Times) In his prime, satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko was more widely read in the Soviet Union than either Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn. His stories give expression to the experience of the ordinary Soviet citizen struggling to survive in the 1920s and '30s, beset by an acute housing shortage, ubiquitous theft and corruption, and the impenetrable new language of the Soviet state. Written in the semi-educated talk of the man or woman on the street, these stories enshrine one of the greatest achievements of the people of the Soviet Union-their gallows humor. In The Galosh, Zoshchenko, the self-described "temporary substitute for the proletarian writer," combines wicked satire with an earthy empathy and a brilliance that places him squarely in the classic Russian comic tradition. Translated from the Russian by Jeremy Hicks.

Hide more