But of course next to the Serapion Brothers, the acmeists seemed like relics from another era. After all, they did not write about the dens of thieves as did Veniamin Kaverin, or partisans who kill an infant, like Vsevolod Ivanov, or about soldiers who, crazed by blood, performed a lynching, like Mikhail Slonimsky. Those were shocking subjects. But the most daring and also the most famous of the Serapion Brothers was the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko. He rejected many traditions of Russian classical literature. Though all around, demands were aired for a “red Leo Tolstoy” to hail the revolution in epic novels, Zoshchenko started writing short humorous stories from the life of urban dwellers instead, explaining, “Until now we still have the tradition of the former intelligentsia’s literature, in which the main object of art is the psychological life of the intellectual. We must break down this tradition, because we can’t go on writing as if nothing had happened in the country.” And what had happened was that after the dislocations of war and revolution, many peasants poured into the cities, creating a huge new stratum. These new urban dwellers were now often setting the tone in social and public life. Traditionally oriented Soviet literature continued cautiously to avoid this type; but Zoshchenko changed that almost single-handedly.
Not only did he make this triumphant “new man,” uneducated and unsightly, the sole hero of his works, but he began writing in the persona of that obnoxious Philistine. He created the literary mask of a dull, angry, greedy, and aggressive human amoeba, insisting that this amoeba was the true author of his works. Not only the dialogue but the entire fabric of Zoshchenko’s early prose consists of the phantasmagoric Soviet “newspeak”: the grotesque, ridiculous attempts of his narrator hero to express himself with authority by means of wild neologisms and meaningless but pompous-sounding word combinations (which make Zoshchenko’s best works practically untranslatable). This real revolution in Russian literature was all the more effective because Zoshchenko’s stories were stylized with virtuoso panache and polished with lapidary precision.
Zoshchenko’s attitude toward his hero was complex: he hated him, feared him, and pitied him. The average reader, fooled by the superficial comedy and simplicity, did not sense this ambivalence in Zoshchenko’s stories. Zoshchenko said sarcastically, “I write very compactly. My sentences are short. Accessible to the poor. Perhaps that is why I have so many readers.” Hundreds of thousands of these new “poor”—financially, morally, emotionally—readers made Zoshchenko one of the richest writers in the Soviet Union. His books came out in dozens of editions, in huge printings, and sold out immediately. He received thousands of letters. He had only to step into the street to be surrounded by a crowd, like Chaliapin. Yet unlike Chaliapin, Zoshchenko was not an impressive sight. Shklovsky described him as “a man of medium height. He has a yellowish face. Ukrainian eyes. And a careful tread. He has a very soft voice. The manner of a man who wants to end a big scandal very politely.”70
This desire of Zoshchenko’s “not to stick out” was noted by Chukovsky, too. “Zoshchenko is very careful—I would say, fearful.”71 Yet Zoshchenko had been a courageous officer in World War I and was decorated many times. The “table of contents” of his life, which Zoshchenko compiled in 1922, is telling:
arrested
sentenced to death
wounded
attempted suicide
Zoshchenko had lofty and even slightly old-fashioned ideas of honor and dignity, but he wanted to be published and censorship was pervasive. All the Serapion Brothers had problems with the censors. Chukovsky recorded a conversation in 1928 with Mikhail Slonimsky, who complained, “I’m writing one thing now that certainly will not pass censorship—it’s for myself, and it will spend all its time in my desk drawer; and I’m writing another one for publication, a terrible one.” Chukovsky agreed with him: “We are in the clutches of a censorship worse than any that had ever been in Russia, that is true. Every publishing house, every journal has its own censor, and their ideal is propagandistic cliche elevated to ritual.”72
In that situation, one had to make accommodations—both psychologically and as a purely practical matter. Daily life was difficult and often disgusting. But blaming the government for that became riskier every day. In that sense Chukovsky’s notation made in 1927 after a walk with Zoshchenko is characteristic. “He cursed contemporary times, but then we both came to the conclusion that nothing can be done with the Russians, and that we can’t come up with anything better, and that the fault is not that of communists but of those little Russian people whom they are trying to remake.”73
