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OSMANIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
Call No. ' ' Accession No. Q . l
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Scenes from the Bathhouse
SCENES FROM THE BATHHOUSE
and Other Stories of Communist Russia
by Mikhail Zoshchenko
TRANSLATED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY SIDNEY MONAS STORIES SELECTED BY MARC SLONIM
Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press
COPYRIGHT © BY THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 1961
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NO. 61-13499
PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS AND SIMULTANEOUSLY
IN TORONTO, CANADA, BY AMBASSADOR BOOKS LIMITED
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
DESIGNED BY STUART ROSS
INTRODUCTION
Mikhail Zoshchenko was born in 1895. His father was an artist, a nobleman, and a bit of a philanderer. His mother was a woman who demanded much and received little. Distressed by her son's behavior, she accused him of being like his father—"a solitary" and "a frozen heart." It wasn't exactly a happy family, but intellectually cultivated and financially comfortable.
He grew up in St. Petersburg, that "unreal city" of fogs and floods, the capital of a decadent empire, and the source of a great literary mythology that expressed the alienation of man from nature and from his own humanity. As a writer Zoshchenko remained fairly immune to the power of this myth. His positivist bent was too strong. He wrote as a detached observer of the street and the everyday, of manners rather than morals, of the commonplace, rather than of the phantasmagoria of Gogol and Bely, the writers of the myth. As a personality, however, he was a true alienated product of the "artificial" city and, like many great comedians, a morose, melancholic, estranged man, driven to humor and "play" as his only means of handling a gross and cacophonous world.
He was a strange, frail, sensitive, detached, proud, and rather difficult child. He read a great deal, especially in the biologic sciences, which caught his interest at an early age. He undoubtedly read Gogol and Leskov. His independent spirit made school uncomfortable for him, and he did not do well there. He found it difficult to forgive a schoolmaster who commented "Rubbish!" on one of his early compositions.
World War I broke out while Zoshchenko was still enrolled as a student at the University of St. Petersburg, and he hastened to volunteer. He was several times wounded, several times decorated, and promoted rapidly to the rank of major. He suffered not only the hardships of war and the responsibilities of command, but the vagaries of his own temperament—by no means a heroic one.
In the summer of 1916 he was gassed, and his health went to
pieces. Then, assigned by the Kerensky government to administer a military post office in Archangel at the time of the Allied occupation of that port, he rejected an opportunity he had there— proffered by an attractive Frenchwoman—of emigrating to Paris. Soon after that, he volunteered for the Red Army and saw action again in Lithuania, but his health forced him to retire within six months.
Zoshchenko's early melancholy persisted and drove him to take on a series of bizarre jobs. He worked as an instructor in poultry husbandry on an experimental collective farm; he was a detective, a professional gambler, a telephone operator for the border guard, and (for him, perhaps the most bizarre job of all) a clerk-typist. On the whole, he preferred nonclerical, nonintel-lectual work; no job, however, held him for long. In 1921 he was back in his native Petrograd, discovering his real and permanent profession—that of a writer.
In the early twenties Zoshchenko was associated with a group of young writers who called themselves the Serapion Brethren after the hermit Serapion as he is portrayed in a tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann, a writer they admired. These young men were what Trotsky called "fellow travelers." They were willing to go along with the Bolsheviks but were eager to maintain a certain independence of outlook and to avoid party discipline. In response to the enthusiasm of party literati for using the arts as effective propaganda, Victor Shklovsky, a talented critic and a Serapion Brother, posed a question: "Can you drive nails with a samovar?" He answered: "Yes, you can. But that is not what it is for."
The Serapion Brethren did not favor "art for art's sake." Their preoccupation with style was of a very different kind from that of the symbolists. They abhorred the mystique of inspiration and the cult of art. They were not religious. Symbolism tasted stale to them. The Brethren preferred to think of themselves as craftsmen rather than geniuses. They tried for a fresh language based on popular usage, on the vocabulary and syntax of the street and countryside. What they had over reality was not so much a firm grip as a light touch.
These men were vivid and original experimenters, and Russian literature of the twenties owes much to them. Their independence of spirit was not so deep, however, as to involve them in tragic consequences when the relative freedom of the twenties came to an" end. They did not struggle too hard when independence had
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to be abandoned. Of the prose writers of the group, Zoshchenko alone continued to write in much the same vein in the thirties as he had in the twenties. He was still not a hero, but he had a certain Schweikian talent for personal survival and for survival as a writer.
Zoshchenko is a very funny writer: that much needs no arguing. He is funnier to Russians than he is to those who see his stories at a considerable distance from the situations they describe and from the language that is so peculiarly appropriate to them. Yet, he is as far from being a local folk-humorist as he is from being a conventional, "classical" satirist. If he is a satirist at all, it is in the more ancient, original sense of the term—a writer of satyr plays. His theme is not the corruption of morals, but brute energy and animal desire which burn through manners as through a cardboard grate.
The theme which runs through all of Zoshchenko's works is the fiery resistance nature offers to history. He himself is a detached observer, neither on one side nor the other. He has been burned by both.
Zoshchenko's technique is that of the skaz, the oral tale. The tale is supposed to have a moral, instructional point, to illustrate something; that is the excuse for telling and listening. But the point gets lost on the way: the storyteller is caught up in the story itself or simply succumbs to the delight of having an audience. It is himself he expresses, and not the moral. Either he loses it completely and arrives at a conclusion as unexpected for him as it is for his audience, or he tacks it on by force majeure, exposing either his own clay feet or the insubstantiality of all conclusions, or both. In Russian literature it was Leskov who first developed this technique, derived from popular storytelling. The narrator is himself a character, whom we come to understand through the words and expressions he uses and misuses, his repetitions, digressions, the things he chooses to talk about, and the things we know are there between the lines but which he is clearly incapable of expressing. The difference between the skaz and the ordinary "point-of-view" story or novel is, first of all, its oral quality—the sound of the spoken voice—and, secondly, the untutored, "primitive" nature of the narrator, his unself-conscious-ness. Among American writers, Ring Lardner uses this technique in a number of places—in his baseball stories, and most successfully in the story called "Haircut." However, Lardner was much
more of a moralist than either Leskov or Zoshchenko. He used the technique to condemn the narrator or to induce the reader to feel sorry for him. Leskov and Zos
hchenko do this to a far lesser degree. As in Lardner, the narrator inadvertently expresses his own poshlost —his vulgarity, his trashiness, the cheap fake of his pretensions—but this is less important than the sheer absurdity of tiie tricks nature plays with him. Leskov was capable of sustaining this kind of interest over considerable length. Zoshchenko, like most moderns, is shorter-winded, but the brevity of his stories is part of their effect.
They are composed with care, with attention to details of diction, inflection, and rhythm. This is by no means obvious, and, indeed, the effect would be lost if it were. The materials are so primitive that the reader would instantly resent any kind of obvious manipulation on Zoshchenko's part as grossly unfair. The effects of spontaneity and immediacy, of the candid photograph, the sketch made hastily on the spot exactly as observed, the tape recording, are all indispensable to Zoshchenko's art.
The situations that provide the material for his stories are the most common and ordinary details of everyday Soviet reality, familiar not only to the average Soviet citizen but even to the casual tourist: the housing shortage, the scarcity of consumers' goods and the inefficiency of consumers' services, bad roads, bureaucracy and red tape, the ferocious juxtapositions of backwardness and material progress. These things are not merely the background for the stories: they determine motives, they shape or obliterate intentions, they conceal, they expose, they frustrate, they assume a shape and a character of their own, and they are felt as a natural force almost as intractable and indifferent to human concern as the desert or the sea. They may be tricked or circumvented, but they cannot be made to care; moreover, they will inevitably leave their stamp on the trickers and circumventers. A person may resemble the desert; the desert is never like a man.
Personal problems and private griefs, fine feelings and an aesthetic sense, are reduced, against this desert, to the scale of absurdity. It isn't fidelity or infidelity in marriage that counts; it's the availability of an apartment. People will, of course, attempt to inflate their feelings in talk, but they are betrayed by the language they use. The desert is not only around them, it is in them.
Zoshchenko uses careless language carefully. His narrators are
not illiterate peasants, but they are usually not far removed from that condition. Their talk is anything but folksy. It is a weird mixture of peasant idiom, misunderstood highfalutin phrases, rhetorical flourishes, explanatory asides that are anything but explanatory, repetitions, omissions, propaganda jargon absurdly adapted to homey usage, instructional pseudoscientific words, foreign phrases, and proverbial cliches joined to the latest party slogans. For his diction and syntax, even more than for the situations in which they occur, Zoshchenko was charged with "caricature." In his autobiography, however, Zoshchenko insists that he merely records the language of the streets, arranging and selecting, it is true, but not exaggerating.
The struggle between nature and history, backwardness and revolution, produces the kind of anomalous situation that Zoshchenko delights in, and he swoops like a hawk on those peculiarities of the Russian language and its usage which reflect that struggle. His verbal "soup," the words he chooses for his palette, are often themselves the product of the kind of situation he is writing about. Take the story "Kocherga": here, the action centers entirely on the peculiarities of this everyday word.
Kochergd means "a poker," and nothing could be more ordinary. However, its associations are with dark little houses heated by wood stoves around which bearded faces nod. It is out of place in the office building of a modern bureaucracy. Because of the shortage of space, a new state institution is housed in an old building that has no central heating and is kept warm by means of six wood stoves located in different parts of the building. The old stoker tends these, mumbling into his beard as he carries his kochergd from one to the other. When an employee who accidentally bumps into him has her hand burned by the poker, the old peasant shows himself surprisingly on the side of history and suggests to the manager of the establishment a rationalization of his work. If there were a poker by each stove, the risk of singeing employees could be avoided. All the manager has to do is order five more pokers from the warehouse, but here the manager comes to grief.
Although it is a perfectly common word, kochergd, is of Tartar origin (another aspect of its dark association) and has grammatical peculiarities. In Russian, the number five takes the genitive plural of the noun—but what is the genitive plural of kochergd? Nobody knows. The manager is a bureaucrat; he cannot afford
to consult other institutions, such as the Academy of Sciences; it wouldn't do for his dignity and career. He exhausts all intellectual resources within his own establishment. In desperation he even calls on the stoker—he may be a peasant but he is a specialist in stoves—"been around them all his life." The stoker responds, using, naturally, the diminutive form so dear to peasant speech. For dignity, that won't do either: the manager doesn't want to be taken for a peasant. Finally, he attempts to resolve his dilemma by calling in a member of his legal staff to draft an order which will obtain the "five pokers" without having to refer to them directly. The resulting document is a masterpiece, but it comes to nothing. There is a shortage; there aren't any pokers. The warehouse answers using the diminutive form.
Zoshchenko's longer stories, which he calls novelle, are literary parodies. They are what happens when poshlost claims for itself not the intelligence but the sentiment of genius. "Michel Siniagin" is a parody of the literary memoirs that appeared with such frequency both in Russia and abroad in the ten years or so following the Revolution, written by men of the symbolist generation who had met Tolstoi or seen Blok disappearing around the corner. "Love" is a parody of the gnomic wisdom-literature & la Rozanov, dear to the apocalyptic generation of the Russian intelligentsia. Zoshchenko never forgave the schoolmaster and the editors who wanted him to "write like a classic." He takes the pretension to style and the pretension to fine feeling into the world of the housing shortage. It bounces like an oversized lead balloon.
The lead balloon is one kind of literary parody Zoshchenko uses; there is another, which he uses much more subtly, which we might call the cork anchor. In the story called "An Amusing Adventure," Zoshchenko adapts the traditional form of bourgeois bedroom farce to his own abbreviated story form and to the "new class" of the Soviet overprivileged. It would be a mistake, however, to see this as a satire on "new class" morality. Zoshchettko does not seem to have anything against the privileged status of his protagonists, nor does he seem to have anything against their marital infidelity. True, he makes fun of their lies and deceptions; he doesn't like lies. But who does? The story is, in fact, completely lacking in moral bite. The point, if we must tyave a point beyond the brio of the story itself, is that nature is s^ll with us, even in the socialist society; that having a bedroom at all is often more important than who sleeps in it; that rationality
is a convention like marriage, and a pretty frail one; and that contrary to the usual ending of bourgeois farce, bedroom tangles do not lend themselves easily to rational solution, but only to further bedroom tangles—if one has a bedroom, that is.
In the story called "Liaisons Dangereuses" the parody, this time of Choderlos de Laclos' great psychological novel, is even more subtle. In the French novel, the supremely intelligent and self-conscious hero has succeeded in mastering his animal nature and completely subordinating it to his will and intellect, which are committed to power—that is, to asserting his superiority over other human beings. His greatest "success" is his own self-destruction. Unlike the other works which Zoshchenko parodies, "Liaisons Dangereuses" is a model of brevity and lucidity of style. But Zoshchenko's very stupid hero manages to achieve the same result by the opposite means in much briefer compass!
It should be abundantly clear by now that Zoshchenko was not a typical satirist of the period of the New Economic Policy (the NEP, 1921-28) like Ilf and Petrov. That period was, nevertheless, peculiarly congenial to him. Not only was it a period of vigorous exp
erimentation in all fields—especially the arts—during which his stories could pass as "samo-kritika" ("self-criticism," dear to the Bolsheviks, in which everything can be taken for a ride except the big boys on top and the policy they make), but the NEP itself created a rather obvious Zoshchenko-like world. It was a period during which a prominent Bolshevik (Bukharin) put on the mask of Guizot to urge the still uncol-lectivized Russian peasants to "enrich themselves." It was a period during which free enterprise was considered embarrassing but necessary, and during which the new socialist society suffered all the ills its leaders attributed to capitalism—unemployment, graft, exploitation—but during which it was still relatively free and uncoerced. The interaction of the old and the new, the ideal and the real, the brilliant and the backward, in the landscape of an underdeveloped and rather primitive economy, produced Zoshchenko types and Zoshchenko situations with a profusion that even the talented Ukrainian writer from Leningrad could not take full advantage of.
From the time of the Five-Year plans, Zoshchenko's life as a writer became increasingly hazardous. In 1946 he was singled out, along with Anna Akhmatova, for particularly violent attack by no less a party figure than Zhdanov, a pseudo critic, who called
him a "pseudo writer." The story Zhdanov attacked most particularly and crudely was the curiously innocent little parable, "The Adventures of an Ape." From that time on, Zoshchenko published little—a few stories, a few articles. In the early days of the thaw, he wrote a few sketches on writing and writers which appeared in the humor magazine Krokodil —mildly courageous pieces, not uninteresting but undistinguished. In general, his stories after 1946, though not different in substance from his earlier work, lack the force and fun of the real Zoshchenko.
He died in 1958 at what, for him, was a fairly ripe old age. An edition of his collected stories appeared shortly after his death and was quickly sold out. He seems to have left behind no imitators (with the possible exception of K. himself) and no disciples, and his name no longer appears in print in the Soviet Union, even for attack.
And Other Stories Of Communist Russia Page 1