Back in the U.S.S.R.

THE Serbian writer Danilo Kis once described the unique tone of Central European literature in the mid- and later 20th century as “ironic lyricism,” but the writings of Mikhail Zoshchenko suggest that this literary alloy was being produced even earlier and farther east. In 1930, Maxim Gorky wrote to Zoshchenko, “You have all the qualities of a satirist, a very acute sense of irony accompanied by lyricism in an extremely original way. I don’t know of such a combination anywhere else in literature.”

In the same year, however, the Russian Assn. of Proletarian Writers declared the “one and only task of Soviet literature” to be “the depiction of the Five-Year Plan and the class war.” Writers with nobler ambitions faced censorship and worse. The association had already condemned many outspoken or innovative writers, including Mikhail Bulgakov, the heir of Nikolai Gogol, as well as the allegorical writer Andrei Platonov and the now revered dystopian novelist Yevgeny Zamyatin. This was the year in which the satirical poet Vladimir Mayakovsky either shot himself to death or was assassinated.

It was not a safe climate in which to be a satirist, and therefore it was the climate in which satire has always flourished. Zoshchenko was both needed and doomed. By the end of 1930, censors had shut down the many satirical periodicals that once thrived in Leningrad, a city that Moscow bureaucrats considered offensively independent and intellectual. All but 10 of the 65 stories in this collection were written during the preceding decade.

The tales in “The Galosh and Other Stories,” selected and translated by Jeremy Hicks, are so brief that they occupy only 169 pages in a volume of 208. But this book provides the broadest selection of Zoshchenko yet published in English, with almost half the stories translated for the first time. It omits Zoshchenko’s longer work, such as “Sentimental Tales” and “Youth Restored,” as well as his children’s books. Hicks focuses on the brief and the satirical, which results in a unified tone and a very amusing book. It is difficult to imagine a more accessible volume of Russian fiction. Written from the trenches of everyday life under a totalitarian regime, these stories read like war dispatches, yet with the skewed humor and manic invention of, say, Irish writer Flann O’Brien.

Why did the Soviet regime tolerate Zoshchenko? The first story here dates from 1923, two years after Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy, which acknowledged the nation’s postwar financial chaos and put off abolishing bourgeois expertise and private agriculture until after commerce could bolster the Soviet infrastructure. For a few brief years, satirical literature flourished.

The echo of another Russian classic in the title “The Galosh” was intentional. Zoshchenko wrote several stories about the soul-stealing weight of bureaucratic corruption, one theme of Gogol’s story “The Overcoat.” Zoshchenko often alludes both to his illustrious predecessors and to his struggling colleagues. He remembers Leo Tolstoy’s story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” in his own “How Much Does a Man Need?” Zoshchenko is no Tolstoy, but he’s a lot funnier.

Consider the familiar-sounding gobbledygook manufactured by this bureaucrat: “As I always say: children are the joy of our lives, and a happy childhood is a problem which, as they say, is very, very much of no small importance, which we’ve now resolved.” Zoshchenko captures the pomposity endemic in bureaucracies. A porter in a hospital is called a Healthcare Operative; the hospital bath is the Cleaning Point. Even over the breakfast table, a man calls his wife “Comrade.”

Zoshchenko’s destitute narrators scrounge kopecks to use as bribe money, while piously reciting the party line. At what amounts to a garage sale at the Winter Palace, a man buys boots that supposedly belonged to the czar, observing, “They had heels, the toes were there.... Maybe the Tsar had worn them for three days in all. The soles hadn’t come off yet.” A man renting a room is happy that it provides the basics: “Two windows. A floor, of course. A ceiling. It was all there.” Another renter “didn’t have to do any particularly major building work. Put in front doors and partitions. Oh yes, and finish off building the staircase up to his floor.” Lines at a pawn shop are so long that one man brings along coats for two seasons, resolving to pawn whichever one he doesn’t need by the time he gets to the front of the line. People steal food, clothing, firewood.

Hicks provides a helpful introduction, publication history and a brief glossary. Like other editors and translators, he had to make arbitrary decisions. Often, he violated the editorial commandment to honor thine author’s final revision, opting instead to represent Zoshchenko’s original magazine-published version rather than the censored book version published later. Colloquial, topical writers add new challenges to the already herculean, even Sisyphean, task of approximating a work of art beyond its original language. It is not a quest for the faint of heart, this conversion into 21st century English of the medley of euphemism, neologism and misunderstanding that was working-class Soviet speech.

“I have attempted,” declares Hicks, “to keep the clumsiness, the sharply discordant mixture of registers, the tautologies and malapropisms of the original, even when they are effectively puns.” This valiant decision results in a parade of our own contemporary slang -- “pretty upbeat,” “the thing is,” “grin and bear it” -- even though Hicks complains that previous translators have relied upon trendy vernacular. Despite Hicks’ resolution to employ a broader English than that spoken in its native isles, plenty of British slang remains, including “bloke” and even “bollocks” -- disconcerting words in the mouth of a Russian peasant. For a reader unable to compare the original text, moreover, there is no way to know whether the run-on sentences (such as “He felt the sack, it was there”) reflect Zoshchenko’s style or a tic of the translator. But these speed bumps detract little from Hicks’ accomplishment.

Zoshchenko had respectable Communist credentials. He joined the Red Army in 1918, the year after the revolution. Having been gassed earlier, in the Great War, he suffered heart problems for the rest of his life and might have become an honored veteran. He was hugely popular, read by both truck drivers and intellectuals. During World War II, he received as many as 6,000 letters per year, many from soldiers at the front. But he committed the unforgivable crime: He criticized the Soviet authorities.

By 1949, with Zamyatin, Bulgakov and Mayakovsky all dead, Zoshchenko was one of the last important critical voices in Soviet Russia. Finally, Stalin forbade publication of Zoshchenko’s works, along with those of the poet Anna Akhmatova. After the ban, Zoshchenko worked only as a cobbler, his first profession, until Stalin’s death in 1953. Three years later, he was published again, thanks to the relatively loosened strictures under Nikita Khrushchev. But it was too late. Zoshchenko died in 1958, and for decades his reputation languished. Now that Soviet Russia is in the trash bin of history alongside Nazi Germany, however, we must applaud a writer who recorded, with unfailing style and wit, an era’s troubles and a people’s voice.