Zoshchenko

The name of Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko (1894–1958), one of the few original and distinctive writers of the Soviet era—the creator of the famous Zoshchenko stories, as well as Sentimental Tales, Restored Youth, Before Sunrise, and other vivid satirical works—is an integral part of 20th-century Russian literature.
For a long time, Mikhail Zoshchenko was regarded as a popular, widely accessible humorist, moreover, a mere “funny man.” But those who grasped Soviet reality in its full essence saw in him a profound satirist and compared him to Gogol. This is evidenced by Zoshchenko’s posthumous literary resurrection in the post-Soviet era.
Bernhard Ruben’s book, drawing on extensive documentary material, traces in detail the writer’s complex creative and human fate, whose works and very life reflected the era in which he lived—when Russia experienced a rupture of times, a fracture of history.