Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko was born in St. Petersburg in the family of an artist. Childhood impressions, including those of complex relationships between parents, were subsequently reflected both in Zoshchenko's stories for children (Galoshes and ice cream, Christmas tree, Grandma's gift, No need to lie, etc.), and in his story Before Sunrise (1943). The first literary experiences relate to childhood. In one of his notebooks, he noted that in 1902-1906 he had already tried to write poetry, and in 1907 he wrote the story Coat.
In 1913 Zoshchenko entered the law faculty of St. Petersburg University. By this time, his first surviving stories, Vanity (1914) and Two-kopeck piece (1914), date back. The study was interrupted by the First World War. In 1915, Zoshchenko volunteered for the front, commanded a battalion, and became a Knight of St. George. Literary work did not stop during these years. Zoshchenko tried his hand at short stories, in the epistolary and satirical genres (composing letters to fictitious addressees and epigrams for fellow soldiers). In 1917 he was demobilized due to heart disease that arose after gas poisoning.
MichaelZoshchenko participated in the First World War, and by 1916 he was promoted to the rank of staff captain. He was awarded many orders, including the Order of St. Stanislaus of the 3rd degree, the Order of St. Anna of the 4th degree "For Courage", the Order of St. Anna of the 3rd degree. In 1917, due to heart disease caused by gas poisoning, Zoshchenko was demobilized.
Upon returning to Petrograd, Marusya, the Meshchanochka, the Neighbor and other unpublished stories were written, in which the influence of G. Maupassant was felt. In 1918, despite his illness, Zoshchenko volunteered for the Red Army and fought on the fronts of the Civil War until 1919. Returning to Petrograd, he earned his living, as before the war, in various professions: a shoemaker, a carpenter, a carpenter, an actor, an instructor in rabbit breeding, a policeman, a criminal investigation officer, etc. In the humorous Orders on the railway police and criminal supervision written at that time, Art. Ligovo and other unpublished works already feel the style of the future satirist.
In 1919, Mikhail Zoshchenko studied at the Creative Studio, organized by the publishing house World Literature. Chukovsky supervised the classes, highly appreciating Zoshchenko's work. Recalling his stories and parodies written during the period of his studio studies, Chukovsky wrote: “It was strange to see that such a sad person was endowed with this wondrous ability to force his neighbors to laugh.” In addition to prose, during his studies, Zoshchenko wrote articles about the work of Blok, Mayakovsky, Teffi ... In the Studio he met the writers Kaverin, Vs. Ivanov, Lunts, Fedin, Polonskaya, who in 1921 united in the literary group "Serapion Brothers", who advocated the freedom of creativity from political guardianship. Creative communication was facilitated by the life of Zoshchenko and other "serapions" in the famous Petrograd House of Arts, described by O. Forsh in the novel Crazy Ship.
In 1920-1921 Zoshchenko wrote the first stories of those that were subsequently published: Love, War, Old Woman Wrangel, Fish female. The cycle Stories of Nazar Ilyich, Mr. Sinebryukhov (1921-1922) was published as a separate book by the Erato publishing house. This event marked Zoshchenko's transition to professional literary activity. The very first publication made him famous. Phrases from his stories acquired the character of popular expressions: “Why are you disturbing the mess?”; "Second Lieutenant wow, but a bastard"... From 1922 to 1946, his books went through about 100 editions, including collected works in six volumes (1928-1932).
By the mid-1920s, Zoshchenko had become one of the most popular writers. His stories Bath, Aristocrat, Case History, which he himself often read to numerous audiences, were known and loved by everyone. In a letter to Zoshchenko, Gorky noted: “I don’t know such a ratio of irony and lyricism in literature anywhere.” Chukovsky believed that the center of Zoshchenko's work was the struggle against callousness in human relations.
In the collections of short stories of the 1920s: Humorous Stories (1923), Dear Citizens (1926), Zoshchenko created a new type of hero for Russian literature - a Soviet person who did not receive an education, did not have the skills of spiritual work, did not have cultural baggage, but strived to become full-fledged participant in life, to be equal to "the rest of humanity." The reflection of such a hero produced a strikingly funny impression. The fact that the story was told on behalf of a highly individualized narrator gave literary critics grounds to define Zoshchenko's creative style as "skazovogo". Academician Vinogradov in the study "Zoshchenko's Language" analyzed in detail the writer's narrative techniques, noted the artistic transformation of various speech layers in his vocabulary. Chukovsky noted that Zoshchenko introduced into literature "a new, not yet fully formed, but victoriously spread throughout the country, non-literary speech and began to freely use it as his own speech."
In 1929, known in Soviet history as "the year of the great turning point", Zoshchenko published the book "Letters to a Writer" - a kind of sociological study. It was made up of several dozen letters from the huge reader's mail that the writer received, and his commentary on them. In the preface to the book, Zoshchenko wrote that he wanted to "show true and undisguised life, genuine living people with their desires, taste, thoughts." The book caused bewilderment among many readers, who expected only regular funny stories from Zoshchenko. After its release, Meyerhold was forbidden to stage Zoshchenko's play "Dear Comrade" (1930).
Soviet reality could not but affect the emotional state of the receptive writer prone to depression from childhood. A trip along the White Sea Canal, organized in the 1930s for propaganda purposes for a large group of Soviet writers, made a depressing impression on him. No less difficult was the need for Zoshchenko to write after this trip thatcriminalallegedly re-educatedin Stalin's camps(History of one life, 1934). An attempt to get rid of the oppressed state, to correct his painful psyche was a kind of psychological study - the story "Returned Youth" (1933). The story evoked an interested reaction in the scientific community, unexpected for the writer: the book was discussed at many academic meetings, reviewed in scientific publications; Academician I. Pavlov began to invite Zoshchenko to his famous Wednesdays.
As a continuation of "Returned Youth" was conceived a collection of short stories "The Blue Book" (1935).According to the contentMikhail Zoshchenko considered The Blue Book a novel, defined it as "a brief history of human relations" and wrote that it "is driven not by a short story, but by the philosophical idea that makes it". Stories about the present were interspersed in it with stories set in the past - in different periods of history. Both the present and the past were given in the perception of the typical hero Zoshchenko, who was not burdened with cultural baggage and understood history as a set of everyday episodes.
After the publication of the "Blue Book", which caused devastating reviews in party publications, Mikhail Zoshchenko was actually forbidden to print works that go beyond "positive satire on individual shortcomings." Despite his high writing activity (custom feuilletons for the press, plays, film scripts), his true talent manifested itself only in stories for children, which he wrote for the magazines "Chizh" and "Ezh".
In the 1930s, the writer worked on a book that he considered the main one. Work continued during the Patriotic War in Alma-Ata, in evacuation, Zoshchenko could not go to the front due to severe heart disease. The initial chapters of this science fiction study of the subconscious have been published byin 1943in the magazine "October" under the title "Before Sunrise". Zoshchenko studied cases from life that gave impetus to a severe mental illness, from which doctors could not save him. Modern scientists note that the writer anticipated many discoveries of the science of the unconscious for decades.
The magazine publication caused a scandal, and such a flurry of critical abuse was brought down on Zoshchenko that the publication of "Before Sunrise" was interrupted. He sent a letter to Stalin, asking him to familiarize himself with the book "or give an order to check it in more detail than is done by the critics." The answer was another stream of abuse in the press, the book was called "nonsense, needed only by the enemies of our country" (Bolshevik magazine).In 1944-1946 Zoshchenko worked a lot for theaters. Two of his comedies were staged at the Leningrad Drama Theatre, one of which - Canvas Briefcase - withstood 200 performances in a year.
In 1946, after the decision of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On the magazines Zvezda and Leningrad”, the party leader of Leningrad Zhdanov recalled the book Before Sunrise in a report, calling it “a disgusting thing”.The decree of 1946, with the rudeness inherent in Soviet ideology, "criticized" Zoshchenko and Akhmatova, led to public persecution and a ban on the publication of their works. The reason was the publication of Zoshchenko's children's story "The Adventures of a Monkey" (1945), in which the authorities saw a hint that monkeys live better than people in the Soviet country. At a writers' meeting, Zoshchenko declared that the honor of an officer and a writer did not allow him to accept the fact that in the resolution of the Central Committee he was called a "coward" and "a bastard of literature." In the future, Zoshchenko also refused to come out with the expected repentance from him and the recognition of "mistakes." In 1954, at a meeting with English students, Zoshchenko again tried to state his attitude to the 1946 resolution, after which the persecution began in a second round.The saddest consequence of the ideological campaign was the exacerbation of mental illness, which did not allow the writer to work fully. His restoration in the Writers' Union after Stalin's death (1953) and the publication of his first book after a long break (1956) brought only temporary relief to his condition.
Zoshchenko the satirist
The first victory of Mikhail Mikhailovich was "The Stories of Nazar Ilyich, Mr. Sinebryukhov" (1921-1922). The loyalty of the hero, the "little man" who had been in the German war, was told ironically, but without malice; the writer, it seems, is rather amused than upset by the humility of Sinebryukhov, who “understands, of course, his rank and position”, and his “boasting”, and what comes out to him from time to time is “a mishap and a regrettable incident”. The case takes place after the February Revolution, the slave in Sinebryukhov still seems justified, but it already acts as an alarming symptom: a revolution has taken place, but the psyche of people remains the same. The narrative is colored by the word of the hero - a tongue-tied person, a simpleton who finds himself in various curious situations. The author's word is folded. The center of artistic vision is moved to the mind of the narrator.
In the context of the main artistic problem of the time, when all writers were solving the question “How to emerge victorious from the constant, exhausting struggle of the artist with the interpreter” (Konstantin Alexandrovich Fedin), Zoshchenko was the winner: the ratio of image and meaning in his satirical stories was extremely harmonious. The main element of the narrative was linguistic comedy, the form of the author's assessment - irony, the genre - the comic tale. This artistic structure has become canonical for Zoshchenko's satirical stories.
The gap between the scale of revolutionary events and the conservatism of the human psyche, which struck Zoshchenko, made the writer especially attentive to that area of life where, as he believed, lofty ideas and epoch-making events are deformed. The writer's phrase, which made a lot of noise, "And we are quietly, and we are little by little, and we are on a par with Russian reality," grew out of a feeling of an alarming gap between the "rapidity of fantasy" and "Russian reality." Without questioning the revolution as an idea, M. Zoshchenko believed, however, that, passing through "Russian reality", the idea encounters on its way obstacles that deform it, rooted in the age-old psychology of yesterday's slave. He created a special - and new - type of hero, where ignorance was fused with readiness for mimicry, natural grasp with aggressiveness, and old instincts and skills were hidden behind the new phraseology. Such stories as "Victim of the Revolution", "Grimace of NEP", "Brake of Westinghouse", "Aristocrat" can serve as a model. The heroes are passive until they understand “what is what and who is not shown to be beaten”, but when it is “shown” they stop at nothing, and their destructive potential is inexhaustible: they mock their own mother, a quarrel over a brush turns into "solid battle" ("Nervous people"), and the pursuit of an innocent person turns into a vicious pursuit ("Terrible Night").
,
The new type was the discovery of Mikhail Zoshchenko. He was often compared with the "little man" of Gogol and Dostoevsky, and later with the hero of Charlie Chaplin. But Zoshchenko's type - the further, the more - deviated from all models. Linguistic comedy, which became an imprint of the absurdity of his hero's consciousness, became a form of his self-disclosure. He no longer considers himself a small person. “You never know what the average person has to do in the world!” - exclaims the hero of the story "Wonderful Rest". A proud attitude to the "cause" - from the demagogy of the era; but Zoshchenko parodies her: “You understand yourself: either you drink a little, then the guests will come, then you need to glue the leg to the sofa ... The wife, too, will sometimes begin to express complaints.” So in the literature of the 1920s, Zoshchenko's satire formed a special, "negative world", as he said, so that he would be "ridiculed and repelled from himself."
Starting from the middle of 1920, Mikhail Zoshchenko published "sentimental stories". Their origins were the story "The Goat" (1922). Then appeared the novels "Apollo and Tamara" (1923), "People" (1924), "Wisdom" (1924), "A Terrible Night" (1925), "What the Nightingale Sang About" (1925), "Merry Adventure" (1926). ) and Lilac Blooms (1929). In the preface to them, Zoshchenko for the first time openly spoke sarcastically about the "planetary missions", heroic pathos and "high ideology" that were expected of him. In a deliberately simple form, he posed the question: how does the death of the human in a person begin, what predetermines it and what can prevent it. This question appeared in the form of a reflective intonation.
The heroes of "sentimental stories" continued to debunk the supposedly passive consciousness. The evolution of Bylinkin (“What the nightingale sang about”), who at the beginning walked in the new city “timidly, looking around and dragging his feet”, and, having received “a strong social position, public service and a salary of the seventh category plus for the load”, turned into a despot and a boor, convinced that the moral passivity of the Zoshchensky hero is still illusory. His activity revealed itself in the rebirth of the spiritual structure: the features of aggressiveness clearly appeared in it. “I really like,” Gorky wrote in 1926, “that the hero of Zoshchenko’s story “What the Nightingale Sang About” — the former hero of The Overcoat, in any case, a close relative of Akaki, arouses my hatred thanks to the clever irony of the author” .
But, as Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky noted in the late 1920s and early 1930s, another type of hero appears.Zoshchenko- a person who "lost his human appearance", "the righteous" ("Goat", "Terrible Night"). These heroes do not accept the morality of the environment, they have other ethical standards, they would like to live by high morality. But their rebellion ends in failure. However, unlike Chaplin’s “victim” rebellion, which is always fanned with compassion, Zoshchenko’s hero’s rebellion is devoid of tragedy: the personality is faced with the need for spiritual resistance to the mores and ideas of his environment, and the writer’s harsh demands do not forgive her compromise and capitulation.
The appeal to the type of righteous heroes betrayed the eternal uncertainty of the Russian satirist in the self-sufficiency of art and was a kind of attempt to continue Gogol's search for a positive hero, a "living soul". However, it is impossible not to notice: in the "sentimental stories" the writer's artistic world has become bipolar; the harmony of meaning and image was broken, philosophical reflections revealed a preaching intention, the pictorial fabric became less dense. The word fused with the author's mask dominated; it was similar in style to stories; meanwhile, the character (type), stylistically motivating the narrative, has changed: this is an average intellectual. The former mask turned out to be attached to the writer.
http://to-name.ru/index.htm
Mikhail Zoshchenko at a meeting of the Serapion Brothers literary circle.
Zoshchenko and Olesha: a double portrait in the interior of the era
Mikhail Zoshchenko and Yuri Olesha - twothe most popular writer of Soviet Russia in the 1920s, who largely determined the appearance of Russian literature of the 20th century. They were both born into impoverished noble families, experienced phenomenal success and oblivion. They were both broken by power. They also had a choice in common: to exchange their talent for day labor or write something that no one will see.
Zoshchenko would not be himself if it were not for his manner of writing. It was a language unknown to literature, and therefore not having its own spelling language. Zoshchenko was endowed with absolute pitch and a brilliant memory. During the years spent in the midst of poor people, he managed to penetrate the secret of their conversational construction, with its characteristic vulgarisms, incorrect grammatical forms and syntactic constructions, he was able to adopt the intonation of their speech, their expressions, turns, phrases - he studied this language to the subtlety and already from the first steps in literature, he began to use it easily and naturally. In his language, expressions such as “plitoir”, “okromya”, “hresh”, “this”, “in him”, “brunette”, “drunk”, “for biting”, “fuck cry”, “ this poodle", "silent animal", "at the stove", etc. But Zoshchenko is a writer not only of a comic style, but also of comic situations. Not only his language is comical, but also the place where the story of the next story unfolded: a commemoration, a communal apartment, a hospital - everything is so familiar, familiar, everyday. And the story itself: a fight in a communal apartment because of a scarce hedgehog, a scandal at the wake because of a broken glass.
In the 1920s, the main genre varieties of the writer's work flourished: a satirical story, a comic novel and a satirical-humorous story. Already at the very beginning of the 1920s, the writer created a number of works that were highly appreciated by M. Gorky. Published in 1922 "Stories of Nazar Ilyich Mr. Sinebryukhov"
Got everyone's attention. Against the background of the short stories of those years, the figure of the hero-storyteller, the grated, experienced man Nazar Ilyich Sinebryukhov, who went through the front and saw a lot in the world, stood out sharply. M. Zoshchenko seeks and finds a kind of intonation, in which the lyric-ironic beginning and the intimate-confiding note are fused together, removing any barrier between the narrator and the listener. Sometimes the narrative is quite skillfully built on the type of a well-known absurdity, beginning with the words "a tall man of short stature was walking." Such inconsistencies create a certain comic effect. True, while he does not have that distinct satirical orientation, which he will acquire later. In Sinebryukhov's Tales, such specifically Zoshchenko turns of comic speech, which remained in the reader's memory for a long time, appear as "as if suddenly the atmosphere smelled of me", "they will rob me like sticky and throw them away for their kind, for nothing that their own relatives", "second lieutenant wow, but bastard", "breaks the riots", etc. Subsequently, a stylistic game of a similar type, but with an incomparably sharper social meaning, will manifest itself in the speeches of other heroes - Semyon Semenovich Kurochkin and Gavrilych, on whose behalf the narration was conducted in a number of the most popular comic short stories by Zoshchenko in the first half of the 20s. The works created by the writer in the 1920s were based on specific and very topical facts gleaned either from direct observations or from numerous letters from readers. Their themes are motley and varied: riots in transport and in hostels, grimaces of the New Economic Policy and grimaces of everyday life, the mold of philistinism and philistinism, arrogant pompadourism and creeping servility, and much, much more. Often the story is built in the form of a casual conversation with the reader, and sometimes, when the shortcomings became especially egregious, frankly journalistic notes sounded in the author's voice. In a series of satirical short stories, M. Zoshchenko maliciously ridiculed the cynically prudent or sentimentally thoughtful earners of individual happiness, intelligent scoundrels and boors, showed in the true light of vulgar and worthless people who are ready to trample on everything truly human on the way to arranging personal well-being ("Matrenishcha", "Grimace of NEP", "Lady with flowers", "Nanny", "Marriage of convenience"). In Zoshchenko's satirical stories, there are no spectacular techniques for sharpening the author's thoughts. They are usually devoid of comedy intrigue. M. Zoshchenko acted here as a denouncer of spiritual Okurovism, a satirist of morals. He chose as the object of analysis the philistine-proprietor, the hoarder and money-grubber, who, from a direct political opponent, became an opponent in the sphere of morality, a hotbed of vulgarity. The circle of persons acting in Zoshchenko's satirical works is extremely narrow, there is no image of the crowd, the mass, visibly or invisibly present in humorous short stories. The pace of plot development is slow, the characters are deprived of the dynamism that distinguishes the heroes of other works of the writer. The heroes of these stories are less rude and uncouth than in humorous short stories. The author is primarily interested in the spiritual world, the system of thinking of an outwardly cultured, but all the more disgusting in essence, tradesman. Oddly enough, but in Zoshchenko's satirical stories there are almost no caricatured, grotesque situations, less comic and no fun at all. However, the main element of Zoshchenko's creativity of the 1920s is still humorous everyday life. Zoshchenko writes about drunkenness, about housing affairs, about losers offended by fate. Zoshchenko has a short story "The Beggar" - about a hefty and impudent subject who got into the habit of regularly going to the hero-narrator, extorting fifty kopecks from him. When he was tired of all this, he advised the enterprising earner to drop in less frequently with uninvited visits. “He didn’t come to see me again - he must have been offended,” the narrator remarked melancholy in the finale. Breaking the connection between cause and effect is the traditional source of the comic. It is important to capture the type of conflicts characteristic of a given environment and era and convey them by means of satirical art. Zoshchenko is dominated by the motive of discord, worldly absurdity, some kind of tragicomic inconsistency of the hero with the pace, rhythm and spirit of the times. Sometimes Zoshchenko's hero really wants to keep up with progress. A hastily assimilated modern trend seems to such a respected citizen not only as a ride of loyalty, but as an example of organic adaptation to revolutionary reality. Hence the addiction to fashionable names and political terminology, hence the desire to assert their "proletarian" insides through bravado with rudeness, ignorance, rudeness. The dominance of a trifle, the slavery of trifles, the comicality of the absurd and absurd - this is what the writer pays attention to in a series of sentimental stories. However, there is also much here that is new, even unexpected for the reader who knew Zoshchenko the novelist. Satire, like all Soviet fiction, changed significantly in the 1930s. The creative fate of the author of "The Aristocrat" and "Sentimental Tales" was no exception. The writer who exposed philistinism, ridiculed philistinism, wrote ironically and parodicly about the poisonous scum of the past, turns his eyes in a completely different direction. Zoshchenko is fascinated by the tasks of socialist transformation. He works in the large-circulation newspapers of Leningrad enterprises, visits the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, listening to the rhythms of the grandiose process of social renewal. There is a turning point in all his work: from the worldview to the tonality of the narrative and style. During this period, Zoshchenko was seized by the idea of merging satire and heroism together. Theoretically, this thesis was proclaimed by him at the very beginning of the 1930s, and practically implemented in "Returned Youth" (1933), "The Story of a Life" (1934), the story "The Blue Book" (1935) and a number of stories of the second half: 30s. The satirist saw the amazing vitality of all kinds of social weeds and by no means underestimated the abilities of the tradesman and the layman for mimicry and opportunism. However, in the 1930s, new prerequisites arose to solve the eternal question of human happiness, due to gigantic socialist transformations, the cultural revolution. This has a significant impact on the nature and direction of the writer's work. Zoshchenko has teaching intonations that did not exist at all before. The satirist not only and even not so much ridicules, castigates, as patiently teaches, explains, interprets, referring to the mind and conscience of the reader. High and pure didactics was embodied with special perfection in a cycle of touching and affectionate stories for children written in 1937-1938.
Plan
1. The formation of Zoshchenko
2. Reasons for the success of Zoshchenko's works with readers:
a) a rich biography as a source of knowledge of life;
b) the language of the reader is the language of the writer;
c) optimism helps to survive
3. Place of creativity of Mikhail Zoshchenko in Russian literature
There is hardly a person who has not read a single work of Mikhail Zoshchenko. In the 1920s and 1930s, he actively collaborated in satirical magazines (Behemoth, Laugher, Cannon, Inspector General, and others). And already then the reputation of the famous satirist was established behind him. Under the pen of Zoshchenko, all the sad aspects of life, instead of the expected sadness or fear, cause laughter. The author himself claimed that in his stories “there is not a drop of fiction. Everything here is the naked truth.”
Nevertheless, despite the resounding success with readers, the work of this writer turned out to be incompatible with the principles of socialist realism. The infamous resolutions of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of the late forties, along with other writers, journalists, and composers, accused Zoshchenko of being unprincipled and propagating bourgeois bourgeois ideology.
A letter from Mikhail Mikhailovich to Stalin (“I have never been an anti-Soviet person ... I have never been a literary rogue or low person”) remained unanswered. In 1946, he was expelled from the Writers' Union, and for the next ten years not a single book of his was published!
The good name of Zoshchenko was restored only during the Khrushchev "thaw".
How can one explain the unprecedented fame of this satirist?
You should start with the fact that the writer's biography itself had a huge impact on his work. He did a lot. Battalion commander, post and telegraph chief, border guard, regimental adjutant, criminal investigation agent, rabbit and chicken breeding instructor, shoemaker, accountant's assistant... And this is still an incomplete list of who this person was and what he did before he sat down at the writer's desk.
He saw many people who had to live in an era of great social and political change. He spoke to them in their language, they were his teachers.
Zoshchenko was a conscientious and sensitive person, he was tormented by pain for others, and the writer considered himself called to serve a “poor” (as he would later call him) person. This "poor" person personified the whole human layer of the then Russia. Before his eyes, the revolution was trying to heal the war wounds of the country and realize lofty dreams. And the "poor" person at that time was forced (instead of creative work in the name of the realization of this dream) to spend time and energy on the fight against minor domestic troubles.
Moreover: he is so busy with it that he cannot even throw off the heavy burden of the past. To open the eyes of a "poor" person, to help him - the writer saw his task in this.
It is very important that, in addition to a deep knowledge of the life of his hero, the writer masterfully masters his language. By syllables reading these stories, the novice reader is absolutely sure that the author is his own. And the place where the events unfold is so familiar and familiar (bathhouse, tram, communal kitchen, post office, hospital). And the story itself (a fight in a communal apartment because of a “hedgehog” (“Nervous people”), bath problems with paper numbers (“Bathhouse”), which a naked person has “nowhere to put it straight”, a glass cracked at a wake in the story of the same name and tea that “smells like a mop”) is also close to the audience.
As for the simple, sometimes even primitive language of his works, here is how the satirist himself wrote about it in 1929: Usually they think that I am distorting the “beautiful Russian language”, that for the sake of laughter I take words not in the meaning that life has given them that I deliberately write in broken language in order to make the most respectable public laugh. This is not true. I hardly distort anything. I write in the language that the street now speaks and thinks. I did this not for the sake of curiosities and not in order to more accurately copy our life. I did this in order to fill, at least temporarily, the colossal gap that has occurred between literature and the street.
The stories of Mikhail Zoshchenko are designed in the spirit of the language and character of the hero on behalf of whom the narration is being conducted. This technique helps to naturally penetrate the inner world of the hero, to show the essence of his nature.
And one more significant circumstance that influenced the success of Zoshchenko's satire. This writer seemed to be a very cheerful and never discouraged person. No problems could make his hero a pessimist. Everything doesn't matter to him. And the fact that one citizen with the help of cakes in front of the entire theatrical audience disgraced him (“Aristocrat”). And the fact that “due to the crisis” he had to live in the bathroom with his “young wife”, child and mother-in-law. And the fact that in the company of crazy psychos I had to travel in the same compartment. And again nothing! Despite such constant, numerous and most often unexpected problems, it is written cheerfully.
This laughter brightened up the difficult life of the readers and gave hope that everything would be fine.
But Zoshchenko himself was a follower of the Gogol trend in literature. He believed that one should not laugh at his stories, but cry. Behind the seeming simplicity of the story, its jokes and curiosities, there is always a serious problem. The writer always had a lot of them.
Zoshchenko keenly felt the most important questions of the time. So, his numerous stories about the housing crisis (“Nervous People”, “Kolpak” and others) appeared at the right time. The same can be said about the topics he raised of bureaucracy, bribery, the elimination of illiteracy ... In a word, almost everything that people encountered in everyday life.
The concept of “philistine” is firmly connected with the word “everyday life”. There is an opinion that Zoshchenko's satire ridiculed the layman. That the writer created unsightly images of the townsfolk to help the revolution.
In fact, Zoshchenko ridiculed not the man himself, but the philistine features in him. With his stories, the satirist urged not to fight these people, but to help them get rid of their shortcomings. And also to alleviate their everyday problems and worries, why strictly ask those whose indifference and abuse of power undermine people's faith in a brighter future.
All Zoshchenko's works have another amazing feature: they can be used to study the history of our country. Subtly feeling the time, the writer managed to fix not only the problems that worry contemporaries, but also the very spirit of the era.
This, perhaps, explains the difficulty of translating his stories into other languages. The foreign reader is so unprepared for the perception of life described by Zoshchenko that he often evaluates it as a genre of some kind of social fantasy. Indeed, how to explain to a person unfamiliar with Russian realities the essence of, say, the story “Case History”? Only a compatriot, who knows firsthand about these problems, is able to understand how a sign “Issue of corpses from 3 to 4” can hang in the emergency room. Or comprehend the nurse’s phrase “For nothing that he is sick, but he also notices all sorts of subtleties. Probably, he says, you will not recover, that you are fussing all over your nose. Or to understand the tirade of the lekpom himself (“I, he says, is the first time I see such a fastidious patient. And he, impudent, does not like it, and it’s not good for him ... No, I like it more when patients come to us in an unconscious state. According at least then everything is to their liking, they are satisfied with everything and do not enter into scientific disputes with us”).
The caustic grotesque of this work emphasizes the inconsistency of the existing situation: the humiliation of human dignity is becoming common within the walls of the most humane, medical institution! And words, and actions, and attitude towards patients - everything here infringes on human dignity. And this is done mechanically, thoughtlessly - simply because it is so established, it is in the order of things, they are so used to it: “Knowing my character, they no longer began to argue with me and tried to agree on everything. Only after bathing they gave me a huge, not for my height, linen. I thought that out of malice they deliberately threw me such a set that did not fit me, but then I saw that this is a normal phenomenon with them. They had little patients, as a rule, in large shirts, and large ones in small ones. And even my kit turned out to be better than the others. On my shirt, the hospital brand was on the sleeve and did not spoil the general appearance, while on other patients the brands were on someone’s back, and someone on their chest, and this morally humiliated human dignity.
Most often, the satirical works of this writer are built as simple and artless narratives of the hero about a particular episode in his life. The story is similar to an essay, a report in which the author did not invent anything, but simply, noticing this or that episode, pedantically told about it with the diligence of an attentive and ironic journalist. That is why Zoshchenko's stories, unlike the action-packed novels by O'Henry or Arkady Averchenko, are built not on an unexpected turn of events, but on the disclosure of unforeseen aspects of character.
Mikhail Zoshchenko left a rich literary heritage. Over 130 books were published during his lifetime. This is more than a thousand stories, feuilletons, novellas, plays, scripts ... But, in addition to his books, Zoshchenko left behind a more extensive "legacy", laying (along with his contemporaries - Mikhail Bulgakov, Arkady Bukhov, Arkady Averchenko, Mikhail Koltsov and many others) the foundations of the genre of the Russian satirical story. And the broad development of this direction is confirmed even today.
So, "Zoshchenko's hero" found an undoubted continuation in the image of the narrator - "lumpen-intellectual" in "Moscow-Petushki" by Venedikt Erofeev, in the prose of Yuz Aleshkovsky, E. Popov, V. Pietsukh. All these writers in the structure of the narrator face the features of "intellectual" and "hard worker", the language of the cultural layer and the common people.
Continuing the analysis of Zoshchenko's traditions in literature and art, one cannot help but turn to the work of Vladimir Vysotsky (in his songs, the image of the hero-narrator of songs is promising).
Equally obvious analogies can be traced in the analysis of the work of Mikhail Zhvanetsky. It intersects with Zoshchenko's in many respects. First of all, we note the similarity of aphoristic constructions, citing a few phrases as proof: “In general, art is falling.” “Therefore, if anyone wants to be well understood here, he must say goodbye to world fame.” “It’s quite amazing how some people don’t like living.” "We must adequately respond to the well-founded, albeit groundless, complaints of foreigners - why are your people gloomy." “They say money is the most powerful thing in the world. Nonsense. Nonsense". “A person of weak mind can criticize our life.”
The odd phrases belong to Zoshchenko, the even ones to Zhvanetsky (which, as one can see, is not revealed without effort). Zhvanetsky continued Zoshchenko's work on the rehabilitation of the "common man" with his ordinary worldly interests, his natural weaknesses, his common sense, his ability to laugh not only at others, but also at himself.
... Reading the works of Zoshchenko, reflecting on them, we, of course, remember Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin. Laughter through tears - in the tradition of Russian classical satire. Behind the cheerful text of his stories, there is always a voice of doubt and anxiety. Zoshchenko always believed in the future of his people, appreciated them and worried about them.
Analysis of the poem by Robert Rozhdestvensky
"The Ballad of Talent, God and the Devil"
Robert Rozhdestvensky entered literature together with a group of talented peers, among whom stood out E. Evtushenko, B. Akhmadulina, A. Voznesensky. First of all, readers were captivated by the civic and moral pathos of this diverse lyric, which affirms the identity of the creative person in the center of the universe.
Analyzing the “Ballad of Talent, God and the Devil”, we see that the very first lines of the work raise an important question: “Everyone says: “His talent is from God!” And if from the devil? What then?..”
The image of talent from the very first stanzas appears before us in two ways. This is both talent - in the sense of unusual human abilities and qualities, and talent as a person himself, endowed with such a gift. Moreover, at the beginning, the poet describes his hero in a completely casual and prosaic way: “... And the talent lived. Sick. Ridiculous. Frowning". These short, jerky sentences, each consisting of a single adjective, have enormous potential for emotional impact on the reader: the power of tension increases more and more as you move from one sentence to another.
In the “everyday” characteristics and description of the everyday life of the talent, there is completely no elevation: “The talent got up, scratching himself sleepily. Lost identity found. And he needed a jar of cucumber pickle more than nectar.” And since all this is clearly happening in the morning, the reader is intrigued: what has the person been doing up to now? It turns out that after listening to the devil’s monologue (“Listen, mediocrity! Who needs your poems now?! After all, you, like everyone else, will drown in the hellish abyss. Relax! ..”), he simply goes “to the tavern. And relaxes!
In the following stanzas, the poet again and again uses a technique already familiar to us, using the word in several meanings and significantly increasing the emotional tension: “He drank with inspiration! He drank so much that the devil looked and was touched. Talent ruined himself with talent!..” This language device, based on a combination of seemingly paradoxically incompatible words in meaning and style (talented ruined), creates vivid and strong images in front of the reader, making them as tragic as possible, to the point of pain.
The tension is growing. The second half of the "Ballad ..." is riddled with bitter pathos and hope. It tells about how the talent worked - “Evil, fiercely. Feather dipping in its own pain. This theme, consistently developing further, sounds on an increasingly piercing note: “Now he was a god! And he was the devil! And that means he was himself.
Tension reaches its climax. Here is the answer to the eternal question: talent from God or from the devil? True talent is both a god and a devil in itself. Again, the combination of opposites gives us the opportunity to look at the world with different eyes, to see it not in the unambiguous categories of "white - black", but in all its multicolor.
After this climax, the author again "descends" to the ground, to the images of the audience watching the process of creation. Both God and the devil are here attributed to completely human, moreover, unexpected actions. Here is how they reacted to the success of talent: “God was baptized. And god cursed. “But how could he write such a thing?!” ... And he still couldn’t do that. ”
How casual and simple the last line sounds! No stylistic excesses, the vocabulary is the most colloquial. But in this simplicity lies the strength with which the poet expresses the main idea of the work: everything is subject to true talent. The phrase is said as if in a quiet voice, but he is so sure of the justice of what was said that there is no need for pathos, loudness, recitation. Everything seems to go without saying, and this is the great truth ...
The truth of war in the works of Y. Bondarev
The theme of war is inexhaustible. More and more new works appear, which again and again make us return to the fiery events of more than fifty years ago and see in the heroes of the Great Patriotic War what we have not yet understood and appreciated enough. At the turn of the fifties and sixties, a whole galaxy of names well-known to readers today appeared: V. Bogomolov, A. Ananiev, V. Bykov, A. Adamovich, Yu. Bondarev ...
The work of Yuri Bondarev has always been dramatic and dramatic. The most tragic event of the twentieth century - the war against fascism, the inescapable memory of it - permeates his books: "Battalions ask for fire", "Silence", "Hot snow", "Coast". Yuri Vasilyevich belongs to the generation for which the Great Patriotic War became the first life baptism, the harsh school of youth.
The basis of Yuri Bondarev's work was the theme of the high humanism of the Soviet soldier, his vital responsibility for our present day. The story "Battalions ask for fire" was published in 1957. This book, as well as subsequent ones, as if logically continuing it ("The Last Volleys", "Silence" and "Two") brought the author wide popularity and recognition of readers.
In "Battalions ..." Yuri Bondarev managed to find his own trend in a wide literary stream. The author does not strive for a comprehensive description of the picture of the war - he bases the work on a specific combat episode, one of many on the battlefield, and populates his story with completely specific people, privates and officers of the great army.
Bondarev's image of war is formidable and cruel. And the events described in the story "Battalions ask for fire" are deeply tragic. The pages of the story are full of high humanism, love and trust in man. Even here, Yuri Bondarev began to develop the theme of the mass heroism of the Soviet people, later it was most fully embodied in the story "Hot Snow". Here the author spoke about the last days of the Battle of Stalingrad, about the people who stood in the way of the Nazis to death.
In 1962, Bondarev's new novel, Silence, was published, and soon its continuation, the novel Two, was published. The hero of "Silence" Sergei Vokhmintsev has just returned from the front. But he cannot erase from his memory the echoes of recent battles. He judges the actions and words of people by the highest measure - the measure of front-line friendship, military partnership. In these difficult circumstances, in the struggle for the establishment of justice, the civic position of the hero is getting stronger. Let us recall the works of Western authors (Remarque, Hemingway) - in this literature, the motive of the alienation of yesterday's soldier from the life of today's society, the motive of the destruction of ideals is constantly heard. Bondarev's position on this issue leaves no room for doubt. At first, it is also not easy for his hero to enter into a peaceful rut. But it was not in vain that Vokhmintsev went through the harsh school of life. He again and again, like the heroes of other books of this writer, asserts: the truth, no matter how bitter it may be, is always alone.
Persecution is watered and lit - such is the lot of a gifted and truthful person. For many years they tried to present Z as anyone, but not as a satirist. In the late 30s, a satire appeared. "Case history" - the hero enters the hospital with typhoid fever, and the first thing he sees is a poster on the wall: "Issuance of corpses from 3 to 4." But not only this: a "washing station", a shirt with a prisoner brand on the chest, a small ward where 30 people are lying. Miraculously, he manages to recover, although everything was done so that he did not survive. W showing not one person or several people, but the whole community, having rejected after 17g. humanism, mercy, humanity. Negative belonged to denunciation, control of the state over all aspects of people's lives. 3 almost documented the origin of the Soviet bureaucracy. The "patient" hero Dmit Naumych is ashamed of his wife's ugliness. But his speech is self-exposing: I know 4 rules of arithmetic. And it says people, endowed with power. The language of bureaucrats - "monkeys" In the story "Monkey language" the passion of officials for incomprehensible words and combinations such as "plenary meeting", "discussion" is ridiculed. "Blue Book" - there are no officials and bureaucrats or they play a secondary role. Here the people themselves are callous and indifferent to each other, they pass by people of misfortune. This indifference is disgusting to Z, and he fights it with his biting and well-aimed word. He does not spare anyone, but still his characters evoke only sarcasm from him, but also a sad smile. Here Z seems to have lost faith in the possibility of altering people's morals. The whole history of man is money, deceit, love, failures, amazing incidents. Topics from W-unsettled life, kitchen troubles, the life of bureaucracy, ordinary people, bureaucrats, funny life situations. Z opened the layman's eyes, corrected the shortcomings. Satirical description of petty-bourgeois morals-goal Z. The language is very simple, colloquial, slang.
"Galosha"
M. M. Zoshchenko was born in Poltava, in the family of a poor artist. He did not graduate from the law faculty of St. Petersburg University, he volunteered for the front. In an autobiographical article, Zoshchenko wrote that after the revolution he “wandered around many places in Russia. He was a carpenter, went to animal trade on Novaya Zemlya, was a shoemaker, served as a telephone operator, policeman, was a search agent, card player, clerk, actor, served again at the front as a volunteer - in the Red Army. The years of two wars and revolutions are a period of intensive spiritual growth of the future writer, the formation of his literary and aesthetic convictions.
Mikhail Mikhailovich continued the traditions of Gogol, early Chekhov, and Leskov. And on their basis, he acted as the creator of the original comic novel. An urban tradesman of the post-revolutionary period, a petty office worker are the constant heroes of the writer. He writes about the comic manifestations of the petty and limited worldly interests of a simple city dweller, about the conditions of life in the post-revolutionary period. The author-narrator and Zoshchenko's characters speak a motley and broken language. Their speech is rude, crammed with clerical statements, "beautiful" words, often empty, devoid of content. The author himself said that “he writes concisely. Phrases are short. available to the poor."
The story "Galosha" is a vivid example of the comic novel genre. The heroes of the story remind us of the heroes of Chekhov's stories. This is a simple person, but we will not learn anything about his talent, genius or hard work, like the heroes of Leskov. Other actors are employees of state institutions. These people deliberately delay the solution of a trifling issue, which indicates their indifference to people, the futility of work. What they do is called red tape. But our hero admires the work of the apparatus: “Here, I think, the office works nicely!”
Is it possible to find a positive character in the story? All the characters inspire contempt in us. How pitiful their experiences and joys! "Don't waste the goods!" And the hero embarks on a search for the “almost brand new” galoshes lost in the tram: worn “for the third season”, with a frayed back, without a baize, “a heel ... almost gone.” For a hero, a week of work is not considered red tape. So what then is considered red tape? And issuing certificates of lost galoshes for someone is a job.
We cannot call this story humorous, since humor implies fun and goodwill. In the same story, sadness and annoyance seep through laughter. The characters are rather caricatured. By ridiculing evil, the author shows us what we should not be.
BATH
The hero-narrator, starting his monologue with the fact that, according to rumors, "in
The baths in America are very excellent," tells of a trip to an ordinary
Soviet bath, "which is worth a dime." Arriving there, he received
there are two numbers in the locker room that a naked person has nowhere to put:
“There are no pockets. Around - the stomach and legs. Tied the numbers to the legs,
the hero goes in search of a gang. Hard to get it, he
discovers that everyone around him is doing laundry: “Only,
let's say, washed up - dirty again. Splash, devils! Deciding
“wash at home”, the hero goes to the dressing room, where he is given strangers
pants: the hole is in the wrong place. Satisfied with them, he
goes to the locker room "for a coat" - however, it is not possible to give it to the hero
want, because only one rope remained from the number on the leg, “and the pieces of paper
No. The paper is washed away." Nevertheless, he manages to persuade the attendant to give
coat “according to signs”: “One, I say, the pocket is torn, there is no other.
As for the buttons, I say that there is an upper one, but no lower ones.
foreseen." To top it off, the hero discovers that he forgot about
bath soap, and the campaign, thus, ends in complete failure.
nervous people
The laughter of Mikhail Zoshchenko is both cheerful and sad. Behind the "everyday" absurd and funny situations of his stories, the writer's sad and sometimes tragic thoughts about life, about people, about time are hidden.
In the 1924 story "Nervous People", the writer touches on one of the main problems of his era - the so-called "housing problem". The hero-narrator tells the readers about a seemingly insignificant incident - a fight in a communal apartment: “Recently, a fight broke out in our apartment. And not just a fight, but a whole fight. Zoshchenko gives a specific designation of the place of action of his story and its participants - Moscow, 20s, residents of an apartment on the corner of Glazovaya and Borovaya. Thus, the writer seeks to enhance the effect of the reader's presence, to make him a witness to the events described.
Already at the beginning of the story, a general picture of what happened is given: a fight broke out, in which the invalid Gavrilov suffered the most. A naive narrator sees the cause of the fight in the increased nervousness of the people: “... the people are already very nervous. Gets upset over small trifles. He is hot.” And this, according to the hero-narrator, is not surprising: “It is, of course. After a civil war, they say, the nerves of the people are always shattered.
What caused the fight? The reason is the most insignificant and ridiculous. One tenant, Marya Vasilievna Shchiptsova, without permission took a hedgehog from another tenant, Darya Petrovna Kobylina, to clean the stove. Darya Petrovna was indignant. So, word for word, two women quarreled. The narrator delicately writes: "They began to talk among themselves." And then he continues: “They made a noise, a roar, a crackle.” With the help of gradation, the author reveals to us the true state of things: we understand that two neighbors began to quarrel, swear and, probably, fight. In addition, thanks to this gradation, the effect of a funny, comic is created.
Darya Petrovna's husband, Ivan Stepanych Kobylin, appeared at the noise and swearing. This image is a typical image of the Nepman, "the bourgeoisie, uncut." The narrator describes him this way: "He is such a healthy man, pot-bellied even, but, in turn, nervous." Kobylin, “like an elephant”, works in a cooperative, sells sausage. For his own, money or things, he, as they say, hangs himself. This hero intervenes in the quarrel with his weighty word: "... for no reason, that is, I will not allow outside alien personnel to use these hedgehogs." For Kobylin, other people, even neighbors, are “strange personnel” who should not touch him in any way.
All the tenants of the communal apartment came out to the scandal - all twelve people. Gathered in a cramped kitchenette, they began to resolve the controversial issue. The appearance of the disabled Gavrilych and his words “What kind of noise is this, but there is no fight?” became the impetus for the climax of the story - a fight.
In the cramped and narrow kitchenette, all the tenants began to wave their hands, taking out their dissatisfaction with both the neighbors and the terrible living conditions. As a result, the most innocent and defenseless, the legless invalid Gavrilych, suffered. Someone in the heat of a fight "hit the disabled person on the kumpol." Only the arriving police were able to calm the raging residents. When they come to their senses, they cannot understand what led them to such a serious fight. This is scary, because the victim of their madness, the invalid Gavrilych, “lies, you know, on the floor, boring. And blood drips from the head.
At the end of the story, we learn that a court was held, the verdict of which was to “prescribe Izhitsu”, that is, to reprimand the tenants of the apartment. The story ends with these words: "And the people's judge, too, such a nervous man got caught - he prescribed Izhitsu."
It seems to me that this verdict confirms the typicality of such situations for Moscow in the 20s of the 20th century. According to Zoshchenko, communal apartments are an absolute evil. Of course, it all depends on individual people. After all, there were also communal apartments in which the neighbors lived as one family and did not want to leave for anything. Of course, the author satirically reveals the image of Kobylin, an uneducated and arrogant grabber. But, at the same time, there is some truth in the words of this hero. Why is he, like the other twelve residents of a small communal apartment, not entitled to his personal space, to his apartment? Excited by tightness, by the fact that they are constantly forced to face their, not always pleasant, neighbors, "nervous people" are constantly in conflict. Every little thing causes them a storm of emotions, as a result of which the most terrible things can happen.
The fact that the “housing problem” is not at all a trifle, the solution of which can wait, is indicated by the tragic ending of the story “Nervous People”. As a result of a fight, an innocent person, an invalid Gavrilych, dies.
This story by Zoshchenko introduces us to the world of Moscow in the 1920s. The image of the hero-narrator, an ordinary Muscovite, naively tells about his life, about what he knows, and what he witnessed, helps to create the flavor of that time. The language of the narrator and the heroes of the work is a mixture of vernacular, vulgarisms and clericalisms, borrowed words. This combination paints a true portrait of Zoshchenko's contemporary and, at the same time, creates a comic effect, causing the reader to smile sadly.
I believe that, exposing the shortcomings of his time, Zoshchenko sought to improve the lives of his contemporaries. Talking about seemingly trifles, the writer showed that life, the life of individual people, consists of trifles. The writer Mikhail Zoshchenko considered it his highest goal to improve this life.
Mikhail Zoshchenko - the creator of countless stories, plays, screenplays, unimaginably adored by readers. However, the true popularity was given to him by small humorous stories published in a wide variety of magazines and newspapers - in Literary Week, Izvestia, Ogonyok, Krokodile and some others.
Zoshchenko's humorous stories were included in various of his books. In new combinations, each time they made me look at myself in a new way: sometimes they appeared as a cycle of stories about darkness and ignorance, and sometimes as stories about petty acquirers. Often they were talking about those who were left out of history. But always they were perceived as stories sharply satirical.
Russian satirical writers in the 20s were distinguished by their special courage and frankness in their statements. All of them were the heirs of Russian realism of the 19th century. The name of Mikhail Zoshchenko is on a par with such names in Russian literature as A. Tolstoy, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, M. Bulgakov, A. Platonov.
The popularity of M. Zoshchenko in the 20s could be envied by any venerable writer in Russia. But his fate was severe in the future: Zhdanov's criticism, and then - a long oblivion, after which the "discovery" of this remarkable writer for the Russian reader again followed. Zoshchenko began to be mentioned as an author writing for the entertainment of the public. We now know well that Zoshchenko was a talented and serious writer of his time. It seems to me that for every reader Zoshchenko reveals his own special facet. It is known that many were perplexed when "The Adventures of a Monkey" incurred the wrath of officials from the Soviet culture. But the Bolsheviks, in my opinion, had already developed a flair for their antipodes. A. A. Zhdanov, criticizing and destroying Zoshchenko, who ridiculed the stupidity and stupidity of Soviet life, against his own will guessed in him a great artist, representing a danger to the existing system. Zoshchenko did not directly, not directly ridicule the cult of Bolshevik ideas, but protested with a sad smile against any violence against a person. It is also known that in his prefaces to editions of "Sentimental Tales", with the proposed misunderstanding and perversion of his work, he wrote: "Against the general background of enormous scale and ideas, these stories are about small, weak people and townsfolk, this book is really , presumably, will sound for some critics some kind of shrill flute, some kind of sentimental insulting offal. It seems to me that Zoshchenko, speaking in this way, defended himself against future attacks on his work.
One of the most significant, in my opinion, stories of this book is "What the nightingale sang about." The author himself said about this story that it is "... perhaps the least sentimental of sentimental stories." Or else: "And what in this composition of cheerfulness, perhaps, will seem to someone not enough, then this is not true. There is cheerfulness here. Not over the edge, of course, but there is." I believe that such cheerfulness, which the satirist writer offered to the clergy, they could not perceive without irritation. The story "What the nightingale sang about" begins with the words: "But" they will laugh at us in three hundred years! Strange, they will say, little people lived. Some, they will say, they had money, passports. Some acts of civil status and square meters of living space..."
It is clear that the writer with such thoughts dreamed of a world more worthy of man. His moral ideals were directed to the future. It seems to me that Zoshchenko was acutely aware of the hardened nature of human relations, the vulgarity of the life around him. This can be seen from the way he reveals the theme of the human personality in a short story about "true love and genuine awe of feelings", about "absolutely extraordinary love." Tormented by thoughts of a future better life, the writer often doubts and asks himself: "Will it be beautiful?" And then he draws the simplest, most common version of such a future: “Maybe everything will be free, for free. Next, the writer proceeds to create the image of the hero. His hero is the simplest person, and his name is ordinary - Vasily Bylinkin. The reader expects that the author will now begin to ridicule his hero, but no, the author seriously tells about Bylinkin's love for Liza Rundukova. All actions that accelerate the gap between lovers, despite their ridiculousness (the culprit is a chest of drawers not given by the bride's mother), I think, nevertheless, is a serious family drama. Among Russian satirical writers, in general, drama and comedy exist side by side. Zoshchenko, as it were, tells us that while people like Vasily Bylinkin, to the question: "What is the nightingale singing about?" - they will answer: "He wants to eat, that's why he sings", - we will not see a worthy future. Zoshchenko does not idealize our past either. To be convinced of this, it is enough to read the Blue Book. The writer knows how much vulgar and cruel humanity is behind him, so that he can immediately free himself from this heritage. But I believe that the combined efforts of satirical writers of the 1920s and 1930s, in particular those whom I named at the beginning of my work, significantly brought our society closer to a more dignified life.
The same thing happened with the heroes of Zoshchenko's stories: to the modern reader, they may seem unreal, completely invented. However, Zoshchenko, with his keen sense of justice and hatred for the militant philistinism, never departed from the real vision of the world. Who is the satirical hero Zoshchenko? What is its place in modern society? Who is the object of mockery, contemptuous laughter?
So, using the example of some of his narratives, one can establish the themes of the writer's satire. In "Hard Times" the main character is a dense, uneducated person, with a frantic, primordial judgment about freedom and rights. When he is forbidden to bring a horse into the store, which by all means needs to try on the collar, he complains: “Well, it’s a little time. I even personally laughed sincerely ... Well, it’s a little time.
