They say he smiled in his coffin, but during his lifetime he was rarely seen smiling. And there were reasons for that.
At the beginning of World War I, he entered the Pavlovsk Military School as a cadet, where he completed four-month accelerated courses under wartime conditions. He went to the front as a second lieutenant.
“During that war, non-commissioned officers lived on average no more than twelve days,” writes Zoshchenko in his last story “Before Sunrise.” In July 1916, in the Smorgon region, he was poisoned with gases, after being treated in hospital he was recognized as disabled of the first category, but returned to the front, having received five military orders and a heart defect.
And after the October Revolution, war hero, staff captain Mikhail Zoshchenko, who refused to emigrate to France, worked as an instructor in rabbit breeding.
But not everything was bad. In the 1920s and 1930s, Zoshchenko became one of the most famous and, perhaps, richest writers. He, like the entire literary group “Serapion Brothers” (in addition to Zoshchenko, it included Lunts, Posner, Kaverin, Vsevolod Ivanov, Slonimsky), was patronized by Gorky, whom some of the group members even visited in Sorrento, despite the “Iron Curtain” that already existed then between the USSR and Europe. His books were published in large editions. He traveled with pop performances throughout the country.
Korney Chukovsky recalled that Zoshchenko was mobbed on the streets by fans, and to get rid of them, he said that he only looked like Zoshchenko, in fact, his last name was Bondarevich.
The success of Zoshchenko’s stories was greatly facilitated by the fact that as an author he did not rise above his characters – the new Soviet bourgeoisie and the new Soviet bourgeoisie, many of whom appeared during the NEP. The author spoke about them in their language, reasoned with their thoughts and seemed to exist in his own, very mundane and even basic system of values.
“The raccoon coat of merchant Eremey Babkin was stolen. Merchant Eremey Babkin howled.” Or: “Today’s guest has gone mad. We have to watch him all the time.” Or: “I want to try something heroic today.” Or: “A person definitely needs to rest. After all, a person is not a chicken.” Or: “How good, comrades, it’s summer! The sun is beating down and it’s hot, and you walk like a demon without felt boots, only in trousers, and you breathe.”
The author, who was born into a poor but still noble family, was so close to the psychology of the Soviet bourgeoisie that today many of Zoshchenko’s stories are incomprehensible to a modern young person who did not experience the shortage of basic goods in the Soviet era, not to mention the famine. How many of them understand, for example, that the “aristocrat” from the story of the same name, greedily devouring free cakes in the theater, is simply hungry?
But Zoshchenko did not stoop to the level of these people. He truly perceived them as his own, without boasting about their origins or their military exploits.
The most offensive thing for him was the resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad” in 1946, which radically changed their fate. Today you even read it with some strange linguistic interest. It seems like a serious official document, but the style is not even one of criticism, but of vulgar abuse. “Vulgar”, “scum”, “disgusting thing” (we are talking about the story “Before Dawn”).
Or blatant rudeness and lies: “The editors of Zvezda know very well Zoshchenko’s face and his unworthy behavior during the war, when Zoshchenko did nothing to help the Soviet people in their fight against the German invaders.”
Photo by: RIA Novosti
Immediately after the outbreak of war, Zoshchenko submitted an application for being sent to the front, but was dismissed due to incapacity. He worked in the fire defense of Leningrad and wrote anti-fascist feuilletons.
At the same time, the story “Before Sunrise”, written by him during the evacuation and partially published in the magazine “October”, was really strange for that time. It was an attempt to overcome the inner fears that tormented him. Psychoanalysis, as we understand it today, which the writer, in the absence of professional psychoanalysts, decided to do on his own.
The title of the story echoed the title of one of the parts of Friedrich Nietzsche’s book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” and Nietzsche had already been declared “the ideologist of fascism.” But before his announcement, it was difficult to name a Soviet writer who was not passionately interested in him, not excluding the “founder of socialist realism” Maxim Gorky.
Why was this resolution necessary? And why did Zoshchenko and Akhmatova fall under it? There was an intention to once again “besiege” the overly free-wheeling intellectual Leningrad. Writers of the old guard were chosen for public flogging. It was necessary to erase from the writers’ brains the last fantasies about some staff captains and students of Tsarskoye Selo gymnasiums, brought up somehow differently, who had their own dignity.
Akhmatova, whose son was in prison, publicly acknowledged the decision. Zoshchenko rebelled and did not admit it, and was subsequently excommunicated from Soviet literature for a long time, despite his previous merits and Gorky’s high regard for his work.
At a special meeting of writers in Leningrad, where the Moscow authorities arrived, he said:
“I can say: my literary life and my destiny in this situation are over. I have no way out. A satirist must be a morally pure person, and I am humiliated like the last son of a bitch… I have nothing in the future. Nothing. I am not going to ask for anything. “I do not need your condescension… nor your abuse and shouting.”
He spent the last years of his life at a dacha in Sestroretsk, where he died in 1958 of acute heart failure. He was buried in the Sestroretsk city cemetery.
Monument to the writer Mikhail Zoshchenko near the Sestroretsk library. Photo: Vitold Muratov / wikipedia.org
