RRP: £10.95
BINDING: Paperback
PUBLISHED: 2000
ISBN: 9780946162659
PAGES: 224
Mikhail Zoshchenko
The Galosh and other stories
Translated from the Russian by Jeremy Hicks
The short stories of Mikhail Zoshchenko, avidly read in Russia from his lifetime to the present day, give expression to the bewildered experience of the ordinary Soviet citizen struggling to survive in the 1920s and ’30s, beset by acute shortages, ubiquitous theft and corruption, and an impenetrable new ideological language. Written in the semi-educated language of the man and woman in the street, they enshrine one of the greatest achievements of the people of the Soviet Union – their gallows humour. Housing-block tenants who reject electricity because it illuminates their squalor too harshly, a young couple who live in a bathroom, a railway-line manager making a speech against bribery who lets slip his secret love of the backhander – Zoshchenko has much sympathy for his close-to-life characters. In his narrator figures self-interested materialism coexists with a poignant faith in the revolutionary project.
Jeremy Hicks’s translations of sixty-five of Zoshchenko’s short stories include many new in English.
‘Hicks has breathed new life into Zoshchenko, providing, in many places, some of the best translations of his stories to date.’ – Gregory Carleton, Slavonica
‘Jeremy Hicks, the translator and editor of this unique, and so far the most comprehensive, collection of Zoshchenko’s short stories, describes at some length Zoshchenko’s idiosyncratic and discordant mixture of propaganda cliché, newspaper-speak, corrupted loan-words, confused party slogans, sentimental endearments, obscenities, garbled Marxist doctrines and snatches of colloquial speech spiced with malapropisms and tautology … All this turns the translator’s task into a high-wire act that Hicks performs with the utmost linguistic inventiveness.’ – Zinovy Zinik, Times Literary Supplement
MIKHAIL ZOSHCHENKO (1894–1958) served as an officer in a grenadier regiment during the First World War and then briefly in the Red Army. He made his name from 1923 onwards with short stories published in the satirical press, which when published in book form sold tens of millions of copies. Zhdanov’s notorious Party Resolution of 1946 condemned his children’s story The Adventures of a Monkey as an attack on the Soviet way of life and he was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union, which meant he could no longer publish, and for a time he had to earn a living repairing shoes. He was never fully rehabilitated in his lifetime, but since the 1960s has been increasingly published and discussed in Russia.