In the book “The Pleasures of Culture,” there are collected more than one hundred stories by the popular Soviet writer Mikhail Zoshchenko. His characters are ordinary people who often find themselves in funny or bitter situations because of their petty moral view of life. For example, in one story the main character is unhappy that his clothes don’t please the audience in a theater, and in another story, a quarrel over a kitchen scrub brush leads to a serious fight between residents of a communal apartment. These stories describe minor problems and misunderstandings that ordinary people encounter.