in Zoshchenko’s Pered voskhodom solntsa,’ The Slavonic and East European Review 67: 1 (1989), 1-28; Krista Hanson, ‘Autobiography and Conversion: Zoshchenko’s Before Sunrise,’ in Autobiographical Statements in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature, Jane Harris ed. (Princeton, 1990), pp. 133-153; Rachel May, ‘Superego as Literary Subtext: Story and Structure in Mikhail Zoshchenko’s Before Sunrise,’ Slavic Review 55: 1 (1996), 106-124.
3. See Alexander Zholkovsky, ‘”What Is the Author Trying to Say with His Artistic Work?”: Rereading Zoshchenko’s Oeuvre,’ Slavic and East European Journal 40: 3 (1996): 458-474, ‘Zoshchenko iz XXI veka, ili Poetika nedoveriia,’ Zvezda 5 (1996), 190-204, ‘Food, Fear, Feigning, and Flight in Zoshchenko’s “Foreigners,”‘ Russian Literature 40 (1996), 385-404. For the integration of both approaches see von Vera von Wiren-Garczynski, ‘Zoshchenko’s Psychological Interests,’ Slavic and East European Journal 11: 1 (1967): 3-22; Krista Hanson, ‘Kto vinovat? Guilt and Rebellion in Zoshchenko’s Accounts of Childhood,‘ in Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis, Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, ed. (Amsterdam & Philadelphia, 1989), pp. 285-302; Linda Scatton, Mikhail Zoshchenko. Evolution of a Writer (Cambridge, 1993); Andrei Siniavskii, ‘Mify Mikhaila Zoshchenko,’ in Litso i maska Mikhaila Zoshchenko (Moscow, 1994), Iu. V. Tomashevskii ed., pp. 238-253 (trans. in Russian Studies in Literature. A Journal of Translations 33: 1 [1996-97], 39-58).
4. See, for instance, such stories as ‘Ne pushchu’ [I Won’t Let You] (Mikh. Zoshchenko, Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh [Leningrad, 1987], vol. 1, pp. 355-356; further references to this edition will be by volume and page only), which invokes the eponymous picture by the Wanderer artist V. E. Makovskii; or ‘Neravnyi brak’ [Unequal Marriage] (first appearing in Golubaia kniga [A Sky-Blue Book] as ‘Rasskaz o starom durake’ [The Story of an Old Fool], 3: 242-245), which similarly plays with the 1862 eponymous picture by V. V. Pukirev.
An intriguing reference to the little boy Zoshchenko’s ‘collaboration’ on one of his father’s artistic projects appears in PVS, in the episode of the father’s burial:
‘Ahead, on a little velvet cushion, they bear the decoration which Papa received for his Picture “Suvorov’s Departure.” This picture hangs on the wall of the Suvorov Museum. It’s done in mosaic. In the left corner of the picture there is a little green fir [elochka]. The lowest branch of this fir was done by me. It turned out crooked, but Papa was satisfied with my work’ (3: 547).
For a correlation of this detail with the quasi-autobiographical little Min’ka’s confrontation with his father against the background of a Christmas fir tree in the story ‘Elka’ [The Christmas Tree], see A. K. Zholkovskii ‘”Aristokastratka,”‘ in Tomashevskii ed., Litso i maska, pp. 331-339 (p. 337); on the Biblical and Oedipal aspects of that children’s story, see Hanson, ‘Kto vinovat?,’ p. 295.
5. Zoshchenko’s achievement as playwright remains underappreciated. It is practically left out of the extant monographs (Chudakova’s, Scatton’s) and in general is rarely discussed either as part of Zoshchenko’s oeuvre or a special topic. For a rare overview see Aleksandra Filippova, ‘”Delo v tom, chto ia – proletarskii pisatel’”: Mikhail Zoshchenko,’ in Paradoks o drame: Perechityvaia p’esy 1920-1930-kh godov, E. I. Strel’tsova ed. [Moscow: Nauka, 1993], pp. 401-426); for the peripeties of Zoshchenko’s writing of plays, radio and film scripts, musical comedy librettos, and sketches, most of them banned, either before or after staging, see Iu. V. Tomashevskii, ‘Khronologicheskaia kanva zhizni i tvorchestva Mikhaila Zoshchenko,’ in his Litso i maska, pp. 340-365, and M. Z. Dolinskii, ‘Dokumenty. Materialy k biograficheskoi khronike,’ ‘Kommentarii i dopolneniia,’ in Mikh. Zoshchenko, Uvazhaemye grazhdane. Parodii. Rasskazy. Fel’etony. Satiricheskie zametki. Pis’ma k pisateliu. Odnoaktnye komedii, M. Z. Dolinskii ed. and comm. (Moscow: Knizhnaia palata, 1991), pp. 32-144, 572-655. For the texts of some of the plays see Zoshchenko, Uvazhaemye grazhdane, Dolinskii ed.; Mikh. Zoshchenko, Sobranie sochinenii v 5-ti tomakh (Moscow: Russlit, 1993), vol. 3; Mikh. Zoshchenko, Izbrannoe v dvukh tomakh (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978), vol. 2.
Many of the plays were dramatized versions of comic stories, e. g. Uvazhaemyi tovarishch [Respected Comrade] (1930), Svad’ba [Wedding] (1933; staged under Zoshchenko’s direction), Prestuplenie i nakazanie [Crime and Punishment] (1933), Neudachnyi den’ [A Bad Day] (1935-1936) Parusinovyi portfel’ [A Canvass Briefcase] (1939). The staging histories of Uvazhaemyi tovarishch and Opasnye sviazi [Liaisons Dangereuses] (1940) were quite dramatic. Of especial relevance to the topic of the present essay is the metaliterary “fantastic comedy” Kul’turnoe nasledie [Cultural Heritage] (1933), featuring as dramatis personae the statues of Pushkin and several Russian tsars (see also Note 48).
6. On Zoshchenko’s ‘theatrical’ motifs see Popkin, The Pragmatics of Insignificance, passim; Shcheglov, ‘Entsiklopediia nekul’turnosti,’ pp. 61-63; Zholkovsky, Text Counter Text, pp. 36-40; on ‘Aristokratka’ and its interplay with Natasha Rostova’s opera outing, see Zholkovsky, ibid, and ‘”Aristokastratka.”‘
7. See Popkin, The Pragmatics of Insignificance, p. 79; Zholkovsky, Text Counter Text, p. 38.
8. On this Zoshchenko motif see Shcheglov, ‘Entsiklopediia nekul’turnosti,’ pp. 61-63.
9. See Popkin, The Pragmatics of Insignificance, pp. 29-30, 76-81.
10. For a juxtaposition of Zoshchenko’s real life, fictionalized autobiography, and comic stories see A. K. Zholkovskii, ‘Zubnoi vrach, korystnaia molochnitsa, intelligentnyi monter i ikh avtor: Krepkovatyi brak v mire Zoshchenko,’ Literaturnoe obozrenie 5/6 (1996): 128-144.
11. See Zholkovsky, ‘”What is the Author Trying to Say”‘ and ‘Food, Fear, Feigning, and Flight.”
12. For more details on the story, see Zholkovsky, ‘Zoshchenko’s “The Electrician,” or the Complex Theatrical Mechanism,’ Russian Studies in Literature 33: 1 (1996-97), 59-79. In what follows, the longer citations are indented and given in quotation marks, while plot paraphrases are merely indented. The translations from the Russian are all mine, with the exception of PVS, where I used/emended Gary Kern’s version (Zoshchenko, Before Sunrise).
13. Similar conflicts around photograph-taking form an episode in Zoshchenko’s comedy Uvazhaemyi tovarishch [Dear Comrade] (1930), see Mikh. Zoshchenko, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh (Moscow, 1993), vol. 3: pp. 211-219. A photo-retoucher as a quasi-artist appears in Zoshchenko’s sentimental tale ‘Siren’ tsvetet’ [Lilacs in Bloom] (1930).
14. 1842, libretto after Pushkin’s eponymous mock-epic poem (1818-1820); see M. I. Glinka, Ruslan i Liudmila. Volshebnaia opera v 5 deistviiakh, in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 15, G. V. Kirkor ed. (Moscow, 1967).
15. See Zoshchenko, 3: 268-270. The play is referred to as Kto vinovat? [Who Is To Blame]–misleadingly, it turns out, since no robbery is to be found in the eponymous 1840 Herzen novel (whose famous title is liberally used in PVS in connection with the pervasive issue of guilt; cf. the title of Hanson’s 1989 article). The episode may have been borrowed from Zoshchenko’s favourite Leskov tale ‘Grabezh’ [Robbery] (1887). In his Pis’ma k pisateliu [Letters to a Writer] (1929), Zoshchenko boils down the tale’s complicated plot to this one scene (‘an excellent story about a merchant by accident robbing a passer-by of his watch’; see Mikh. Zoshchenko, Uvazhaemye grazhdane. Parodii. Rasskazy. Fel’etony. Satiricheskie zametki. Pis’ma k pisateliu. Odnoaktnye komedii (Moscow, 1991), pp. 363-364)–singled out most likely by virtue of its affinity to his own recurrent motif ‘everybody is to blame or, at least, to be suspected'(see, e. g., ‘Sobachii niukh’ [Dog Scent] (1924) and ‘Mokroe delo’ [The Bloody Affair] (1925)). Incidentally, this motif underlies the subtle intertextual counterpoint (latent in Zoshchenko’s text), of the two robberies: in ‘Akter,’ the amateur is deliberately robbed by professional actors under the cover of acting; in ‘Grabezh,’ one honest person unwittingly robs another, thus ‘playing the role ‘of a thief.
16. Glinka, Ruslan i Liudmila, p. 80.
17. Compare Gen. 1. 1-3; cf. also Boris Pasternak’s poem ‘Meerkhol’dam’ [To the Meierholds] (1928), where the stage, the director, the lighting, the star actress etc. are metaphorized in terms of Gen. 1, 2.
18. A. S. Pushkin, Ruslan i Liudmila. Poema, in his 16-vol. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, Poemy 1817-1824 (Moscow, 1937), pp. 1-87, see p. 62. The formulaic pattern ‘with one hand–with the other hand,’ parodied by the electrician and his author (and naturalized by the exaggerated gesticulation of certain opera singers who seem to think they are ‘singing with their hands’), goes all the way back to Ovid’s classical line about the Scythians, who at all times had to be ready to defend themselves: ‘Hac arat infelix, hac tenet arma manu’ [With this (one he) is tilling, the unlucky (man), with the other hand (he) is holding weapons] (Tristia, V, 10. 24). In Glinka’s opera, the ‘hand’ motif becomes prominent in Act II, as Ruslan wrests the magic sword from Golova: ‘I will destroy everything before me–all I need is a sword that would fit my hand… Here’s the sword I have desired! I can feel its worth in my hand’ (Glinka, Ruslan i Liudmila, pp. 181, 184).
19. On ‘alternativeness’ see Shcheglov, ‘Entsiklopediia nekul’turnosti,’ 73-74.
20. The contraposition of the ‘monter’ and the ‘tenor’ gains also from the paronomastic interplay of the two Russian nouns, especially when the latter appears in the instrumental case: ‘tenorom,’ e. g.: ‘Tut, konechno, monter skhlestnulsia s tenorom.’
21. Zoshchenko, 3, pp. 558, 619, 622, 625-628.
22. Zoshchenko, Uvazhaemye grazhdane (1991), pp. 220-221, emended according to Mikh. Zoshchenko, Uvazhaemye grazhdane (Moscow, 1927), pp. 150-151.
23. See Masing-Delic, ‘Biology, Reason, and Literature…,’ Hanson, ‘Kto vinovat?’, A. K. Zholkovskii, ‘Ruka blizhnego i ee mesto v poetike Zoshchenko,’ Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 15 (1995): 262-286.
24. Glinka, Ruslan i Liudmila, pp. 81-85.
25. Zoshchenko, 3, pp. 607-615.
26. Zoshchenko, 3, pp. 626-627.
27. On Zoshchenko’s Nietzschean connection see Tat’iana Kadash, ‘”Zver’”i “nezhivoi chelovek” v mire rannego Zoshchenko,’ Literaturnoe obozrenie, 1 (1995) [249]: 36-38; Richard Grose, ‘Zoshchenko and Nietzsche’s Philosophy: Lessons in Misogyny, Sex and Self-Overcoming,’ The Russian Review 54: 3 (1995): 352-364.
28. Zoshchenko, 3, pp. 627.
29. See Zoshchenko, 3, pp. 590-591, 549-550, 467, 507. On some of these episodes and Zoshchenko’s ambivalent attitude towards authority figures and power in general, see Hanson, ‘Kto vinovat?’
30. See Zoshchenko, Uvazhaemye grazhdane (1991), p. 585; cf. also Viktor Shklovsky’s telling 1928 title and essay, ‘O Zoshchenke i bol’shoi literature,’ in his Gamburgskii schet (1914-1933), (Moscow, 1990), pp. 413-419, translated as: ‘On Zoshchenko and Major Literature,’ in Russian Literature Triquarterly 14 (1976): 407-414.
31. This author-character parallel is noted by Popkin (The Pragmatics of Insignificance, p. 78). A. K. Voronskii, who published an early critique of Zoshchenko’s writing (see his 1922 ‘Mikhail Zoshchenko. Rasskazy Nazara Il’icha gospodina Sinebriukhova,’ in Tomashevskii ed., Litso i maska, pp. 136-137) was a target of Zoshchenko’s polemic (see ‘O sebe, ob ideologii i eshche koe o chem,’ in his Uvazhaemye grazhdane [1991], pp. 578-580). One possible ‘prototype’ of the tenor figure could have been the poet Aleksandr Blok, whom Anna Akhmatova later (in her 1960 ‘Tri stikhotvoreniia’) labeled ‘the epoch’s tragic tenor’–with a nod to their 1913 backstage exchange, in which Blok, to allay her stage fright, had said: ‘Anna Andreevna, we are not tenors’ (see her 1965 ‘Vospominaniia ob Al. Bloke,’ in her Sochineniia, vol. 2 [Muenchen, 1968], pp. 191-192). Zoshchenko may have known about this from Akhmatova herself or otherwise; his own ambiguous attitude towards Blok’s grandeur and fall as an archetypal representative of the ancien culture is on record in his 1919 essay ‘Konets rytsaria Pechal’nogo Obraza’ (in Tomashevskii ed., Litso i maska, pp. 78-85), in Mishel’ Siniagin (1930), and PVS.
32. ‘Authorial/directorial’ talents promoting the action are a hallmark of negative and ambiguous characters: evil magicians, villains, provocateurs, swindlers, clowns and the like, e. g. Mephistopheles, Chichikov, Peter Verkhovenskii, Ostap Bender.
33. Zoshchenko, 3, pp. 441-442. An enlightened electrician appears in ‘Rasskaz pro odnu korystnuiu molochnitsu’ [A story About a Greedy Milkwoman]’ (in GK, Zoshchenko, 3, pp. 206-209), where his profession is referred to as an ‘intellectual’ one; about this story, see Zholkovskii, ‘Zubnoi vrach…’
34. Zoshchenko, 3: 396.
35. D. Granin, ‘Mimoletnoe iavlenie,’ in Vospominaniia o Mikhaile Zoshchenko, Iu. V. Tomashevskii ed. (Sankt-Peterburg, 1995), pp.: 483-505.
36. V. Kaverin, ‘Molodoi Zoshchenko,’ in Tomashevskii ed. Vospominaniia o Mikhaile Zoshchenko, pp. 120-138, see pp. 127-128.
37. It has appeared as ‘Slozhnyi mekhanizm’ and ‘Teatral’nyi mekhanizm’; see commentaries in Zoshchenko, 1, p. 548.
38. Zoshchenko, 3, pp. 471-472. For a detailed analysis see A. K. Zholkovskii, Inventsii (Moscow, 1995), pp. 57-71.
39. See Chudakova, Poetika Mikhail Zoshchenko, p. 179.
40. Zoshchenko, 1: 74-81.
41. A circus rider Miss Elvira [devitsa El’vira] appears in the chapter ‘Tsirk’ [Circus] of K. S. Stanislavskii’s Moia zhizn’ v iskusstve (see vol. 1 of his Sobranie socinenii v vos’mi tomakh [Moscow, 1954]), pp. 13-20 (absent in the 1924 English-language edition). As a teenager (ca. 1875), the future famous actor-director relishes his personal acquaintance with a friend-of-the-family ballerina, prefers circus to ballet, opera, and drama, admires El’vira appearing in a ‘Danse de chale,’ kisses the hem of her dress, is kidded as her presumed fiance, plays at becoming the manager [direktor] of a home circus, etc. Along with the parallels to Zoshchenko’s ‘El’vira,’ the chapter also contains an unexpected one to ‘Monter’–the performances of the home circus are often undermined by the actions of the ‘managers”s brother:
‘My brother, who alone could replace the orchestra, is… careless and undisciplined. He did not take our business seriously and could, therefore, do God knows what. He would play for a while, and then, suddenly, in front of all the “public,” he would lie down on the floor in the middle of the hall, feet up, and start screaming: “I won’t play any more!” In the long run, for a bar of chocolate, he would of course, resume playing. But the… “for-realness” [vsamdelishnost’] of the performance would be ruined’ (p. 17).
Zoshchenko’s heroine’s ‘real’ name, Nastia Gorokhova, may, in its turn, be of fictitious origin, going back to that of the ‘charming Wanda,’ who, according to her passport, was Nastas’ia Kanavkina, in Chekhov’s 1886 story ‘Znakomyi muzhchina’ [A Male Acquaintance]: both street-walkers’ names come from those of St.-Petersburg streets (Gorokhovaia, [Zimniaia] Kanavka). (An oral prompt from Professor Omry Ronen.)
42. 1787; libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. The subsequent quotes are from the multi-language libretto: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Don Giovanni. Drama giocoso in due atti (Vienna, 1986), an attachment to a cassette recording by EMI Records Ltd. Zoshchenko may have been exposed to one or the other of the two Russian versions: Don Zhuan. Komicheskaia opera d dvukh aktakh. Muzyka V.-A. Motsarta (Moscow, 1882 [libretto]); Don Zhuan. Opera V.-A. Motsarta (Moscow, 1899; [piano reduction]).
43. That 1897 story is narrated by a student who writes, for his neighbour the muscular and vulgar prostitute, letters from her imaginary lover Boles’ and her responses to him; she repays the student by mending his clothes.
44. On Mozart’s self-quoting and Pushkin’s play with it, see B. M. Gasparov, ‘”Ty, Motsart, nedostoin sam sebia,”‘ in Vremennik pushkinskoi komissii. 1974 (Leningrad, 1977), pp. 115-122; B. A. Kats, ‘”Iz Motsarta nam chto-nibud!”‘in Vremennik pushkinskoi komissii. 1979 (Leningrad, 1982), pp. 120-124.
45. In the Russian versions of the libretto, the ‘fingers’ become ‘ruchki’ [little hands]. An interesting Zoshchenko-like effect can be found in Moliere’s rendition of the same motif, focusing on the dirtiness of the hands of one of the peasant girls wooed by Dom Juan (Dom Juan, ou le Festin de Pierre [1665], II, 2).
46. A comparison suggests itself with the tenor’s (imaginary) hand job in ‘Monter,’ bringing out in it, given the sexual overtones of the conflict over the ‘dames,’ certain hidden erotic connotations. Note also the ‘vocal’ seme common to both situations: Don Giovanni’s one hand is used to impede Donna Anna’s voice, the tenor’s, to sing; moreover, the action of the other hand is in both cases the more ‘electrifying’: physically arousing in Don Giovanni, lightening in ‘Monter.’
47. A. S. Pushkin, Kamennyi gost’, III, see his 16-vol. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7, Dramaticheskie proizvedeniia (Moscow, 1948), p. 153.
48. On this Pushkin invariant see Roman Jakobson’s 1937 article, ‘The Statue in Pushkin’s Poetic Mythology,’ in his Selected Writings, vol. 5 (The Hague–Paris, 1979), pp. 237-280; and also A. K. Zholkovskii, ‘Materialy k opisaniiu poeticheskogo mira Pushkina,’ in Russian Romanticism: Studies in Poetic Codes, Nils Ake Nilsson ed. (Stockholm, 1979), pp. 45-93, see pp. 46-52.
Zoshchenko’s attraction to the ‘Don Juan’ [donzhuanskii] topos, in its predominantly Pushkinian Russian version, is interestingly manifested in the story ‘Lichnaia zhizn” [Personal Life] (1933), later included in Golubaia kniga as “Melkii sluchai iz lichnoi zhizni’ [A Trifling Incident from Private Life] in the ‘Love’ section (3: 255-259), where the first-person narrator’s womanizing is dealt a major blow in front of the Pushkin statue (in Moscow’s Pushkin Square), thus casting Pushkin in the role of an avenging Commendatore (see Zholkovskii, Bluzhdaiushchie sny i drugie raboty [Moscow, 1994], pp. 228-229). Pushkin’s statue appears also as the cultural arbiter in Zoshchenko’s “fantastic comedy” Kul’turnoe nasledie (see Note 5).
49. Both in Don Giovanni and Kamennyi gost’, women speak of avenging themselves on him in physical terms, but the actual violence is reserved for the Statue to perform.
50. About this story and problematic, see A. K. Zholkovskii, Bluzhdaiushchie sny, pp. 228-231.
51. For a Freudian reading of such situations, with special reference to Pushkin, see Daniel [Rancour-]Laferriere, Five Russian Poems (Englewood, NJ, 1977), pp. 48-79; for an alternative, ‘Girardian’ interpretation, see Rene Girard, ‘”Triangular desire”,’ in his Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (Baltimore, 1965), pp. 1-52. On ‘homosexual shame,’ with special reference to Leo Tolstoy’s ‘Posle bala’ [After the Ball], see Stephanie Sandler, ‘Pleasure, Danger, and the Dance: Nineteenth-Century Russian Variations,’ in Russia, Women, Culture, Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren eds. (Bloomington, Indiana, 1996), pp. 247-272, see pp. 260-263.
52. Pushkin, Kamennyi gost’, I, p. 142.
53. See William Mills Todd III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), passim.
54. See M. A. Kuzmin, ‘Negry,’ in Krasnaia gazeta 108 (May 10, 1926): 4; V. S. Poliakov, Tovarishch smekh (Moscow, 1976), p. 82; A. K. Zholkovskii, ‘K reinterpretatsii poetiki Mikhaila Zoshchenko (“Entsiklopediia strakha” i ideinaia struktura rasskaza “Dushevnaia prostota”),’ Izvestiia Akademii Nauk. Seriia literatury i iazyka 54: 5 (1995): 50-60.
55. Among the literary subtexts of ‘Aristokratka’ are two Chekhov stories with theatre settings: ‘Anna na shee’ [Anna on the Neck] (1895), where the stingy husband picks up a pear from the concessions stand, squashes it and puts it back (see Zholkovskii, ‘”Aristokastratka,”‘ p. 334), and ‘Dama s sobachkoi’ [The Lady with the Little Dog] (1899), whose separate seating arrangements are reproduced in Zoshchenko’s story (see Popkin, The Pragmatics of Insignificance, p. 77). As for virtual operatic subtexts, one might consider several nineteenth-century French operas sharing the theme of man’s public humiliation by his indomitable, sometimes ‘alien’ mistress: Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875), Camille Saint-Saens’ Samson et Dalila (1877), and Jules Massenet’s Herodiade (1881) and Manon [Lescaut] (1884). Samson et Dalila and Herodiade would be additionally suitable because the humiliation takes place at a feast, and Carmen, because it was singled out for praise by one of Zoshchenko’s favourite writers–Friedrich Nietzsche (see his ‘The Case of Wagner,’ where he also accuses Wagner’s operas of a lack of ‘aristocraticism’ and ‘nourishment’ [‘not enough to bite’]). To be sure, other operas, similar to the story in other respects, must be considered.