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Mikhail Zoshchenko's Sentimental Tales are satirical portraits of small-town characters on the fringes of Soviet society in the first decade of Bolshevik rule. The tales are narrated by one Kolenkorov, who is anything but a model Soviet author: not only is he still attached to the era of the old regime, he is also, quite simply, not a very good writer. Shaped by Zoshchenko's masterful hands-he takes credit for editing the tales in a series of comic prefaces-Kolenkorov's prose is beautifully mangled, full of stylistic infelicities, overloaded flights of metaphor, tortured cliché, and misused bureaucratese, in the tradition of Gogol.Yet beneath Kolenkorov's intrusive narration and sublime blathering, the stories are genuinely moving. They tell tales of unrequited love and amorous misadventures among down-on-their-luck musicians, provincial damsels, aspiring poets, and liberal aristocrats hopelessly out of place in the new Russia, against a backdrop of overcrowded apartments, scheming, and daydreaming. Zoshchenko's deadpan style and sly ventriloquy mask a biting critique of Soviet life-and perhaps life in general. An original perspective on Soviet society in the 1920s and simply uproariously funny, Sentimental Tales at last shows Anglophone readers why Zoshchenko is considered among the greatest humorists of the Soviet era.
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The largest, most comprehensive anthology of its kind, this volume brings together significant, representative stories from every decade of the twentieth century. It includes the prose of officially recognized writers and dissidents, both well-known and neglected or forgotten, plus new authors from the end of the century. The selections reflect the various literary trends and approaches to depicting reality in this era: traditional realism, modernism, socialist realism, and post-modernism. Taken as a whole, the stories capture every major aspect of Russian life, history and culture in the twentieth century. The rich array of themes and styles will be of tremendous interest to students and readers who want to learn about Russia through the engaging genre of the short story.
Short stories, Russian --- Russian fiction --- Russian fiction. --- Short stories, Russian. --- 1900-1999. --- A Tolstoy. --- Babel. --- Bulgakov. --- Bunin. --- Dovlatov. --- Eastern Europe. --- Kharms. --- Nabokov. --- Platonov. --- Russia. --- Solzhenitsyn. --- Sorokin. --- Zamyatin. --- course reader. --- culture. --- literary trends. --- literature. --- modernisms. --- political dissidents. --- postmodernism. --- short stories. --- socialist realism. --- style. --- translated fiction. --- writing.
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