Stories

Among Arkady Averchenko’s works, there are talented, sharp socially oriented pieces where evil is mocked—the fears of an ordinary person, bribery among officials, the epidemic of spy mania, literary ineptitude and its cheap clichés. The target of his satire is also everything ugly, anti-aesthetic, “sick” in life and in art. Averchenko’s story-jokes remain relevant even in our time, which is explained by his appeal to the “eternal” theme of human relationships, the genre modifications of the comic, and the boundless creative imagination of the Russian “king of laughter.”