Sentimental Tales

by Mikhail Zoshchenko

  5. The “German dentist” is, in all likelihood, Freud, and what our author describes is some version of the theory of drives. Freudian analysis was tolerated in Soviet Russia in the 1920s but was officially denounced at the 1930 Congress on Human Behavior in Moscow. See Martin A. Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). Zoshchenko had a lifelong interest in Freud, and his autobiography, Before Sunrise, can be read as a work of Freudian self-analysis. See note xviii.

  6. Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) is regarded as Russia’s greatest literary figure, who presided over the Golden Age of Russian poetry; the years of his birth and death essentially bracketed that period. The Symbolist Alexander Blok (1880–1921) occupied a similar position during the Silver Age of Russian poetry, which also lasted roughly from 1880 to the early 1920s. The verse “A bird hopping on a branch,” which our author attributes to Pushkin, is not to be found in Pushkin’s oeuvre.