Before Sunrise + Lecture by Dmitry Bykov

We offer you an autobiographical novella by Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko—a work that became fatal for the writer: after writing it, he became the target of those around him for many years, including writers, critics, and even the top officials of the state.

“Now I think I’ll begin a new book, which will be the last in my trilogy, started with ‘The Returned Youth’ and continued with ‘The Blue Book.’ This book will have little resemblance to ordinary fiction. It will be more of a treatise—a philosophical and journalistic one—than belles-lettres.”

From the resolution of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) “On the journals ‘Zvezda’ and ‘Leningrad’” dated August 14, 1946: “...Zoshchenko’s face is well known, and his unworthy behavior during the war is also well known; when he, without helping the Soviet people in their struggle against the German invaders, wrote such a disgusting thing as ‘Before Sunrise,’ whose assessment—like the assessment of all of Zoshchenko’s ‘literary’ ‘work’—was given in the pages of the journal ‘The Bolshevik’.”

Read and narrated by the writer and literary scholar Dmitry Bykov.