Beginning in the 1930s, Zoshchenko was subjected to increasingly severe criticism from Soviet officials. He tried to conform to the requirements of Socialist Realism—notably in Istoriya odnoy zhizhni (1935; “The Story of One Life”), dealing with the construction, by forced labour, of the White Sea–Baltic Waterway—but with little success. In 1943 the magazine Oktyabr began to serialize his psychological-introspective series of episodes, anecdotes, and reminiscences entitled Pered voskhodom solntsa (“Before Sunrise”) but suspended publication after the second installment. It was only in 1972 that the series was published in full, as Povest o razume (“A Tale About Reason”).
In 1946 Zoshchenko published in the literary magazine Zvezda a short story, “Priklyucheniya obezyany” (“The Adventures of a Monkey”), which was condemned by Communist critics as malicious and insulting to the Soviet people. He was expelled (with the poet Anna Akhmatova) from the Union of Soviet Writers, which meant the virtual end of his literary career. In 1954, meeting with English students in Russia, Zoshchenko stated that he did not consider himself guilty, after which he was subjected to further persecution. These pressures led to a psychological crisis; as a result, Zoshchenko spent his final years in ill health.
After his death, the Soviet press tended to ignore him, but some of his works were reissued, and their prompt sale indicated his continuing popularity.
Additional Reading
Linda Hart Scatton, Mikhail Zoshchenko: Evolution of a Writer (1993); Gregory Carleton, The Politics of Reception: Critical Constructions of Mikhail Zoshchenko (1998); Jeremy Hicks, Mikhail Zoshchenko and the Poetics of Skaz (2000).
skaz
▪ Russian literature
in Russian literature, a written narrative that imitates a spontaneous oral account in its use of dialect, slang, and the peculiar idiom of that persona. Among the well-known writers who have used this device are Nikolay Leskov (Leskov, Nikolay Semyonovich), Aleksey Remizov (Remizov, Aleksey Mikhaylovich), Mikhail Zoshchenko (Zoshchenko, Mikhail Mikhaylovich), and Yevgeny Zamyatin (Zamyatin, Yevgeny Ivanovich).
The word is of Russian origin and literally means “tale”; it is derived from skazat,
Leskov, Nikolay Semyonovich
▪ Russian writer
pseudonym Stebnitsky
born Feb. 16 [Feb. 4, Old Style], 1831, Gorokhovo, Russia
died March 5 [Feb. 21], 1895, St. Petersburg
novelist and short-story writer who has been described as the greatest of Russian storytellers.
As a child Leskov was taken to different monasteries by his grandmother, and he used those early memories of Russian monastic life with good effect in his most famous novel, Soboryane (1872; Cathedral Folk, 1924). A junior clerk of a criminal court in Orel and Kiev, he later joined an English firm and traveled all over Russia; it was during these travels that he obtained the material for most of his novels and short stories. Leskov began his writing career as a journalist. In 1865 he published his best known story, Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uezda (Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, 1961), the passionate heroine of which lives and dies by violence. His most popular tale, however, remains Skaz o Tulskom kosom Levshe i o stalnoy Blokhe (1881; “The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea”), a masterpiece of Gogolesque comedy in which an illiterate smith from Tula outwits the skill of the most advanced British craftsman. Another story, the picaresque Ocharovanny strannik (1873; Enchanted Wanderer, 1961), was written after a visit to the monastic islands on Lake Ladoga in 1872. His early novels Nekuda (1864; “Nowhere to Go”) and Na nozhakh (1870–71; “At Daggers Drawn”) were violently attacked by the Russian radicals as revealing an attitude of uncompromising hostility toward the Russian revolutionary movement, an attitude Leskov later modified. In 1969 W.B. Edgerton translated into English, for the first time, 13 of Leskov's stories, with a new translation of “The Steel Flea.”
Remizov, Aleksey Mikhaylovich
▪ Russian writer
born July 6 [June 24, Old Style], 1877, Moscow
died Nov. 26, 1957, Paris
Symbolist writer whose works had a strong influence on Russian writers before and after the 1917 Revolution.
Born into a poor family of merchant ancestry, Remizov gained his early experiences in the streets of Moscow. He attended the University of Moscow but was expelled in 1897 for participation in student riots, put in prison, and exiled to the provinces. In 1905 he settled in St. Petersburg, where he immediately began to frequent literary circles, particularly the Symbolist group. His works had begun to appear in various modernist periodicals, but his fame and popularity did not come until the publication in 1910 of Neuyomny buben (“The Indefatigable Tambourine”). This story of provincial life is among his best works, and it embodies many of the characteristics often found in his writing, including elements of the weird, the grotesque, and the whimsical. That same year Remizov published the short novel Krestovye syostry (“Sisters of the Cross”), one of his most popular works. Although close to the Symbolists, Remizov did not fully believe in the principles of this movement. A vital element in his prose was his exploitation of the full potential of the Russian language, from the contemporary popular idiom to the language of ancient Russian chronicles and folk tales.
Preferring to keep a distance from politics, he worked for magazines that had a patriotic stance during World War I. In 1917, before the Bolsheviks came to power, he published Slovo o pogibeli russkoy zemli (“Threnody on the Destruction of the Russian Land”). In 1921 he emigrated, settling first in Berlin and then, in 1923, in Paris. The large number of books that Remizov wrote during his émigré years were not commercially successful, and some were not published until after his death. Yet they had a vital effect on many writers because of his elaborate use of language and his constant interest in the hidden sides of a character's personality. Remizov's books were rarely published in Russia during the Soviet era but were widely republished beginning in the late 1980s.
Additional Reading
Greta N. Slobin (ed.), Aleksej Remizov: Approaches to a Protean Writer (1987); Greta N. Slobin, Remizov's Fiction, 1900–21 (1991).
Shklovsky, Viktor Borisovich
▪ Soviet author
born Jan. 24 [Jan. 12, Old Style], 1893, St. Petersburg, Russia
died Dec. 8, 1984, Moscow
Russian literary critic and novelist. He was a major voice of Formalism (q.v.), a critical school that had great influence in Russian literature in the 1920s.
Educated at the University of St. Petersburg, Shklovsky helped found OPOYAZ, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language, in 1914. He was also connected with the Serapion Brothers, a collection of writers that began meeting in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in 1921. Both groups felt that literature's importance lay primarily not in its social content but rather in its independent creation of language. In O teori prozy (1925; “On the Theory of Prose”) and Metod pisatelskogo masterstva (1928; “The Technique of the Writer's Craft”), Shklovsky argued that literature is a collection of stylistic and formal devices that force the reader to view the world afresh by presenting old ideas or mundane experiences in new, unusual ways. His concept of ostranenie, or “making it strange,” was his chief contribution to Russian Formalist theory.