Mikhail Zoshchenko
BEFORE SUNRISEt
«If I'd been a friend of luck, I vow
I certainly wouldn't be doing this now."
House of the Arts
This house is on the corner of the Moika Canal and
the Nevsky Prospect.
1. In 1946, Zoshchenko, together with Anna Akhmatova and Boris Paster–
nak, were denounced for infringing the canons of socialist realism laid
down by A. A. Zhdanov at the first Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934.
They were accused of writing works devoid of political and ideological
content, and of demoralizing Soviet youth by their pessimism. The
journals in which they had published their works during the war
(,(vn;da
and
Leningrad)
were the subject of a special decree of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party. The head of the Soviet Union of
Writers at that time, N. Tikhonov, together with the editors of these
journals, lost their jobs. One of the works mentioned in the decree was
Zoshchenko's "Before Sunrise." It had been published in two installments
in
October,
in 1943; the rest never appeared.
"Before Sunrise" is an exercise in self-analysis-unique in Russian
literature--that Zoshchenko attempted by writing down the most vivid
and compelling episodes in his life until 1926. Explicitly under the
influence of Freud, the humorist hoped in this way to find some clue
to his own relentless unhappiness. He regarded the episodes he describes
as "snapshots," which explains their partial incoherence.
In this first installment, excerpted here, Zoshchenko describes his check–
ered career in the immediate post-revolutionary years. Besides a brief
spell as a detective, mentioned here, he was successively: a carpenter,
a telephone operator, a shoemaker's assistant, a militiaman, a gambler,
and an actor.
Zoshchenko died in 1958, apparently unforgiven, unrepentant and un–
honored.
