Stories

11 hrs. 20 min.

Humor & Satire

Language Russian

Author Panteleymon Romanov

Narrator Evgeny Ternovsky

Description

Panteleimon Sergeyevich Romanov (July 12 (24), 1884 — April 8, 1938) was a Russian prose writer.

He wrote a large number of short stories—long kept at the level of lightly ironic nature sketches of Soviet everyday life. However, in the second half of the 1920s he published a series of socially and politically sharp stories: “Without Bird Cherry” (1926), “Trial of a Pioneer,” “The Right to Life, or the Problem of Party-Freedom” (1927). The story “Without Bird Cherry,” depicting the unromantic “love life” of Komsomol members and the vulgar ideas of “new people” about morality, made the author famous across all Russia; its title became a saying and was translated into several languages. In the same vein, Panteleimon Romanov’s satirical novels “A New Tablet” (1928), “Comrade Kislyakov” (1930), and “Property” (1933) portrayed the philistinism of Soviet everyday life, the opportunism of intellectuals and writers. Throughout this period, Romanov was subject to systematic persecution by Soviet criticism, which saw his writings as nothing but “slander” and “defamation”; nevertheless, he fundamentally did not want to give up. Romanov justified his position as a satirist in a speech at the First Congress of Soviet Writers (1934).

Contents

The Promised Land
Holy Alms
House No. 3
Bad Goods
Unmanageable People
Smoke
Patient People
A Gift from God
Light Service
Beast
A Timid Fellow
A Strong People
State Property
Traffic Jams
Blue Dress
A Bewitched Village
Technical Words
Instructions
A Natural Disaster
Believers
Wretched
A Swedish Machine
Thirteen Logs
Economy
Not the Right Person
Kulaks
Little Black Cakes
Little Lights
By the Ferry
An Actress
Stars
Apple Blossom
A Woman in Black
On the Volga
An Actress
Afanasyev
I Want to Accept the Path of My Land Entirely