A Tale of Reason

"A Tale of Reason" is the second half of the story "Before Sunrise," cut out by Soviet censorship and published many years later, after the writer’s death, as a separate work. Zoshchenko wrote "Before Sunrise" in the mid-1940s, and it is one of his brightest works in the context of the "atypical Zoshchenko."
In this nostalgic story about his life, written in a dramatic key, the author tries to find the roots of his gloomy worldview in childhood: he recalls how he was afraid of thunderstorms and water, how alien and frightening the world seemed to him, how motifs of horror and fear obsessively repeated themselves in his dreams… Through analysis and the search for the causes of his illnesses, Zoshchenko comes to the conclusion that the human mind has boundless possibilities…
The radio recording of "A Tale of Reason" by People’s Artist of Russia Sergey Yuryevich Yursky essentially became a continuation of his authorial project "Zoshchenko on the Radio." The first one-man performance based on the writer’s "Blue Book" was recorded for radio in 2005.
The program was prepared by the Advaita production center with financial support from the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communications.